[plug] DVD movie

[Gavin Chester]

On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 09:04 +0800, Mike Holland wrote:
> Timothy White wrote:
> 
> > Well, I must say, it all depends on WHAT you want to do. I have
> > mastered a number of DVD's  under linux, and being a CLI warrior,
> > quickly dismissed the GUI's as being too difficult.
> 
> Yes, I found it quite easy to make a menu-less DVD using mencoder and 
> dvdauthor under linux. Unfortunately, I later found that a number of
> standalone DVD players did not like it.
> 
> > mplayer+mencoder to put the movie files in the correct format for
> > burning to DVD (MPEG 2 with AC3 audio I think it is. Make sure you use
> > AC3, and not the MPEG Audio stuff, cause AC3 is supported by more DVD
> > players).
> 
> I'll make a note of that, thanks. I thought all DVD players were 
> supposed to play MP2 audio (mpeg 1, layer 2 audio), as seen on digital TV.
> 
> I might try again some time, but its so much easier just to use a DVD
> player that supports mpeg4 (aka DivX).

My reason for starting this thread was not because I can't RTFM, but it
is counterproductive for me to spend the next month or so installing &
configuring apps one after another, satisfying all their dependencies,
trying to find an effective way to do the task.  That is why I solicited
comment from this list to see what others have found useful for them.
Why reinvent the wheel? <G>

So, thanks for all the useful replies and pointers.  Keep 'em coming if
you have any more thoughts and experiences to share.  

One thing I found independent of your collective advice is that K3B, my
favourite burning app, will rip and encode DVD movies.  It acts as a
front-end to 'transcode' and requires 'xvid' or 'divx' codecs installed
along with the usual libdvdcss, etc.  The K3B online help file explains
the process and dependencies.  However, I have yet to make it work as
they describe :-/  First stumbling block for me to work on is that
transcode did not build how I wanted (I grabbed the cvs version) and K3B
refuses to accept that transcode is installed :-(  I'll persist a bit
more before trying one of your other suggestions.

Gavin.