Linux DVD Authoring

[Josetann]

Can anyone recommend a good DVD Authoring program for linux?  I\'d like to take mpeg2 files (some will be DVD\'s, some will not), re-encode so they\'ll fit, then burn to DVD-R.

[Space Between]

Wow..is their one??
Ive nnnnnever seen one. I think you might have to go with a nt system for that.

If you did find one i and most others would still recommend using windows for that. Very evolved tools for authoring. Scenarist, maestro, etc..

however there was someone who once spoke of a linux authoring tool on dv.com but i never read the thread to find out if it was a ? about where to find one...or a ? how to solve a problem using one. This was almost 2 years ago.

If you find one please post the name...would be very nice.

[Josetann]

Well, I kinda found one, Gear Pro or something like that, but way too expensive.  I have the tools to make an exact copy of a DVD or just the movie part itself, but this is often more than what\'ll fit on a DVD-R.  I did have one small DVD that I was able to backup and burn all in linux (I did run a utility in win4lin that strips the macrovision and region code if present, but that was it).  I\'ll probably end up backing up in linux but doing the conversion in winme using win4lin.  There\'s a nice program I\'ve heard about that only works in win2k/winxp, so I may reinstall that to give it a whirl.

[Anonymous]

You guys are pathetic.  Do a little search on google.

I am guessing you are just wanting to burn/ripping.
This is going to be a SMALL list, since it was only one search for each list.

Burning DVD\'s (search: linux dvd writing):
http://www.nongnu.org/dvdrtools/
http://acd.ucar.edu/~fredrick/linux/dvd/
http://lists.suse.com/archive/packet-writi...3-Jan/0001.html

Ripping (search: linux dvd ripping): (mostly not avail in US due to licenses with the libraries)
http://www.bunkus.org/dvdripping4linux/en/...rate/index.html
http://diablonetwork.net/dvd.html
http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de/


Hope this helps.

[Space Between]

Well i dont know how your budget is...or what you might do, but ScenaristNT is really nice...does everything. DVDMaestro is really nice too. www.doom9.org has a walk through on how to convert dvd9 to dvd5.  might help, if you find it worth it.

If your looking to ...uhm..buy a application to author dvd\'s in a semi-affordable price range...well good luck...if its under like a grand it pretty much is HIGHLY limited..and couldnt even do half the stuff your retail dvd movies do....no way.

for the most part though backing up dvd movies, by re encoding them and all that, is extremely lame. There is DVD-R release groups out there now...to me they are really lame and wasting ALOT of bandwidth.

try dv.com...i got a ebook on the basic\'s of dvd authoring..nothing great though..can help however.  If you want it i will email it to you. (i had to literally scan it up...500 page\'s...ouch). ~10MB

btw i didnt know ProGear worked under linux...i have heard of it but never tried it.

[Space Between]

The anon user most be TOTALLY clueless on what DVD authoring is...

[Josetann]

I\'m thinking of just running tmpgenc (sp?) under win4lin to do any necessary re-encoding.  I forgot the program name, but I can also take out macrovision and region code if I wanted to using a windows program under win4lin.  I\'m one of those that can\'t stand swapping out discs in the middle of a movie (was kinda upset that the LOTR special edition made me do this, lol), so I would re-encode those.  Some of our DVD\'s have gotten cracked on the inside ring but are still playable, so those are the first priority.

Yeah, there\'s a Gear Pro for Linux, it\'s about $800 though.  For that price, I\'d just buy three extra copies of all my movies.

And to the anon reader...I have already made a full backup of a DVD and burned it using linux (short DBZ DVD).

[Space Between]

How\'s your feeling on divx though? I mean all you really need is a tv out card for like 60usd.

I gave up personally on anything compression technique\'s besides divx or more modern codec\'s.

I too back all my movies up...but to divx.
However i only have 2 dvd\'s, The Princess Bride and The Abyss. However my son has ~60 movies. All of these are childrens films. I have been doing it for about 3 years now off and on and at first i thought about going to vcd or svcd. I did that then thought no way. About a year ago a friend of mine got a dvd writer. I started to convert them over. I had like 3 images converted that were semi-hard to author (mainly as i remember Toy Story 2). I gave up quickly though in defeat because i just didnt see the need.

Honestly, no zhit, the first time i thought about converting my movies to divx was a dirty impression. I had only encoded vcd\'s to divx and that was it. So i thought screw it and about 2 years ago i started to encoded all my son\'s dvd\'s to divx aswell.

I can honestly say this. I am VERY happy i decided too. At first it was rough...i had no tv out card. Also having 2 cd\'s to watch a movie wasnt much my thing either...that was the HUGE delima for me. I soon realized it wasnt soo bad.

Now in your case josetann...your at where i want to be. I DO NOT have a dvd writer and my lord do i need one. With a dvd writer i could get 5-7 of my sons movies on all one disc!!. Now that would be AWESOME. Right now i use winrar to \"store\" the image\'s into 2 700MB archives if it cant fit on one cd. He doesnt watch them all...all the time so it works out. I got a 40gig hdd i just extract them too and he works off those (i wrote a quick javascript to display the covers and all he has to do is click them and they run..hes only 4 1/2).

Also i think you might want to consider the format of DVD right now as it is. How much longer is it going to last? Can\'t last forever. I think DivX is in many ways \"futuring\" for the \"Defacto\" home playback...or if not DivX the \"Defacto\" most likely that can play it back atleast.

You UNDOUBTLY need a tv out card.

Bottom line is for me...i really didnt want to encode to divx because i would loose alot of the features and have to deal with more than 1 disc...however today i wouldnt even think of something other than divx. If i can only get a dvd writer now so i can put several movies on 1 disc.

[Josetann]

TV-out isn\'t a prob, just got a Matrox G400 DH for it\'s TV-out quality (building a media PC, will run linux, and either mythtv or freetivo).  However, I\'d like to keep the DVD format, since right now, it is a standard.  Most DVD players can play a burned DVD, VCD, and even SVCD.  When the next gen players come out, I don\'t know if they\'ll support Divx, but they would have to support DVD at the very least.

[Space Between]

Im not too sure what the next gen players will really be...as far as USA goes.

I have read alot about players sprouting out of china that run linux that let you load your own decoder . A more REAL example of this i can think of is not a dvd-v player but a dvd-rom...the ps2. Since Playstation 2 will have a hard drive, and the hard drive will be running linux 2.0 kernel...i see no reason why divx on ps2 wont be possible...im sure it will be.

For standalone\'s, here from the usa, if you read up on what the dvd consortium wants to make the next \"standard\"...you will be SHOCKED that it might NOT play the dvd\'s of today. Toshiba has a format that will but Toshiba\'s format does\'nt hold as much data...soooo when the concerns\' of hi-def finally hit the drawing board to make a new/next \"standard\", the new/next \"standard\" will probably be the one that is NOT Toshiba\'s and no longer be backwards compatible with current dvd\'s. Make\'s no sense...extremely hard to believe...but considering how the MPAA feels about DeCSS and the like i realize that it can be a possibility for the next \"standard\" to be so strict. Either way to be honest, if we start seeing more players that will allow you to load your own decoder...what will it matter what the next standard is, because you could make your standard to whatever you want.

SVCD,VCD...to me that is pretty much useless for anything over 40min. .Any vcd/svcd containing more than 40mins suffer\'s on the bitrate and is highly noticable that it does.

TV out for me is the only way to go, until there is a player for the mass\'s that will allow you to load your own decoder. Even then being used to PC playback via TV out i would still stick with it over ANY player no matter what the features.

DVD standard is good...but it is already seeing the end of it\'s days. By this i dont mean they will stop making DVD movies anytime soon...but the quality it gives is almost considered inferiror by today\'s new codec\'s. When HD finally comes into the USA mainstream, like in the next year and a half...dvd\'s will certainly be inferior.

btw DivX5.0.2...has some playback issue\'s.  DivX 5.0.3 is now the latest...have yet to play with that.

[Josetann]

Well, I\'m thinking about just using something like dvd2one for quick dvd backups, and encoding in mpg4 for hard drive storage.  I will have a PC running linux acting as the media center for now, but may not always have that...plus if I want to take a disc to play at a friend\'s house, much better luck getting a DVD-R burned as a regular DVD to work, than one burned with mpg4 content.

Then again there are mpg4 hardware players coming out.  Got any links on the possible formats of the next ver of DVD?  If I\'m going to encode to mpg4, I\'d like to at least have a chance that they\'ll work in a regular set-top player in the future.

[Space Between]

Here are some i have read in the past...however i get most my info from library magazines like \"DVD\", \"DV\", \"Videography\", \"PC Magazine\", etc...

these are from oldest to latest...however they all seem to say the same thing about the next standard, which is, \"iffy\" .

http://optics.org/articles/news/8/2/17/1
http://www.fatalexception.org/articles/2002/20020408.html
http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/19171.html
http://www.inq7.net/inf/2002/sep/01/inf_3-1.htm

Beyond all the reading a human could ever do on the subject, the dvd consortium is so \"out of wack\" that they cant even settle on the current dvd recordable standard...let alone make a new one and pin it down. It will be rough when the new standard hits, i fear, and also HOPE that the new standard to be in a couple years will fail and fail horribly. If that happens room makes way for new ideas...and new companies.

If the MPAA, DVD Consortium, and everyone else around this topic fail on delivering a new standard that becomes popular...it would actually be a success for consumer\'s technology wise and price wise. It never seemed that way to me before. Before if i thought something would fail then it would be a HORRIBLE thing. However in this case it would shatter barriers that little, unkown companies are held down with due to the \"Power\" the MPAA, DVD Consortium, etc... has.

In the end,  i doubt we should be sooo lucky to see the corporate monsters fail and open new and better chances up to the world at lower cost\'s :-)

[Anonymous]

Try to use mplayer and \"mencoder\" a tool suplied for mplayer.
Mplayer can be found at www.mplayerhq.hu
Robert

[Anonymous]

You can use transcode to get just about any videoformat into a DVD compatible m2v/mpa. That you can mux together with tcmplex into a DVD compatible program stream (VOB).

After that use dvdauthor to create the vob/ifo structure. You can only generate chaptermarks right now, though. Menues and fancy stuff is not supported yet. The latest cdrtools or dvdrtools have a dvdvideo enabled mkisofs via the option -dvd-video. That creates a dvd video udf image.

Burn it and you are done.

You need to use many commandline tools to finally get your dvd but it works, I successfully tried it with various divx/xvid movies and a dvbstream I ripped. Maybe eventually someone will create a nice gui since especially transcode is quite a beast.

[Space Between]

anon above...you seemed to be up to date. Have you heard of any HI-DEF authoring tools that might come into play on Linux in the...well semi-near future??

just wondering because i heard that authoring hd was going to be alot different as far as spec\'s and all that. and if it even is released to the public is another i guess after what happened with decess.

[Guest]

There is a project at sourceforge http://dvdauthor.sf.net, that will do the authoring bit.

It is all command line and alpha quality. But it's semms like they ar making good progress and I have used it to make some simple DVDs