Tonight at the meeting I was asked to post what I did to get a video DVD burned. I'm more than happy to do so. I'm tickled pink I got it to work so it's a pleasure.

This is the simplest case where a single video file plays automatically on a console unit. There are separate steps one needs to go through to burn a video DVD. First is to get the video file into an appropriate format. Next is to take the resulting file and place it properly into a directory structure expected by the player. The final part is from the URL Montana Quiring posted earlier. Namely burning the directories to the DVD. This is where I was having trouble before.

The tools needed are mplayer (specifically mencoder), videotrans (has a bunch of dependencies including mencoder), dvdauthor (also has some dependencies), and growisofs. I understand transcode can substitute for mencoder and videotrans. Here is what I did from the commandline to get it to work.

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# part of videotrans - Translate to vob file movie-to-dvd -m ntsc -M 'sample01.avi'

# part of dvdauthor - Create the file structure dvdauthor -o DVD 'sample01.vob' dvdauthor -T -o DVD

# part of growisofs - Put the directory structure on a DVD growisofs -Z /dev/hdb -dvd-video DVD

=================== NOTES: -DVD is an empty directory where the directory structure is created. -/dev/hdb is my burner (found from the KDE hardware browser). -I did not have to be root to do this.

There are other things I could do such as lowering the quality or size. Eventually I could create menus. The man pages say subtitles aren't supported yet. I would presume multiple language streams aren't either.

I'm not sure if I missed the "-Z" parameter or I used something like "/mnt/cdrom" (in hindsight, this would have been really dumb) last month. Whatever it was, this last line solved my problem.

Later Mike

P.S. Good meeting. I understood the principals of what he was talking about even if I missed the specific references.