At a recent MUUG meeting someone was asking about burning VCDs (Video CDs). I believe the consensus at the meeting was that burning under Linux was comprised of a hodge-podge of various command line tools for converting video formats and burning making it quite difficult at best.
I recently stumbled on the following software:
which seems to bring everything under one roof and claims to do CD, VCD, and DVD burning all in one application (it does not appear to be just a GUI front end to command line tools).
However, I do not currently have a burner to test it with so I was hoping someone from the group could give it a whirl and report back on success?
Thanks.
"John" == John Lange john.lange@bighostbox.com writes:
John> At a recent MUUG meeting someone was asking about burning John> VCDs (Video CDs). I believe the consensus at the meeting was John> that burning under Linux was comprised of a hodge-podge of John> various command line tools for converting video formats and John> burning making it quite difficult at best.
John> I recently stumbled on the following software:
John> http://www.k3b.org/
John> which seems to bring everything under one roof and claims to John> do CD, VCD, and DVD burning all in one application (it does John> not appear to be just a GUI front end to command line John> tools).
John> However, I do not currently have a burner to test it with so John> I was hoping someone from the group could give it a whirl John> and report back on success?
Hey John,
I just have a regular CD burner, so I grabbed a few commercials in MPEG format, and tried out the VCD creation. I'm completely winging it, having just bought the DVD player a couple days ago, but the process seems to work OK. It helps to have some CD-RWs around to experiment, so you can just do a quick blank and try something else.
The K3B program does call others as well, such as cdrecord and cdrdao, and it expects (or at least hopes) to be able to run some of them as SUID root. It does handle the permissions setup for you though, which would be handy for the Linux newbies.
The interface is very pretty, but seems functional enough. Probably typical for KDE, I'm not sure.
Debian (testing) has packages for K3D and those programs it depends on, so installation was trivial as usual. What else? I dunno, I'll probably use it again.
Cheers, Tim
Thanks very much for your assessment Tim.
Its too bad that it still tries to use all those command line tools as so many of them are buggy, out-of-date and/or unsupported. It also means you have to chase down dozens of add-on files if you want to burn anything. Now that I know this I'm far less tempted to get a new burner and give it a try.
Hopefully they have done a good job on improving the GUI.
Thanks for your insight.
"John" == John Lange john.lange@bighostbox.com writes:
John> Thanks very much for your assessment Tim. Its too bad that John> it still tries to use all those command line tools as so John> many of them are buggy, out-of-date and/or unsupported. It John> also means you have to chase down dozens of add-on files if John> you want to burn anything. Now that I know this I'm far less John> tempted to get a new burner and give it a try.
John> Hopefully they have done a good job on improving the GUI.
John> Thanks for your insight.
Hey John,
Many of the command-line tools *are* the standard way of doing it, and work fine wrapped in a gui tool. The GUI front-end is just personal preference, and having a command-line program in the back-end is much like having it embedded in a library. Except of course, you can't easily type a command to a library to get something done.
In the same vein, cdparanoia rips audio tracks, lame or oggenc compress them again, and do their jobs well. I use grip to wrap these things, but it makes sense that different people do the part which interests them. Think of it as the natural Unix Way. Do not fight it, grasshopper.
Anyway, if the tools themselves are reasonably up-to-date, as most should be, then a decent package-management tool should ease the process of getting the pieces you need. Which distribution are you using?
Cheers, Tim
According to John Lange:
Its too bad that it still tries to use all those command line tools as so many of them are buggy, out-of-date and/or unsupported.
Which ones in particular? I can't comment on the various trans-coding utilities, as I've never used them, but cdrecord, cdrdao, and vcdimager have all worked fine for me, seem to be supported, and continue to be enhanced.
It also means you have to chase down dozens of add-on files if you want to burn anything.
Yeah, they could have done a better job of listing dependencies, I guess, so that you could let yum do the job for you.
Of course, even following their instructions on using yum under Fedora didn't work for me - yum complained about required packages that it couldn't find (id3lib and libmad). So, I'm back to doing it the old fashioned way: manually fetching and installing packages, hand-tweaking spec files and rebuilding RPM's.
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gedetil＠cs.umanitoba.ca -
John Lange -
Tim Lavoie -
Tim Lavoie