[COLUG] Making Video DVD's

[Scott Merrill]

Mark Erbaugh wrote:
> The cable access channel has discontinued support for VHS and will be
> going to DVD.  I assume I can produce a DVD directly from Kino using a
> DVD burner on the computer.  Is someone familiar with the procedure?  I
> think one time I tried to produce a DVD ISO file with Kino and for our
> 35 minute presentation the encoding process was going to take several
> hours.  I'm running a 1.9 GHz Pentium with 1 GB of Ram (Ubuntu 6.06).
> I've got plenty of hard disk space.

Using Kino you can export to MPEG-2 format, which is the codec used by
DVDs.  DVDs have a special format, though, so the MPEG-2 output from
Kino cannot simply be put to DVD and played on a DVD player.
(Exceptions exist, of course; but an .mpeg2 file on DVD media _is not_ a
standard DVD video disc.)

You need to feed your MPEG-2 source files into dvdauthor, which will
produce the necessary DVD file structure (/VIDEO_TS, plus *.VOB and
*.IFO files).
	http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

dvdauthor uses an XML file to control the input and output.  It's fairly
easy to make complex DVDs, and I find it annoyingly complex to make
simple DVDs.  Here are some examples:
	http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/doc/ex-title.html#AEN37

It's important to note that dvdauthor merely creates on your hard disk a
valid DVD file structure.  It does not burn that structure to disc.
James Tappin's guide provides the necessary instructions for putting
that directory structure to disc:
	http://www.tappin.me.uk/Linux/dvd.html#writing

I _strongly_ recommend that you use RW media as you learn the tool.

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