Tue, 11 Dec 2007

Burning a DVD under Linux (2)

I found QDVDauthor very easy to use (it comes with a nice "quick start guide") - added my MPEG files to the project and created a menu with a background image, then created the DVD ... and that was it. Only then did I realise that, of course, this program doesn't do the burning, it just provides all the stuff which you then burn onto a DVD with whatever program you have.

So for burning I used growisofs (growisofs -Z dev/dvd hk_videos_dec2007* -dvd-compat), which worked like a breeze:

Executing 'genisoimage hk_videos_dec2007/AUDIO_TS hk_videos_dec2007/VIDEO_TS | builtin_dd of=/dev/dvd obs=32k seek=0'
I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
/dev/dvd: "Current Write Speed" is 4.1x1352KBps.

Then a lot of progress messages and finally:

Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 0
Total directory bytes: 0
Path table size(bytes): 10
Max brk space used 0
\1726418 extents written (3371 MB)
builtin_dd: 1726432*2KB out @ average 4.0x1352KBps
/dev/dvd: flushing cache
/dev/dvd: updating RMA
/dev/dvd: closing disc

With much trepidation, I inserted the disc into the DVD player - and it worked! What doesn't work, though, is the menu. It lives a kind of half-life as a video clip a few seconds long, so it's there but it's not a menu. When the player has loaded the disc, the contents of the root folder are displayed instead: a file named "VIDEO*TS" and 4 files named "VTS*01*1" through "VTS*01*4". "VIDEO*TS" is the menu; "VTS*01*1" contains the first four-and-a-half of altogether 9 video clips (the first of which is without any audio), "VTS*01*2" contains the rest of the 4th clip, the 5th and part of the 6th, "VTS*01*3" the rest of the 6th, the 7th and part of the 8th, "VTS*01*4" the rest of the 8th clip. Obviously there's no need to have an individual file for each clip - they're supposed to be accessible from the menu.

In other words, everything is fine, except that the menu doesn't work and somehow the sound of the 1st video got lost. Now I'm racking my brains trying to understand what exactly went wrong.

Posted on 11 Dec 2007 at 12:28 in /technology. -- Permalink