I just bought a toshiba double layer drive, and it shows up in lindows ( i run 4.5) but i cant for the life of me find the software required to start burning.

anyone know where to find the software?

There really isn't much software in the Linux world for DVD burning yet. K3B can burn DVDs, as can XCDRoast (I think), but neither of them can yet do much in the way of authoring video to DVD; you have to have the DVD filesystem ready to burn, or else it won't work. To create a DVD filesystem, you need something like dvdauthor, but it's all command-line and fairly complicated; you also need to have videos in just the right format or else it won't play in your regular DVD player.

It's not quite production-ready yet, but a little suite I wrote called tovid may help you. It's currently all command-line also, but much easier than doing all the necessary steps by hand, and a GUI is on the way very shortly. Currently, tovid produces output suitable for burning with K3B, but the next release will probably do burning also.

Finally, there's also QDVDAuthor, which is more mature and can burn DVDs for you, but it's still under heavy development.

Hi,

I am trying to find out how to burn double-layer dvd's under linux if anybody can give me a tip?

I will share with you my experience with xcdroast and k3b in the hope that this will help some of you.

Thank you wapcaplet for giving us the link to QDVD-Author. It's very useful

I am using debian woody (stable)www.debian.org , so there aren't a lot of apps included in the distro and I installed myself in 2002 the cdrw tools of schilly and xcdroast http://www.xcdroast.org/ to start burning cd's. Unfortunately I bought a DVD-writer (double layer capable) and the tools of schilly were not enough, so I installed dvd+rw-tools http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/tools/?M=D (growisofs is there) and burning dvd's wasn't a problem, though k3b from the package provided coudn't find growisofs. Unfortunately in the latest distros of debian (sarge) it is not finding growisofs either. The people from the k3b project should do something to fix this.

so here it is what i did to help it out

Everything works fine but I still cannot write double layer. What do I need to know?

thanks and best regards

Get K3B and associated libraries and programs. Mine works just fine on my LG double-layer DVD burner under Rh9.

does k3b (the programs behind) recognize automatically a double-layer media?
I am wondoring if it's worth to buy some?

and what options should be activated for this to work

regards

OK I just installed Debian 3.1r-0a after using Mandrake for a year (first MDK 10.0 then 10.1). I've had Debian for about a day. I got most of my apps reinstalled but am still having trouble with 2 things. One is for a Sharp Zaurus sl5500 handheld pda, which I will fix in another forum. The other is on topic of burning dvd's in linux. When I first started using linux (MDK 10.0) I was successful in burning one movie! After that one, I have been unsuccessful and to this day I don't know how to do it. I know, as stated above in some posts that much of the process is done via the command line with k3b. I just tried it after I thought I had all the dependencies installed. I tried with a dvd+r then when I seen it was going to make an iso and the burn process failed I tried it with a cd-r (that I realized wouldn't work because the file was something like 860mb). That, however is irrelevant because I get the same output... here it is:

/usr/bin/mkisofs: No such file or directory. Faild to open /tmp/kde-joe/k3bVideoDvd0//VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.IFO
/usr/bin/mkisofs: Can't open VMG info for '/tmp/kde-joe/k3bVideoDvd0/'.
/usr/bin/mkisofs: Unable to parse DVD-Video structures.
/usr/bin/mkisofs: Unable to make a DVD-Video image.

mkisofs comand:
-----------------------
/usr/bin/mkisofs -gui -graft-points -volid K3b data project -volset -appid K3B THE CD KREATOR VERSION 0.11.20 (C) 2003 SEBASTIAN TRUEG AND THE K3B TEAM -publisher -preparer K3b - Version 0.11.20 -sysid LINUX -volset-size 1 -volset-seqno 1 -sort /tmp/kde-joe/k3bK0N1pc.tmp -rational-rock -hide-list /tmp/kde-joe/k3bXUuHTb.tmp -full-iso9660-filenames -follow-links -iso-level 2 -path-list /tmp/kde-joe/k3baCXzec.tmp -dvd-video /tmp/kde-joe/k3bVideoDvd0 /home/joe/.kde/share/apps/k3b/temp/dummydir0/

Now from what I read here, I think its telling me that mkisofs isn't there but it is there (not as a folder but as an executable app. So what do I need to do to be capable of burning a video dvd? Or even just creating an iso of a video onto a cd-r?

As a footnote, I came across the fact that Nero has Nerolinux now. However, I couldn't get it to burn dvd's either. I have emailed them and gotten a reply from the senior sales lady stating that it should work. It burns cd's beautifully but then so does k3b. I want to burn video! Could someone please educate me a bit about how to do this? If I knew that Nerolinux burned the dvd's I would make the purchase but then maybe someone here will teach me how to use k3b to do so for free....

Thanks,
jmill_1

Hi earlier I was using Mandrake too, but it seeemed to be too crapy, if someone tries to do smoething beyond the intention of the distributioin makers.
That's why I started using debian. Well this one is really hard to configure and bring to work as you desire, but if you still want to use a flexible distribution based on debian you can try Ubuntu (www.ubuntulinux.org) I think.

Now about your specific problem.

The error what you get means that you need a premastered DVD-structure.
K3B does not do premastering. You should do this with another program.
I have those from the DVD family but have never tried to remaster a dvd because of lack of time.
Again I think for people that don't know debian well and would like to start using it without spending hours of cusomizing and optimizing, than try ubuntu.

As far as I know K3B is working fine on it

Regards