Authoring an .AVI file onto a DVD

Hawky · 03-24-2008, 02:23 PM

Sorry if this has been asked before, but Google wasn't much help and the search on LQ didn't allow 3 letter words - in this case it didn't like .AVI or DVD, which didn't really help.

I've got a load of movies in .avi format that I would like to copy to a DVD so it can be watched in standard DVD players.
This is easy enough on windows, but I'd rather do it on my Linux box.

Does anyone have any experience with this or know the name of the program I need to use?
I'm running openSUSE 10.3

Cheers guys!

AdamHawkins.net

BrianK · 03-24-2008, 02:32 PM

I believe this can be done with mplayer's mencoder.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-si...c-feat-vcd-dvd

Not sure about making chapters for each AVI, but I haven't read through the docs completely either.

AuldLochinvar · 03-24-2008, 02:52 PM

I may be able to help.
I am the delighted possessor of a FLIP VIDEO camera, which records in AVI format, MP4 video (I think).

Using either Ubuntu or Linux Mint, I've downloaded Qdvdauthor, which is a GUI wrapper for dvdauthor, which includes spumux. Dvdauthor takes an XML file of instructions for making a DVD. Spumux takes an XML file of instructions to multiplex 'button' images with a menu MPEG. Qdvdauthor composes the XML for you in typical GUI fashion, and also brings in its train encoders for video and audio.

I've found it much easier than my first attempts with Kino, a DV camera, and dvdauthor. Not that a DV camera isn't more powerful than my ultra-handy Flipvideo, nor that Kino and dvdauthor aren't first class brilliant software.

By the way, if you like to generate purely virtual animations, for menus and interludes, I also recommend povray.

Oh, by the way, you can let Qdvdauthor burn its results to a dvd, but I always want to look at the VIDEO_TS file first, so I use k3b instead.

H_TeXMeX_H · 03-24-2008, 04:46 PM

maybe this will help:
http://www.jochem.name/DVD-Authoring-with-Linux

beadyallen · 03-24-2008, 05:24 PM

As posted above, there's loads of ways to do it. Personally, I use mencoder to generate compatible mpeg files, then use dvdstyler to build and burn the dvd. I use the following command line to generate the mpegs:

Code:

mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -vf scale=720:-2,expand=720:576,harddup -srate 48000 -af resample=48000:0:2 -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=7000:vbitrate=3000:keyint=15:vstrict=1:acodec=ac3:abitrate=128 -ofps 25 -o <outputfilename>.mpg <inputfilename>.avi

Play around with the options (detailed in the mencoder manpage) to improve the quality, maybe with two pass encoding (although for me, 2 pass is only useful if you're bothered about accurate target file sizes).

mrclisdue · 03-24-2008, 09:05 PM

I use Devede:

Quote:

DeVeDe is a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by Mplayer. The big advantage over other utilites is that it only needs Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, VCDImager and MKisofs (well, and Python, PyGTK and PyGlade), so its dependencies are really small.

Code:

http://www.rastersoft.com/programas/devede.html

cheers,