ok I have been searching in vain for a way to burn my movies I have loaded onto my system onto dvd's or even cd's (if that's easier). I cannot find anything to tell me how to do this. I have gone through a few postings here saying the person has burned movies so I know it can be done. In fact, I have burned one movie using the command line. But I have only been able to burn that one single movie. I have tried to get k3b setup to burn the movies but can't get it to work either. If anyone has a step by step how-to on how to burn movies I would greatly appreciate posting it here. Again, even if its through the command line, its better than nothing. My g/f is sick of watching movies on the computer and wants to be able to watch them at her house too. PLEASE help!!!!!!!

My dvd burner is a NEC 1100 dvd+r/rw burner; Debian Sarge distro; I have cdrdao installed and can burn cd's quite nicely using k3b. Thanks again in advance.

I used an application called tovid to do the same for a bunch of avi cartoons to DVD for a (long) road trip.

It was really simple and complete (did everything from encode to burn). as long as you don't have complicated menu'ing needs
check it out ->tovid

cheers

and what distro were you using that on? Again, I'm running Debian and I've tried that before but I couldn't get it to work for whatever reason.

You didn't say you had tried Tovid.

True, tovid isn't packaged for debian so you need a manual compile. You need to provide more details on why it didn't work for whatever reason.

cheers

tovid uses mencoder to make a VCD and DVD files but they are not compatible with video players. I recommend using transcode because it makes more compatible MPEG-1/MPEG-2 files. Also it keeps audio and video sync near perfect which mplayer/mencoder lacks. Also mencoder has problems encoding AC3, so it is better to use either transcode or ffmpeg to encode PCM or MP3 to AC3. Then use either tcmplex or mplex to combine m2v and AC3 together.

I have used mplayer to play a video file that is going through some video filters and pipe its output to a yuv4mpeg fifo file. Then used transcode to make a MPEG-2 file for DVD from the fifo file. I could use mplayer module in transcode but it has bad support when include video filters and has problems with audio. To get a near perfect capture the FPS statistics in transcode have to be equal or greater than the FPS of the video file that mplayer is playing. I have done this on a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz (Northwood core) with 1 GB of ECC RAMBUS memory and Hitachi GXP180 120 GB hard drive is formatted as XFS using custom options. The kernel is set to server and clock per process is set to 1000 Hz. If you need to do any video clean up, need to copy an audio channel to another channel, or foley (sweeten) the audio mplayer is flexible, but only if you pipe the video and audio output to a fifo file first and then use transcode or ffmpeg to encode the streams to the desire file formats.