Using mkisofs to make a DVD ISO image

mcfiddish · 07-09-2007, 02:40 PM

I've created a DVD of home movies using dvdauthor and mkisofs. The DVD does not play in my DVD player, nor does it play in xine. It does play with mplayer.

Furthermore, I can mount the DVD, and then xine works if I point it to the mount directory containing the VIDEO_TS folder. xine will not play the iso image, but mplayer will.

I created the iso file with

Code:

mkisofs -dvd-video -o DVD.iso DVD/

Its size is 4363286528 bytes.

I can also mount the iso image, and run xine successfully.

I've successfully made DVDs of home movies before this way, so I don't know why I'm stuck this time. It seems like a problem with mkisofs.

This is on Ubuntu, with
mkisofs 2.01-unofficial-iconv (i686-pc-linux-gnu)

xine --verbose dvd:/ says

Code:

libdvdnav: DVD Serial Number: 468FDCC800000000
libdvdnav: DVD Title (Alternative): 
libdvdnav: Unable to find map file '/home/hari/.dvdnav/2006-2007.map'
libdvdnav: DVD disk reports itself with Region mask 0x00000000. Regions: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
xine: found demuxer plugin: DVD/VOB demux plugin
av_offset=0 pts
spu_offset=0 pts
input_dvd: Error getting next block from DVD (Encrypted or faulty DVD)

---------------------- (ERROR) ----------------------
The source can't be read.
Maybe you don't have enough rights for this, or source doesn't contain data (e.g: not disc in drive). (Encrypted or faulty DVD)
------------------ (END OF ERROR) -------------------

I get the same error with xine --verbose dvd:/home/hari/dvd.iso

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

IBall · 07-09-2007, 09:01 PM

You don't really need to use mkisofs directly to create Video DVDs.

The basic steps are to encode the video to mpeg2, create the DVD structure using dvdauthor and burn it using growisofs. You can test the DVD structure using Mplayer or Xine after the dvdauthor step.

I have more information about this Here.

--Ian

mcfiddish · 07-15-2007, 11:39 AM

Thanks, but isn't growisofs a frontend to mkisofs?

It looks like my problem was a bad dvdauthor.xml file. I had a few mpegs that I wanted to combine into one chapter, and apparently I didn't do it correctly. I was able to create a disc image by using dvdauthor to create one chapter per file. It's not exactly what I wanted but it works.

lazlow · 07-15-2007, 12:04 PM

I use avidemux2 to convert and join the mpgs needed to be in one chapter. You might want to look at Qdvdauthor too. It is a gui front end for dvdauthor.

mcfiddish · 07-15-2007, 03:30 PM

Looking at this some more, I don't know if dvdauthor was the problem after all; maybe it is mkisofs.

I appreciate the advice to use other tools to burn the disc, but I'm stil left with my initial problem: I can view the DVD/ directory created by dvdauthor with xine, but I can't make an iso image that works.

The reason I want to do this is to be able to burn additional copies of this disc in the future, without having to keep the DVD/ directory around.

Is there anything besides mkisofs that I can use to make an iso image from a DVD/ directory?

winandlinux · 07-16-2007, 03:32 AM

Handbrake can help you convert DVD to other video formats.
It is free.
If you would like to backup DVD, just download it.

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