sorry to hear it, well, thx for lettting us know.

BTW, i was able to mess with my DVD player's settings, and now the burnt dvd works fine (no more cut sequences). It works in the letterbox/widescreen mode.

Great, that solves a possible bug for me because you are not the first user to report the playability problem.

I was sure that the letterboxing setting was the culprit but your the firts to report it officially.

Yeah, i am not surprised that somone else mentioned it. Like i said before, this was the first time i have had to change the player's settings to have it not cut the video from its sides. But hey, as long as it works with the other settings, i am not complaining. I actually learned something about my dvd players settings by doing that, as well. :)

Hey, Merry Christmas!!!

you too! :)

A success!
 

My first DVD burning was a success. :D It's a plain English movie with no subtitles and no special authoring, but it works fine as it loads into my DVD player.

I used the original article as a source but also this one (http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~maxi/.../msg00079.html) and this one
(https://init.linpro.no/pipermail/sko...er/002800.html). A mix'n match of solutions.
The latter discusses the use of dvddirgen but as the author noted, its utility is dubious. Personnaly, I simply created my DVD directly with the sole usage of dvdauthor which seemed to have created everything on the spot. If you have a specific warning against me ignoring this program, go right ahead. ;)

But I was worried there for a while. The AUDIO_TS directory on my hard disk is empty. All sound seems to be agglutinated to the main VOBs. Is it because it is useful only for secondary languages ?

Also, I started to play around with a DVD that contains multi-languages. As I ripped two audio tracks, both tracks are conspicuously unequal in length. I would have thought that both tracks would be of the same length. Any hint on the process at work here ?

Thanks.

PS to Steel_J: Thanks for the reply on mplex and tcmplex. But I used another box which uses Linux from Scratch and an updated copy of mplex while my Mandrake 9.2 seems to have problems with it.

PPS to Steel_J: Keep hanging on, man. Be happy with your new life.

Re: A success!
 

AUDIO_TS folders should never contain anything for DVD-Videos - they are only included to help hardware compatibility (some DVD players refuse to play if the AUDIO_TS folder is not present.) It is used for AOB files on DVD-Audio discs ( a very different animal than DVD-video).

Thanks Narc!

By the way I see your in Montreal. The world is sometimes as small as it is big.

I'm in St-Eustache.

Only you and I will get that one!!!, :D

You said you had success with your first DVD backup using my guide and a couple others (witch is good) but I am curious, did you try my bash script posted earlier in this thread?

I'm out for people to test it because I am develloping it. It is based on my guide and it does everything automagically!

If people help me out and test it and give me feedback it will be more polished.

I need it to work well because Wapcaplet is looking at it for the Tovid utilities suite.

Hehe.

I didn't try you bash script, though. My DVD unit is on one machine but without disk space; my LFS machine has enough disk space but scattered throughout different partitions. So I'm swaping files around a lot. I'll need a few $$$ and time to fix my setup. And I'll use sub-titles with OCR soon (/me like japanese movies).

I'll tell you what I accomplished in the near future.

kpex, your websites are down...they down for good or will come back up?

Linux from scratch, hummmmm!

That would make you the guy to ask when we get Unix problems now wouldn'it!

Took me about two years to move from Windblows, I'm pretty good for a newbie but I am far from building my own OS.

It's in my future though.

As for your file hauling and space making efforts on your systems, take it easy. I am a slow bug myself.

I like to take my time and computer do tend to drain our wallets don't they?.

Happy new year, all. :)

Steel_J

Just wanted to let you know - I tried your script from this post - ver version=0.11a.

As it sits, I have a 4.0GB mpeg - works in mplayer.

Unfortunatly, I don't think I know enough about this to tell you if something small went
wrong, but so far, so good. VERY nice work.

best regards
-tw
(slackware 10/current)

p.s. - having trouble creating simple menus - any links for command line examples for that?
dvd plays, just no menus - Just want to be able to switch chapters.

Try Varsha at DVD http://varsha.sourceforge.net/

or

QDVDAuthor at http://qdvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

These are gui and allow you to create chapters easily.

As for command line, you need to use dvdauthor and specify a chapter list like so:

Create a DVD file system by running

Create a folder named: dvd

dvdauthor -o dvd dvd_output.mpg dvd_output2.mpg ...

To add chapters every 10 minutes, do

dvddauthor -o dvd -c ,10:00,20:00,30:00,40:00,50:00,1:00:00,1:10:00,1:20:00,1:30:00,1:40:00,
1:50:00,2:00 dvd_output.mpg

and then...

dvdauthor -T -o dvd

to create TOC files.

my dvd9 to dvd5 script
 

here is a bash script I wrote to take the VOB files ripped from dvd:rip and trim and compress them to fit on 4.7Gb dvd+R or dvd-R

# [2005] [Jason Mynheir] [shady@shady.d2g.com]
# Requires Transcode, DVDauthor, Mjpegtools, DVD:Rip, K3B

# Run this script in the working directory that your ripped VOB files are stored
# If you use this program and like it please let me know, or if you modify it please email me a copy
# Thank you and Happy Ripping
ls
cat *.vob > movie.vox
rm *.vob
mv movie.vox movie.vob
tcextract -i movie.vob -t vob -x mpeg2 > movie.m2v
tcextract -i movie.vob -a 0 -x ac3 -t vob > movie.ac3
rm movie.vob
tcrequant -i movie.m2v -o shrunk.m2v -f 1.5
rm movie.m2v
mplex -f 8 -o final.mpg shrunk.m2v movie.ac3
rm shrunk.m2v
rm movie.ac3
dvddirgen -o dvddir
dvdauthor -o dvddir final.mpg
dvdauthor -o dvddir -T
rm final.mpg
# Now burn VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS to DVD using K3B