I've burned up about 12 DVD-Rs now trying to burn a video file onto a playable DVD. At first I thought my hardware must be dying, but I am able to burn working iso's copied from existing DVDs, so I know it's not that. I used the guide from THIS page to get started. I'm able to make the .VOB files etc. with dvdauthor, and I can even use mplayer to play them and confirm they're good. But when it comes to burning, I can't get the disk to play in any DVD player I own; it just spins for a minute or so and then errors out. I just tried reading one of these DVDs in my computer, and I was able to read it just fine, so I know the data isn't corrupted, more likely I'm just missing an argument that makes it more player-friendly; either that or I've encoded the video wrong? I've been using but it doesn't seem to be doing the job.

Any obvious mistakes I'm making so far? I'll post more details later if not.

UPDATE: I just used the above code to try another disk after freeing up some system resources, and this disk won't play even on my computer. I can mount it and see the files, but when I ffplay *.VOB, the disk just spins for a LONG time, and I sit here unable to unmount or eject it as it attempts to read it.

can you play the .iso with ogle?

That's my litmus test.

One caveat I've run into is that ffmpeg and others are not that great are rate control and DVD is a compressed format with limits. Using mpeg2enc and mplex to add in audio is about the only way I've been able to author a DVD playable in a stand alone player.

Otherwise

growisofs -dvd-video -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd ./DVD/
(for the parent tree should work.)

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=image.iso
(for an image)
(mkisofs -dvd-video -o image.iso ./DVD/)

And other methods. Make sure that your DVD player can even play DVDs. Mine had a dirty lens which kept me troubleshooting the wrong thing for a while. The little engine that ALMOST could.

Try tools like 2ManDVD or DeveDe, it will do the conversion/burning stuff for you.

...Well, that's interesting. On the way home from work, I picked up some DVD+Rs, thinking that it's a slight possibility that it wants + rather than -. I popped the +R in, ran the exact same command as before, and - BAM! It worked! DVD played back perfectly in multiple units. I must have a very picky DVD burner - or readers. Now to see if it passes test #2!