Ive tried many times to make a DVD of family video clips (mpegs / AVI) depending on that video recorder was used.

but ive never managed it, ive tried automatic scripts, ive tried mencoder, ive read tutorials, but i usually get criptc error messages about incompatable sampling rates or whatever that i dont understand well enough to correct.

once, though a mad combination of porgrams, different ones to proccess and convert sound, programs piped into programs piped into program's i actually manager to get somthing to start working.

5 hours later, my compatable video file was created, but it played too fast, like fast farward. o tweak the scripts for veideo, then 5 hours later again, sound was dead.

basically, ive given up trying to understand the internal workings of video formats.

is there a miracle program out there for linux that takes common video formats, and output an ISO-image to burn to a DVD ?

i dont mind being asked about Aspect ratio's, and simple questions like that, but much more, and im lost.

MAC world, or windows world, Adobe Premier(sp?) is one of the best tools on the market for making movies. it is one of the tools that proffesionals use to make TV shows,l Advertisments, and Movies (small scale not multi million $ silver screen movies) and is an industry standard. sadly i do not know of any tool like that, or with that kind of power for linux.

i suppose you could try and run premier via crossover office to get it to run in linux, but again i am not 100% if that would work or not.

i would prefere linux native, and i dont need anything super profesional...
im looking to create DVD photo album, but with video's. dont matter if the menu works, even the DVD player just plays them one after the other as different chapters, that would be great.

ive found a good tutorial on the gentoo forums for DVD authoring.
maybe ill take anouther attempt at doing it all manually.

You might be in luck. Check out the following links:

1) http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/
2) http://dvdstyler.sourceforge.net/

The first is a little program which i've just came across. I haven't tried it since I've had linux removed from my system for a lil over a week (severe linux and hard disk issues, don't flame me please) so I haven't been able to use this program myself and give you my personal feedback about this. However it claims to do just what your looking for, which is author a DVD from big clip(s). It's a complete package from what I'm getting at that's comprised of many smaller applications that work together. However this means that these must all be command based programs. I'm sure you'd like a nice GUI frontend so it would be much easier to organize and author the DVD. That's what the 2nd link is for. It's the Frontend link for DVDAuthor. It seems to have a clean interface and It might just do the job your looking for. I hope it works out. If it works (or doesn't) please come back and let me know because I too am looking for a similar program for linux.

-al