Is there a way to create a DVD playable in a dvd player from a .avi file?

Yes, it's a bit of a pain, for the moment. Here's what I did. I changed the avi to an mpg with ffmpeg. I wrote a little script to do that for a whole directory of avi's, as I had a few dozen short home movie clips I wanted to put on a dvd, and they all had long tedious names. I can post the script here if you want it. It isn't polished or fancy, (read that as having workable basic options but no gui way to change them.) but it does work, for me anyway. Then I used qdvdauthor to put the mpg's in the right format, with a menu, with buttons. Then the command line program mkisofs to build an iso, then I used K3b to burn the iso. The version of qdvdauthor that comes with edgy crashed every few minutes, and I never ever got it to work. I tried to find a deb for the most recent version, but never did. Downloaded the source for the most recent version, and couldn't compile it. So I installed it in a fedora partition I had abandoned a while ago, and it worked like a charm. I can post more details if you are still interested. There are a bunch of tools out there to do this, but it's damn hard to get them to work. It's a pain in the ass.

Let me know if you want/need more details....

David

if rgreeves does not want the script i would defo like it.

How long would a 700 meg file take to convert do ya think?

also rgreeves you could get a dvd player with usb and copy your stuff onto usb devices and plug them in and away ya go.

tovid, is an easy way to convert videos to the correct format for creating a dvd.

See here:
http://tovid.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_make_a_basic_DVD

You can use tovid to create dvd menus....but using a gui such as dvdstyler may be easier.

I used tovid too, or tried to rather. It took a lot longer than my quick and dirty solution, but it does handle the details much better than my little script could do. In any event. Here is my little script. You need ffmpeg installed. Here it is.


#!/bin/bash
echo Which Directory contains the movies you want converted ?
read NAME
cd $NAME
for i in $( ls ); do
ffmpeg -i $i -target ntsc-dvd -b 1100 $NAME/$i.mpg
done

Make sure you don't have anything else in that directory, or it may throw up some sort of error. It also leaves the .avi as part of the filename, so now foo.avi becomes foo.avi.mpg which might not look very elegant, but it did let me know which files were the ones I had converted on my own, and it works just fine too, so I didn't mind.

Another tool I found, was avitovob I think it was. This took far longer than my own solution too, like 10 times longer, far longer than I was willing to wait.

Oh, my script, the -b 1100 option sets the bit rate. 1100 was just a number I came up with that made a ripped version of cars look ok on the tv after being ripped to avi, then transcoded back to mpg, and burned to a dvd-r with snow white and lady and the tramp. You can increase that number to increase the quality, or lower it to decrease the size of the mpg.

Here is a link to avitovob I mentioned.

http://inferno.slug.org/cgi-bin/wiki?AviToVob

Good luck....

David

P.S. I don't really remember, but I think a 700mb file took around 15 or 20 min, but could have been half that, or twice that for that matter.

Since I notice from your profile that you are using Ubuntu, you may find this page useful.

This page is one that I have written about turning AVI files into DVD's playable on any standard DVD player. Providing that MPlayer can play the AVI, Mencoder will be able to convert it.

Then just author it with DVD author, and burn it to DVD.

It does take some time - about 30mins on my machine for an hour long TV recording.

You can just copy and paste the commands of that page, and edit the bits on the last line that need to change (ie file names)

I hope this helps
--Ian

downloaded tovid and when installing I get the error: dependency is not satisfiable: mencoder message

Have you installed mencoder?

--Ian

i use mplayer all the time but have not installed mencoder. How-to?

--Ian

ok, I downloaded a .deb version and installed it in my Ubuntu 6.10 system. I had to reboot to find the gui listed in applications. when I click on the gui icon it runs but does not complete. ideas?

Have you tried my script ? It ain't fancy but it does work. Let us know how it turned out.

David