[PLUG] Authoring video DVDs on Ubuntu Hardy

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

MythTV has become critical infrastructure, in large part for the library 
of "Curious George" episodes we've amassed.  But unless Myth will work 
over broadband, which I doubt (and thanks, Chad, for your thoughts on 
this), we won't have any on vacation, so I wanted to burn a couple of 
DVDs.  After a lot of fumbling around, here is the almost trivial method 
I came up with on Ubuntu Hardy.

0) Find and copy scp some episodes over to the DVD burner machine
1) sudo aptitude install devede dvd+rw-tools gopchop
2) Use gopchop to edit out the commercials
3) Launch devede, which has a pretty minimal interface, but it works.
	* SET vids to NTSC instead of the wrong default PAL!!!
	* Keep source files in ~/DVD/source or something, since
		every file-open operation starts in ~/
	* Add menu items and associate vid files
	* Use ~/DVD/temp to keep things collected, default is ~/
		which will scatter files about
	* Give the ISO a good name, .iso will be automatically appended
	(See http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/75/)
4) growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/<dvdrw>=< name >.iso && eject
	* adjust <dvdrw> and <name> as needed

End
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I ran into a bunch of issues in coming up with the above process.

a) I originally used brasero to burn the disc.  It complained that the 
md5 hashes didn't match, but I have no idea why since the discs 
(eventually) worked.  And doing those extra hashes made the operation 
take significantly longer.

b) I originally didn't set the vids to NTSC in devede, but left it as 
the default PAL.  When I burned the disc my DVD player complained it 
couldn't read it.  Assuming a problem with "a)" I burned another disc 
using growisofs but got the same problem.  So it was an ISO problem, not 
a burn problem.

c) Then I tried gnomebaker and qdvdauthor, but neither do video DVDs 
(they do audio CD and data CD/DVD).

d) tovid and gtovid "worked" but the GUI (gtovid) was *much* more 
primitive than devede (which is saying a lot).  There is no feedback, so 
the first pass it encoded the files too big to fit on the 4.7G DVD 
(devede's fit at about 95%+-1).  I had to re-do it and change "Quality" 
from 8 to 7 and it then fit.  But the main menu kind of flickers and is 
hard to read and video quality wasn't great.  All in all, very ugly.

e) Subtitles which exist in the original MythTV MPeg2 files were lost. 
I know there are various subtitle rippers I could have used, then merged 
them back in using devede, but that was too much like work.

f) devede has no templates and only 1 sample "menu background" image. 
I'm sure I could have come up with a way to do a screen cap and use 
that, but I didn't bother.


Links:
http://www.rastersoft.com/programas/devede.html
For Windows: http://www.majorsilence.com/devede/
Now I find these(!):
   http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/02/05/150718.php
   http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/75/

In the end, we have 2 DVDs with 4 half-hour episodes on each.

Hope this is useful,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|        jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
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