here is my issue i have a bunch video on my computer and i wanted to put them on dvds (dvd 5s hopefully) is there a program that can do this. K3b seems to only want dvd 9s and every other linux program i use seems to only burn them as data files which i cannot play on my dvd player.
thanx in advance

man mkisofs

is this the name of the program?

man mkisofs will give you the manual on how to use the command mkisofs.

From the author:

"The mkisofs tool is used for premastering iso9660 filesystems which are used on CDROMs. The output of mkisofs can then be sent to a CDROM writer with a utility such as cdrecord."

You will need to construct a dvd compliant structure before using mkisofs as that will just create the iso for burning. Use something like dvdauthor (http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/) to do this.

nice but how can i learn to use this

i downloaded dvdauthor through yum and since it is a command line ripper i have been unable to use it

is the video you have in AVI files or some non-dvd format? if so, you'll first need to convert them to dvd format, then author a dvd with the converted files, and make a menu of some sort if there's going to be more than one video one the disc. there's a chance that the authoring app will create an iso for you...

If you're converting xvid avis, don't use the highest quality settings in the conversion as the source is already heavily compressed - if you use lower quality settings while converting to dvd format, the file size will be minimal but you won't really lose any quality comparing with the source. Anyway, this post so far has been purposefully non-specific as I haven't attempted any of this stuff on linux yet.

However, I do know that videohelp.com has small section of linux video guides. I think this guide is the kind of guide you're after. the authoring part certainly is anyway.

thanx everything is in avi format.i read through the how to's they were ok but i wasnt interested in downloading new programs but using native windows stuff

This is IMHO the definitive guide to video conversion:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-si...n/MPlayer.html

Next, there's the authoring. I can't help there... I did not try yet.

Yves.

have you tried this yet i am having trouble figuring this program out.

is it mencoder you're having trouble figuring out(it's the mencoder section of that guide that theYinYeti is talking about btw..)? I'm afraid it'll probably be a while before I give that an attempt, at least until I start messing around with my debian install (slackware's great for learning about linux, but I'm still pathetic at compiling, and mplayer isn't enough for the whole process of avi-->vob-->an_actual_dvd).

I'm also a little confused... you say want to do this with native windows software? Not sure why you would ask here then, but, in windows I would be using WinAVI to convert to dvd/vobs, and DVD-Lab to author the actual dvd. However I have illegitimate copies of both apps, you won't be able to find fully-functional copies as a simple (legitimate) download. You may find suitable free apps for windows, but there's a decent chance they're at least as challenging to use as figuring out how to do this in linux.(edit: there are certainly excellent free tools for doing the opposite in windows though..)

Anyway, it seems to me if you want to do something new with your computer (linux or otherwise), you should be prepared to install some new software now and then.

doom9.org is also a good resource for video guides...

if you're sticking with M$ btw, WinAVI is well worth the $30 it costs. not sure I'd say the same about dvd-lab though ($100 for the cheapest version with least features, $250 for the fully functional version), though it is an excellent tool for authoring (on windows at least).

thanx for the response. i didn't want to download new software but the tutorial section of this site offered me a great tutorial on this. all it seems i need is dvdauthor dvdstyler and k3b.
all done from the command line. these are probably the best apps for this kind of stuff once you get the hang of using them

the big question i have is this seems to take over an hour on my system to do a simple 700 mb avi movie is this about normal or is something wrong

the big question i have is this seems to take over an hour on my system to do a simple 700 mb avi movie is this about normal or is something wrong

K3b needs mplayer with mencoder, transcode, and ffmpeg to do its job.

I have found that mencoder does a better job only encoding video into MPEG-2 because it has high tolerance for errors and handles just about any codec. Then use either transcode or ffmpeg to make an AC3 file. Next use either tcmplex or mplex to combine the video and sound files to together to make a DVD video compatible file. Finally using dvdauthor to author the MPEG file into VOB, IFO, BUP files so DVD players can read them.

dvdauthor is not a ripper. vobcopy is ripper.

For high quality encodings, it takes very, very long. You should expect four to eight hours when doing high quality two pass encodings.