Basic DVD authoring on Fedora · Jan 3, 01:11 PM
I’ve found my notes on DVD copying useful before, I thought to do the same for authoring DVDs based on readily available content such as downloaded or streamed video or self recorded content. Note that copyright restrictions probably apply to content available online, and insofar as these notes describe the use of downloaded or streamed content they are for educational purposes only. Respect copyright notices and don’t bite the hand that feeds :)
You might find that digital cameras record .mov files, or you could download them from services like BBC’s iPlayer using software like get_iplayer
I planned to use Brasero as it’s readily available in Fedora. Unfortunately, though it runs easily it really needs lots of other packages to make it useful. I tried to author a DVD and couldn’t add many types of content (eg. .mov files). Checking the docs reveals that:
“In order to use all the potential of the video project, you need to install all GStreamer’s plugins, ffmpeg, vcdimager and dvdauthor.”
I searched and found a few other helpful packages for video that weren’t in the default install. I installed the lot with yum:
yum install xine xine-lib libdvdcss
yum install ffmpeg vcdimager dvdauthor
yum install gstreamer-plugins*
Unfortunately that stopped Brasero from working completely, so I had to remove gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras. It turns out there is an easier way to get the plugins. First try and open the file you want to put on a DVD, by just clicking on it. The default video player opens. If it has trouble understanding the file it will ask if you would like to search for the appropriate codecs. Brasero doesn’t know how to do this and just complains that it can’t use the file.
When trying to view the .mov file, Movie Player installed gstreamer-ffmpeg for me. After that, Brasero was able to add the .mov files to my project.
To my disappointment, trying to use Brasero further to write a disc didn’t result in success. The burning process stalled at the point of making an image. At least I didn’t waste any discs.
Having failed with Brasero I was recommended to try k3b or similar (k9copy also does authoring and has been seen to shrink things to the right size for a disc before – very useful). I checked gnomebaker but it wasn’t yet usable for creating video DVDs. If it’s possible to use k9copy and k3b to make a video DVD from scratch… I couldn’t find the way. The first method I found that worked was DeVeDe, and creating the iso image with that was trivial. Just add tracks, add files, ‘adjust disc usage’ to set the compression rates for the videos, and sit back while the iso is prepared.
Once you have an iso pretty much any burning tool will reliably write it to a blank disc.
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