Friday, July 27, 2007

My Ubuntu Experience: VCD/DVD Authoring

At first I thought about trying DeVeDe but I read that DeVeDe is incompatible with the MPlayer shipped with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn so I tried tovid instead.

I) Installation: follow the instructions from here.

II) Start the App: simply type tovidgui under any writable directory (e.g. your home)

[1. Layout]: you add videos here. The simplest VCD or DVD requires 1 menu and all videos could go under the menu. Name your source and destination files without spaces and underscores if you can.

[2. Encode]: just hit "Start encoding" and let it finish.

[3. Burn]: this is where I ran into trouble. If I simply hit "Start", both VCD and DVD failed.

VCD trouble: the cue and bin files were created successfully. However, when it tried burning them using cdrdao, nothing happened. I had to kill that process and repeat the cdrdao command in Terminal. Then it burned the VCD. However, I could only play the resulting disc on computer but not my VCD player. Your mileage may vary.

DVD trouble: again, the files were created successfully. However, when it executed dvdauthor, it does not like the titleset with -noask in the XML. So the solution is re-run the last command right after [2. Encode]: i.e., the makexml command, but take out the -noask option. This will generate a good XML. Then I could hit "Start" under [3. Burn] without problem.

(Link to the official Tovid GUI guide .)

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