What I wound up with is a combination of three tools – only one of which was a command. It’s not as simple as creating them in Windows, but it’s free and it’s reliable (and will also up your geek “cred” – which we all could use.)

DeVeDe

This first tool started out to be the most promising – until it came time to actually burn the DVD. Unfortunately DeVeDe stinks at the process of burning. So what I wound up using this tool for is to create the DVD structure which consists of a directory VIDEO_TS and all necessary files (.IFO, .VOB, and .BUP to be precise.)

Getting and installing DeVeDe is simple because it is found in most common repositories. Fire up your Add/Remove Software utility, do a search for “devede” (no quotes) and install the results of the search.

DeVeDe Main Window

Once it is installed fire it up. The opening window will ask what disk type you want to create. Click “Video DVD”. the new window (shown on the left) is where you add your files and configure your options. You can really get creative with creating menus, etc. For the sake of simplicity we will stick with the basics.

Click the Add button under the Files Pane. This is where you will locate the .avi file you want to add to your movie. In the resulting window you can also switch from PAl to NTSC, add audio tracks (if there isn’t already one), add subtitles, and a number of advanced options.

Once you have added your file click the OK button to come back to the main window. Now, click the Advanced options drop down to reveal a few more options. In this section you want to select the option “Create Disk Structure”. Don’t bother with the iso option – DeVeDe is as bad at creating the iso as it is at burning.

Now click the Forward button and the process will begin. Depending upon how many files (and how large they are) you might have a long wait.

Once the process is complete you can Quit out of DeVeDe. You are done with that application.

mkisofs

Now you need to locate the directory housing the VIDEO_TS directory. You have to run the mkisofs command on that directory like so:

mkisofs -dvd-video -o ~/DVD_NAME.iso /path/to/VIDEO_TS

Where DVD_NAME is the name you want to give the iso file and where /path/to/ is the absolute path to the VIDEO_TS directory (but leave out the VIDEO_TS portion.) So if VIDEO_TS is located in /home/jlwallen/movie and I want to name the iso lost.iso the command would look like:

mkisofs -dvd-video -o /home/jlwallen/lost.iso /home/jlwallen/movie

You will want to make sure there is plenty of space on the drive (or directory) you use for this because it can take up some space (how much depends upon the size of the DVD being created.) The results, once the command is finished, will be DVD_NAME.iso (Again where DVD_NAME is the actual name of the iso you created.)

K3B

Now the easy part. Using K3B you will burn this iso image to disk. You can follow the process in my previous article Burn CD and DVD ISO images with K3B. Once K3B finishes you should have a DVD suited for nearly any home DVD player.

Final Thoughts

Nope…it’s not as easy as it should be. But now you can re-create the process fairly quickly with the right tools. Have you found an easier way to create DVDs in Linux? If so let your fellow gHacks readers know.

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The main argument for using DeVeDe is the ease if use of this application. It just takes a minute to add the videos to the application and start the creation of the DVD which does not require user input at all. The program keeps the advanced parameters like audio and video bitrates in configuration dialogs that a normal user does not need to bother to look into.

One nice feature of the video to DVD software is the ability to automatically adjust the size and the quality of the videos that are added to the application so that all movies fit on the selected medium. The medium that is created can have a size between 185 Megabytes and 8.5 Gigabytes which can be selected from templates.

The user can specify the output format of each video file that he adds, select an audio track if multiple are available and add subtitles from the computer. Advanced users can take a look at detailed information and settings and change settings like the aspect ratio, the scaling mode or several quality settings.

The title menu of the DVD can be configured extensively. A user who just wants to play the videos one after the other can keep the default settings. Users who want to define font size, background image and sounds can do that as well.

If the computer uses more than one cpu core then users should enable the optimization for multi-core cpus in the advanced options of the main menu. The video to DVD software saves the new DVD in iso format on the hard drive which can then be burned to a blank DVD. Other options include the creation of a video_ts folder.

DeVeDe is an excellent video to DVD program for Windows and Linux.

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