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.

Related posts

• Burn CDs From Command Line (4)
• Burn CD and DVD ISO Images with K3B (9)
• Yoggie PICO Personal Mobile Security Computer (3)
• With Ubuntu 9.10 Arrives Wubi 9.10 (2)
• WinX DVD Author Giveaway (53)

In this article we will cover the cdrecord and dd commands where we will burn ISO images, data backups, and audio CDs.

Installing cdrecord and dd

By default, cdrecord and dd, should be installed. If not you can find it in your Add/Remove Software utility by searching for “cdrecord” and “dd”. Once you have installed the applications open up a terminal window and get ready.

The first thing you need to do is to determine where your device is located. To locate your device issue the command cdrecord -scanbus. When the command runs you should see output similar to:

1000,0,0 100000) *
1000,1,0 100001) *
1000,2,0 100002) ‘HL-DT-ST’ ‘RW/DVD GCC-T10N ‘ ‘1.00′ Removable CD-ROM
1000,3,0 100003) *
1000,4,0 100004) *
1000,5,0 100005) *
1000,6,0 100006) *
1000,7,0 100007) *
As you can see above, my device is listed. The listing information I take out of this is 0,2,0. If your scanbus reports the number before the first “,” as a 1000 you will only want the last digit – in my case a 0. If scanbus reports only a 0 before the first “,” that will be your first number in your device location. So my device is 0,2,0.

This device address will be plugged into the command for burning in conjunction with the dev= argument.

Burning ISO image

You have data on a CD that you want turned into an ISO image. This could be a Linux distribution or anything. To do this you would issue the command:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=ISO_file.iso

Where /dev/cdrom is the location of your CD device and ISO_file.iso name of the ISO image you want to create. NOTE: If you are wanting to put the ISO image file in a location other than where you are issuing the command, use the full path to the file name.

You can also make use of the mkisofs command to create ISO images of directories on your hard drive. The command for this would look like:

mkisofs -o Directory.iso Directory

Now let’s burn that ISO image to a CD. To do this issue a command similar to:

cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -data speed=48 ISO_file.iso

The above command would put the ISO_file.iso file onto a burnable CD. If you know the actual burning speed of your device you can make adjustments to the command above.

Burn Audio CDs

What everyone has been waiting for. How to burn audio CDs. You could easily burn a directory full of .wav files with the command:

cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -eject speed=48 -pad -audio *.wav

But let’s take this one step further and create a handy bash script that will do the following:

Convert spaces in file names to underscores.

Convert .mp3 files to .wav files.

Burn all .wav files to cd.

Here is the script:

#!/bin/sh

# Convert spaces to underscores
for i in *.mp3; do mv “$i” `echo $i | tr ‘ ‘ ‘_’`; done

# Convert MP3 files to WAV files
for i in *.mp3; do mpg123 -w `basename $i .mp3`.wav $i; done

# Burn the CD
cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -eject speed=48 -pad -audio *.wav

Once you have created the script, make sure you chmod the file so it is executable like this:

chmod u+x burn_script

To run the script first move it into the directory that contains your mp3 files and issue the command ./burn_script. Or you can copy the burn_script to /usr/bin so it is a global command.

Final Thoughts

Linux is an incredibly flexible operating system. The ability to burn CDs from the command line proves just how flexible it is. Do you have other tricks you like to use along these lines? If so, share them.

Related posts

• Searching for Files in Linux via Command Line (3)
• Linux Command Line Fu (5)
• Get To Know Linux: gnome-terminal (5)
• dd: the ultimate disk cloning tool (11)
• Create DVDs in Linux with DeVeDe, mkisofs, and K3B (3)