Making-DVDs at CCRMA Workstations

You can backup a lot of data onto a single DVD. Perhaps sound-files, graphics, photos, presentations or even your $HOME directory. You can also author a digital movie on a DVD to play on household DVD players or on computer DVD drives. A Linux Journal article on DVD authoring might get you started on the subject of DVD video authoring. There are several tutorials and howto's on creating DVD-video. In general you might want to use dvdauthor. There is a tutorial on using dvdauthor at 'thoughts on DVD authoring'.

Since most of the time DVDs are used for data purposes here are some guidelines:

• DVD kinds, drives:

  There are several formats for DVDs. DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW plus dual layer versions of these. The distinctions are actually based on how data is written and read from the disk. Some manufacturers prefer one method over the other but in past months more and more drives are compatible with all standards. Other things to note is that DVD-R and DVD+R can only be recorded once while DVD-RW, DVD+RW can be recorded several times. In general if you are authoring and fixating movies, DVD-R are more compatible with home DVD players and legacy computer DVD drives.

  DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL Dual layer are based on a technology which provides two individual recordable layers on a single-sided DVD disc. The dual layered discs can hold 7.95GB

  DVD-RAM discs can be recorded and erased repeatedly but are compatible only with devices manufactured by the companies that support the DVD-RAM format. DVD-RAM discs are typically housed in cartridges.

• For burning DVDs
  • “K3b is a CD and DVD burning application for Linux systems optimized for KDE window manager in Linux. It provides a comfortable user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD. While the experienced user can take influence in all steps of the burning process the beginner may find comfort in the automatic settings and the reasonable K3b defaults which allow a quick start. The actual burning in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord, cdrdao, and growisofs.”

    With K3b you can create data CDs, audio Cds, Video Cds, Mixed Mode CDs, eMovix CD. You can do CD copy as well as CD ripping. Additionally you can do DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding plus many other actions.

    K3b is on the Red Hat-Fedora or PlanetCCRMA menu under the Sound and Video applications. It can also be run on a terminal window with the 'k3b' command. Documentation for this program is huge and include several tutorials.

  • “dvdauthor is a simple set of tools to help you author a DVD. The idea is to be able to create menus, buttons, chapters, etc, but for now you can just take an mpeg stream (as created by mplex -f 8 from mjpegtools 1.6.0) and write it to DVD.”

  • The man-page of growisofs states:

    “ growisofs was originally designed as a frontend to mkisofs to facilitate appending of data to ISO9660 volumes residing on random-access media such as DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, plain files, hard disk partitions. In the course of development general purpose DVD recording support was implemented, and as of now growisofs supports not only random-access media, but even mastering of multi-session DVD media such as DVD+R and DVD-R/-RW. In addition growisofs supports first-/single-session recording of arbitrary pre-mastered image (formatted as UDF, ISO9660 or any other file system, if formatted at all) to all supported DVD media types.”

  • “X-CD-Roast provides a GUI interface for commands like cdrecord and mkisofs. X-CDRoast includes a self-explanatory X11 user interface, automatic SCSI and IDE hardware setup, support for mastering of new ISO9660 data CDs, support for production of new audio CDs, fast copying of CDs without hard disk buffering, and a log file option. You can use Xcdroast for graphical user interface to write DVDs but you need enter a ProDVD key in the setup.” (see the Mastering Cd's section at §9.25).

• Commands for backing up and storing data on DVDs.

  The easiest way to burn or record data DVD's is with the growisofs command on a terminal window. Typically once you have your data directory burning is done in one step. Beware that permissions on the data directory are changed and therefore a 'tarball' is recommended provided that data size is not huge. You can have several tarballs though.

  The great advantage with the 'growisofs' command is that you don't need to create an image of the data you want to store on a DVD. To master and burn an ISO9660 volume use the Rock-Ridge extensions in order to keep the filenames intact with a command that looks like:

  
           growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -R  dvd/       
  

  Where 'dvd/' is your data directory.

  If you have and iso image of the DVD type something like:

  
           growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=fc5.iso       
  

  
  

  Note: DVD ISO-images can be created with K3b.