dvdauthor

dvdauthor is a program that will generate a DVD-Video movie from a valid MPEG-2 stream that should play when you put it in a DVD player.

To start you need MPEG-2 files that contain the necessary DVD-Video VOB packets. These can be generated with FFmpeg, or by by passing -f 8 to mplex.

How to Use

There are 3 steps to building the DVD directory structure on your HDD.

1. Delete a previously authored dvd

   dvddirdel [-o dir]

   To guard against mistakes, this will only delete files and subdirectories that look like part of a DVD-Video structure.

2. Create your titlesets

   dvdauthor [-o dir] [audio/video/subpicture options] [chapters]

   To create 1 chapter per mpeg, simply do

   dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] chap1.mpg chap2.mpg chap3.mpg...

   To manually specify chapters, use the '--chapters' option

   dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] -c chap1a.mpg chap1b.mpg -c chap2a.mpg chap2b.mpg ....

   To add chapters every fifteen minutes, do

   dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] -c 0,15:00,30:00,45:00,1:00:00,1:15:00... longvideo.mpg

   Call dvdauthor for each titleset you want to create. Note that due to the DVD-Video standard, all audio, video, and subpicture options must be set once for the entire titleset; i.e. you cannot mix PAL and NTSC video in the same titleset. For that you must generate separate titlesets.

   Run dvdauthor -h to see the audio, video, and subpicture options. Note that dvdauthor can autodetect most parameters except the language.

3. Create the table of contents

   dvdauthor -T [-o dir]

Voila! You now have a DVD-Video directory structure that will probably work! You can now write this out to your DVD, mini-DVD (CD), or just play it from your HDD. To generate the UDF image to burn to DVD, use mkisofs and pass it the -dvd-video option.

See also

FFmpeg

See http://www.ffmpeg.org/.

Note that packages included with your distro are almost certainly out of date. Always use the latest version from the Git repository or the latest release.

mjpegtools

See http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net.

It includes mplex for building an MPEG-2 system stream with hooks for DVD-Video navigation packets.

mpucoder's site on DVD specifications

See http://www.mpucoder.com/DVD/.

It contains details on the DVD-Video format

Inside DVD-Video on Wikibooks

See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Inside_DVD-Video.

This is a work-in-progress wikibook designed to contain all publicly available information on DVD-Video. an attempt to document everything that is publicly known about the DVD-Video spec in a readable form