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    Making DVDs to watch on your Television

    I am probably not posting this in the right location on the forum, but I figure when you work through a process pass it on to save someone else the headache.

    Two weeks before Christmas I bought my wife and I new acer Aspire 5733 laptops. They had Windows 7 something I refuse to use on them. So in the door out of the box and a dose of linux to fix them. Kubuntu 11.10 on both. Mine would end up with about 30 re-installs over the next 2 weeks trying to get it the way I wanted it. It is back to 11.10 with KDE 4.7.95 on it.

    My task before Christmas was to convert 34 video files and burn them to DVD to be used in DVD players hooked to a television i.e movies. With a lot of googling, system reloads of several distros, and a lot of trial and error, I finally came up with a solution that worked. So I will give it to you from a clean install and you can take it from there. I have been able to convert and burn every file format I have tried so far.

    As I said I am running Oneiric now and it is the only OS on my system. So here we go assuming you have already downloaded a Kubuntu ISO burned it to the proper media and have just finished a clean install, or already have it installed on your system.

    Open terminal and and do the following in this order.

    sudo apt-get update

    sudo apt-get upgrade

    sudo apt-get install mencoder ffmpeg winff devede vlc smplayer

    I prefer to use vlc for testing playback and you will need the codecs from mplayer. I found that out though trial and error. Once you have installed all of this you are ready to go. Oh it will help if you have a video file you are wanting to convert into a DVD.

    Step 1: open Winff. Click the + button to add the file you want to convert and add it. It should appear in the large window after you have located it. Clicked on it to highlight it, and then clicked the open button bottom right. Under the big window select the Convert to button and choose DVD. Then click the Preset button and choose the format that is relevant to your location and preferred playback mode. I am in the US so I used NTSC DVD Fullscreen. Pal formats do not work on the Sony DVD players in my house. Then pick your output folder in the bottom window and click the Convert button at the top. This is a slow process depending on the size of the file you are converting. The end result is you will have a file with the original name but now it will be a .mpg format. Close Winff.

    Step 2: Open DeVeDe and click on the top bar Video DVD. Under Titles click on the Properties and button and type in whatever you are wanting the video to be called. When the video is complete and burned this will be the title that comes up on the screen where you will select play with your DVD player to start watching the movie. Under the title window on the left hand side you should see a place to select PAL or NTSC. Where I am at NTSC is the only thing that works. Now under file click the ADD+ button and use the pop-up to locate your file. On the pop-up there is also a place to choose PAL/SECAM or NTSC. Make sure you choose the appropriate one for your project. Then click on the forward buttons until the DVD creation begins. At this point DeVeDe will create a file in your home directory called movie and start the DVD creation process. It is a 4 step process in which it will convert the files again, create the DVD file tree structure, and then create and ISO image to burn to a blank DVD. Step 4 is burning the actual DVD. I close the program after step 3 and burn the ISO with K3B, which DeVeDe would probably default to,but I am not goiong to take the chance that it doesn't. Out of all the media burning programs I have used in linux I have experienced less issues with K3B than any other. It just works.

    Step 3: Open K3B, choose More actions, choose Burn Image and navigate to the movie folder in your home directory and choose the ISO. It will be named movie.iso. Pick it and start the burn process. When it is complete pop the DVD in your player and watch it on your TV. This whole process is pretty time consuming but the results are pretty good.

    Enjoy!!

    #2
    Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

    It is curious how this stuff happens.

    i have purchased quite a few television series sets over the last two years and one of the sets will not play on my brand new DVD player

    I think it is "too sophisticated "a form of copy protection in the device because the dvds are all by one company and appear identical. But, they play on the computer so....here I go!

    thanks!

    woodsmoke
    sigpic
    Love Thy Neighbor Baby!

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

      nice little how 2 .......but step 1 is redundant DeVeDe will take your .avi,mpg,whatever as it uses Mencoder for it's work.

      and dont forget you can make custom menu's for your DVD's with DeVeDe as well with soundtracks and picture backgrounds

      VINNY
      i7 4core HT 8MB L3 2.9GHz
      16GB RAM
      Nvidia GTX 860M 4GB RAM 1152 cuda cores

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        #4
        Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

        I have been using devede to do this for years. The only caution I have is that the process is very CPU intensive. Keep an eye on your CPU temps during the process because on an older computer, you might end up with a computer crash in the middle of the recording if the temp hits the upper limit. Close all other programs before beginning to give as much of your resources to the project as possible.
        Never too old to learn
        Ault, CO, USA

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          #5
          Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

          Step 1 may be redundant, but it was a step I added in the process after DeVeDe botched the conversion on a couple of flv files. Step 1 saved me coastering anymore disks. Now that I have finished the disked I needed to and have my system stable I will probable mess with DeVeDe some more and see if I can figure out the issue it was having with the files it botched. Good thing about vlc is it will play the ISOs just fine. So I can convert them to ISO and check them before I burn them. Might should have done that the first go around it might have saved me some time.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

            Originally posted by Detonate
            The only caution I have is that the process is very CPU intensive. Keep an eye on your CPU temps during the process because on an older computer, you might end up with a computer crash in the middle of the recording if the temp hits the upper limit.
            Detonate speaks the truth. When it was new a year ago, I used my Intel i-7 950, overclocked to 4.2GHz, to convert the .mpg versions of my family VHS tapes from the 1980s to DVD images. With all that horsepower, you would suppose the encoding would happen really quickly, but no -- it took many hours (and a spindle of double-layer 8.5GB DVDs), and the CPU temps tested my heatsink pretty hard. Devede is one of a few packages that I have used that is designed to take full advantage of multi-threaded CPUs, so it is efficient if you shut down other packages and let it do its work.

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

              Originally posted by dibl
              Originally posted by Detonate
              The only caution I have is that the process is very CPU intensive. Keep an eye on your CPU temps during the process because on an older computer, you might end up with a computer crash in the middle of the recording if the temp hits the upper limit.
              Detonate speaks the truth. When it was new a year ago, I used my Intel i-7 950, overclocked to 4.2GHz, to convert the .mpg versions of my family VHS tapes from the 1980s to DVD images. With all that horsepower, you would suppose the encoding would happen really quickly, but no -- it took many hours (and a spindle of double-layer 8.5GB DVDs), and the CPU temps tested my heatsink pretty hard. Devede is one of a few packages that I have used that is designed to take full advantage of multi-threaded CPUs, so it is efficient if you shut down other packages and let it do its work.
              I found out real quick, it doesn't matter what is under the hood, DeVeDe is going to take full advantage of it. Trying to do anything else until it is finished is pointless. If you want to try though it will give you and opportunity to open a terminal and use xkill.

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

                Originally posted by vinnywright
                nice little how 2 .......but step 1 is redundant DeVeDe will take your .avi,mpg,whatever as it uses Mencoder for it's work.

                and dont forget you can make custom menu's for your DVD's with DeVeDe as well with soundtracks and picture backgrounds

                VINNY
                The custom menus were the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to get those disk done and my system where it was set up the way I wanted it. When I am making them for myself I will play with the toys in it more. In the two week process I started with kubuntu. Then Lmde stipped down with xfce installed, back to kubuntu. I started stripping it down until it crashed and I couldn't recover it from console. Then I installed debian with xfce because you just can't go wrong there. That is until you tweak and strip it into the ground. Then re-installed debian with KDE upgraded squeeze to wheezy, and then to sid. Best I could get it to was KDE 4.65. I started stripping it down, and you probably guessed it.......bye bye system again. At this point my wife was starting to get a little pissed off. I repeated the install, tweak, crash, and re-install process several more times converting and burning a movie or two here and there. Finally reinstalled Kubuntu bumped up to kde 4.7.95 and finished. Decided to lay off the tweaking and removing stuff for a week or two.

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                  #9
                  Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

                  I've often used DeVeDe, but if you want more control over menus, then dvdstyler is what I prefer.
                  For me, I use devede if I'm just quickly making a dvd, but I will use dvdstyler otherwise.
                  These both will do all the transcoding work for you. I've never had a problem using avi files.

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                    #10
                    Re: Making DVDs to watch on your Television

                    avi files weren't a problem, flv is what caused devede to stumble. I get moved this weekend I will have totry again.

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