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Have you considered DeVeDe? I use to to build custom ISOs using whatever.

Where is the DVD so I can watch it on my TV???

You make it yourself with DeVeDe. Apparently there's even a Windows version now.

Gimp is a very good graphics program. I will not argue that Photoshop is better but Gimp is much more powerful than Photoshop Elements.

Don't forget the leaps and bounds the GIMP team has made towards making the app much, much easier for newbies. And everything short of MSPAINT.EXE is better than Photoshop Elements.

I really like DeeVeeDee for making DVDs is super easy to use.

You must mean DeVeDe. I have to say that I have not found a better tool for mastering DVDs, whether commercial or open source. Xilisoft's DVD Creator is nice, for example, but, quite honestly, it does too much. It tries to be a video editor, a menu creator, etc., while DeVeDe sticks with to the basics and optionally generates simple menus for you. Most of the time, I just want to be able to put a full videos on a disc and a menu to select between them; I don't need a video editor or a menu creator, or special effects doodads, or anything like that. And if I do want those, I have those tools, too.

DeVeDe is probably one of the most innovative open source projects ever, IMHO.

Along with Audacity, of course. :)

http://www.rastersoft.com/programas/devede.html http://www.dvdstyler.de/ http://qdvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

Devede is a really good gui and adds a lot of functionality. And uses mencoder, which as of 1.0rc2 implements SMP quite nicely. I've been using it the last few days for family videos, on an AMD64 X2, and it is working flawlessly using both cores.

Try this little program for doing DVD conversions. It'll convert any thing playable my mplayer into a DVD ISO file. It's a front-end and requires a few backend tools, but it is, IMHO, a fairly good example of the principles I outline in my post.

The thing is, with Ubuntu Joe Sixpack doesn't need to buy Quicken, a DVD creator, a DVD player or Greetings Workshop, because their equivalents all available for free through the Ubuntu repositories! Commercial software doesn't have to exist for every need, just for the ones where there isn't an open source equivalent.

So (in bizzaro world, where Walmart employees know anything about Linux) the salesperson would explain to Joe that if he gets the $60 more expensive Ubuntu system, he doesn't need to spend $100 on all those other programs. Plus he gets a full office suite installed by default, so he doesn't have to spend multiple $100s on MS Office. Oh, and he doesn't need to buy those virus scanners and spyware removal tools, saving even more money. Then the saleperson will tell Joe that if he buys the Ubuntu system, he will get free upgrades for life, for all of the products it comes with. Sounds a bit more compelling when you put it that way, doesn't it?

The only thing you would have trouble with is games, which is a known problem for Linux as it used to be for Mac. Since Mac doesn't have DirectX, I would guess that they use OpenGL for 3D games, so it wouldn't take much of a Linux market to make it worthwhile for the games companies to port their Mac version to run on Linux too.

There's a similar project that I'm using everywhere regardless of operating systems : GAG.
You can download it from here .
Gag has no bells and whistles like XOSL, but it does the same thing. You create a little bootable floppy with it, and it's then easy to configure and install anywhere.
Gag supports multiple languages, it can swap disk ordering, it can protect bootup with a password, and I never had a single trouble with it.