Free DVD Recording Tool For Linux?

jobsagoodun writes " cdrecord-ProDVD is OK for burning DVDs but (i) it grumbles pointlessly about device names and (ii) it has a weird binary-only license that expires every six months or so. There are some Free forks off cdrtools - dvd+rw/+r/-r ,dvdrtools and this patch - do any of them make a good replacement?"

Comments

Some info

[Guiri]

I use dvd+rw-tools and works pretty good.

To burn a DVD I just do:

growisofs -Z /dev/burner -R -J /path/to/data

A very good option for doing all this very easily is to get K3b which is part of the KDE distribution.

For authoring DVDs I recently discovered Qdvdauthor, and it works like a charm!, I was able to create my own DVDs with menus with custom backgrounds, sound, etc.

Also check my homepage for help about video conversions: http ://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de

Re:Some info

[Corhonio]

I've been using dvd+rw-tools (my distro is gentoo) exlusively for burning dvds since I got a plextor 708A last xmas.

I never had a single problem with it from day 1 :)

I'd like to mention that with the -overburn flag I can squeeze a bit more of data (above 4.7 billion bytes but below 4.7 million Kbytes(Kbyte=1024 bytes)) when needed.

In addition I update my dvd burners firmware with PXUpdate for UNIX http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/firmware.html, something which is very important for people that don't dual boot.

As demonstrated in https://expressivefreedom.org/Projects/PVR/Firewir e-Methodology.html a 4gb+ single file (ie a backup tar/bz2ball) can be squeezed in dvd, which is something that propably(I can't say for sure since I haven't used windows for ages) can't be done in windows.

Chris. PS Use the above at your own risk

K3B

[g-to-the-o-to-the-g]

K3B, dvdbackup, and dvdshrink (ran under wine, 3.0b5) work awesome.

growisofs is your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

I just use growisofs! It comes with the dvd+rw-tools and it works like a charm. It only requires mkisofs.

So to burn a data DVD:
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -r -J my_directory

and to burn a video DVD:
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video my_dvd

I don't know the story behind cdrecord-prodvd and all that license cruft (was Mr. Joerg "you must use SCSI" Schilling involved with that nonsense?)

The less you have to deal with Schilling the better.

Re:Is this a joke?

[\/\/]

I did not think there could be any desktop user that has not heard of k3b...

I did not think there could be any desktop user that doesn't understand k3b is a GUI FRONTEND to several command line tools, one of them being cdrecord-ProDVD for writing DVDs. Without these backends, your k3b will DO NOTHING. Another option for writing DVDs are the dvd+rw-tools, which also work for DVD-R now. THAT is what the question is about, not your GUI-of-the-day.

Perhaps for the next Ask Slashdot we could have a question about free web browsers? Or maybe a free Linux C compiler?

Or maybe have a question about what's the difference about a GUI frontend and an actual work-performing backend?