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

Re:Some info

[slobbargoat]

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

Just note that you don't need the entire KDE distribution to have K3b, you only need kdelibs from the KDE distribution.

k3b

[FireChipmunk]

k3b works great for burning DVDs.

Re:k3b

[unixmaster]

FYI K3B recently got fixed to compile/run properly on FreeBSD .

K3B

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

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

Re:Is this a joke?

[zulux]

Dear Slashdot,
I've been having fun with my new Mandrake install - but coming from a Windows world, I'm puzzeled...

Does Linux have a text editor?

dvdrtools

[mishan]

I use dvdrtools (dvdrecord), which works completely perfectly for me. Debian even has dvdrtools in their distribution already. I use it just like cdrecord.

dvdrecord -v dev=/dev/dvdrw driveropts=burnproof -dao -data MY_DVD_IMAGE.ISO

dvdrtools

[james b]

dvdrtools in Debian unstable works pretty well.
I use it like this:

mkisofs -f -udf -V "Your Disc Label" -o currentcd.img -r "your-directory-of-data"
dvdrecord dev=/dev/hdd -dao currentcd.img

It gives a warning about accessing the drive via /dev/hdd being depracated, but works fine.

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:growisofs is your friend

[Chris Siegler]

The less you have to deal with Schilling the better.

Amen! Back before dvd+rw tools came out and all there was were some hacks to cdrecord I tried to buy ProDVD but gave up. As far as I could tell there's no way to actually buy it. When searching the newsgroups all I found were several Schilling rants, several people like me trying to buy it without luck, and finally a patch to an old cdrecord version that didn't require a license. If it was an intelligence test you needed to pass to get the damn license I failed miserably.

Re:Is this a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

in case you haven't noticed, k3b burns DVDs using those very programs he mentioned in the summary.

it it just a front-end for programs like mkisofs and cdrecord.

Re:Is this a joke?

[Ford Prefect]

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

• Web browser - Chimera. Has an Athena-based X11 user interface, supports modern GIF images, and can retrieve data from HTTP, FTP and Gopher servers.
  
• C compiler - various exist, including the Tiny C Compiler. Other possibilities for porting include Sozobon C Compiler and Open Watcom.
  

Hope that helps!

What I'd like to see...

[polyp2000]

Is a a good DVD-Authoring system. Its easy enough to burn DVD's on linux and has been for some time K3b uses the command line tools to do its work seamlessly.

But i'd like it to be easier to dump footage via my DV Camcorder over firewire and dump it on a DVD with a nice little menu. Just by clicking a couple of buttons. Alas I havent come across anything like this yet. Which is why im still hankering after a powerbook.

Nick ...

Re:What I'd like to see...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see that, too, although I am alot happier to discover that video DVDs do NOT REQUIRE menus! Because, personally, I just want to pop in a disc and go. I don't want to do more work than press play, and I doubt my presently-DVD-less parents want anything different from the "play/stop/rewind/ff" interface of a VCR they're familiar with either.

So here's my formula to get DV to DVD without crufty menus. With almost minimum fuss.

1. use kino to grab the DV and do basic editing. It can't do much editing (i.e. you can't trim in between clips) and it's sluggish in some respects but it works like a charm.
2. Inside kino go to EXPORT->MPEG and select option 8 for the file format.
This uses mpeg2enc, which is amazingly SLOW, but does a good job. Expect many hours encoding 1 hour of footage. My FX-53 is about 1/10th real time. If you want to retain chapters, make sure to select "scene split" before exporting!
3. So now you have one or more .mpeg files. Use dvdauthor to construct the directory. First you must make an XML file (the second-most annoying part of the whole procedure after mpeg2enc slowness).
<dvdauthor>
<vmgm />
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<vob file="/path/to/first.mpeg" />
<vob file="/path/to/next.mpeg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>
4. Generate the DVD file structure.
dvdauthor -o my_dvd -x my.xml

5. Burn it with growisofs
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video my_dvd

Voila! Alot of steps and very slow, but not too painful otherwise. And no annoying menus!

Re:What I'd like to see...

[AstroDrabb]

You can get MainActor for Linux. A professional multi-platform editor. Some info from the site:

MainActor 5 for Linux offers professional features almost identical to the features you already know from the Windows version, including DV capture and MPEG-1/2 import and export in a new interface.

You can download the demo and give it a whirl. I think it cost about $99.

For lighter work, there is Q DVD-Author. It is FOSS and works well for making DVD's with menus, etc.

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?

11th Commandment

[Apreche]

Thou shalt not ask slashdot a question which can be answered by searching the gentoo forums.

Re:11th Commandment

[Taladar]

So you can't be bothered to look through the top 5 search results in Google (which are pretty useful for this question if you use something like "linux dvd burn" as search string) but you can be bothered to search through hundreds of slashdot comments?

Re:Is this a joke?

[Minna Kirai]

Freshmeat.net exists and its platform and even license independent.

First, note that "k3b" is one of the least-informative program names imaginable. It provides ZERO descriptive data (aside from possibly the fact that it uses KDE). Nobody can be expected to guess that she wants "k3b" to make DVDs. So what happens if you search for a "DVD burner" on freshmeat.net?

Searching for "DVD burner" gives 0 hits. "DVD burn" gives 8 hits, but k3b isn't one of them. "cd burn" gives 7 hits, again without mentioning k3b.

Searching for "DVD" by itself produces 128 results, but again, k3b isn't in there. So apparently a freshmeat search is useless, unless you already knew the cryptic 3-character app name.

A google-search (such as for "linux dvd burn") would've faster and more fruitful. Rather sad that freshmeat isn't a good place to search for Free software...

k3b

[tiger99]

When I last stuck a blank DVD in the drive some weeks ago, it just worked. k3b did indeed open, it was so uncannily like the way a certain broken OS works for CD writing, if something like Roxio is installed.

I become more impressed with kde each time I use it, which is daily. The level of integration must surely be the equal of its closed-source rivals.

BTW I do most of my work on SuSE 9.1, but it (kde) seems much the same on the other machines, Xandros, FC2 and even FreeBSD (although I have not yet tried DVD writing on the latter).

I get the impression that each of kde and gnome is in itself a much bigger achievement than the kernel, and certainly they are important because new users or prospective users see the GUI first. They don't care about the window manager, or the X implementation, or even the kernel. But Linux distros are clearly doing something right.

BTW my DVD writer is multi-mode (+/-R and RW, and RAM) and the type of blank disc was correctly identified without any messing about by me, much to my surprise, as I have seen the "other" OS have problems.

Since the post was rather questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

let's ask another question that might be more interesting to the majority who seem to already be using K3B.
I heard that one of the big changes in the 2.6 kernel was that the SCSI emmulation was dropped for optical burning and that this should improve performance.
Well sure enough, my CD writing speeds went nuts. I had never burnt a CD at 20X using that PC which, granted was only a K62 500, but Nero had never gotten to speeds that high without using up the buffer in a few seconds. But with the 2.6 kernel I was getting 20X sustained without even touching the buffer. I was truly impressed.
BUT!
Unfortunately, the same thing didn't hold true for DVD. My DVD burner, which is the same machine, an 8X+/-RW CyQue AKA MET, that was giving me the insane CD writing speeds was still quite slow with DVDs.
This was disappointing because using the bundled Nero that had come with the burner I could get 4X easily even writing over the network and 8X was technically doable although it spent more time refilling the cache than writing. After seeing the CD write speed so high, I really hoped that the 2.6 kernel would give me equally fast DVD write speeds. Instead, my DVD write speeds are less than one speed which is quite slow.
However, I'm not saying Nero on Windows is better even though it is faster. I still use 2.6 kernel and K3B to write DVDs because Linux doesn't choke on filenames like Windows does and cheap media that fails in Nero still at least writes in K3B.
On this last note, I want to clarify that I've used many different media and all of them seem to give the same result. So, this isn't a cheap media related issue.
There's a better ask slashdot topic.

Media Recording in Linux

[Pan T. Hose]

For any kind of Linux-related media recording whatsoever, you should definitely check out dyne:bolic, i.e. a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD:

"dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives, being a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, all using only free software.

"dyne:bolic is a GNU/Linux distribution simply running from a CD, without the need to install anything, able to recognize most of your devices and periferals: sound, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb devices and more.

"It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning it into a full media station: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console--and if you have more than one, you can easily do clusters."

It is unquestionably invaluable to explore if you are not sure which software do you need to install and use on your own GNU/Linux system (e.g. Debian or Gentoo). I hope this helps.

Not so fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernel 2.6.8 has effectively killed non root users from burning CDs and DVDs.

Re:Not so fast!

[PCM2]

Kernel 2.6.8 has effectively killed non root users from burning CDs and DVDs.

I had no idea what this guy was talking about either, until I read this.

from linux weekly news: Alternatives to cdrecord

[j1m 5n0w]

Alternatives to cdrecord

After last week's discussion of cdrecord, and concerns that recent releases of cdrecord may not be free software, we decided to take a look and see what alternatives exist for Linux users. The answer, unfortunately, is "not many." While there are quite a few front-ends for recording CDs under Linux, there are very few actual CD and DVD-burning applications available to Linux users. Applications like K3b, MP3Roaster, BashBurn and others all use cdrecord to burn CDs.

Re:Global images

[rusty0101]

Standard ISO images don't lock the user into the proprietary tools that the proprietary software company wants the end user to buy as add-ons or upgrades to the free copy of whatever they got with the DVD(+|_|+_)(R|RW) burner the user bought.

That isn't to say that the proprietary varient isn't a simple variation of the ISO image, (perhaps both an md5 and/or sha1 signature attached to the end of the image to assure integrity, or additional information the tool does not use in the actual burning, but may update each time the image is used, or even checked to see if the user is 'authorized' to burn this iso, say a hash of the authorization key for the product.

From what I have seen, all of the burners out there can use the ISO format to burn CDs and DVDs, but everyone seems to like vendor lock in for some reason, and may not provide the ability to create an ISO in the 'free' version included with drives.

Then again, what do I know.

-Rusty

Re:A bit difficult, but:

[hummassa]

This most absolutely never happened to me. There is no win format my machine refused to read as of the current date. The contrary happened a lot: somebody brings a disc no-one can read, I dd_rescue it, fiddle a little with the image, and voila... all works again.

dvdrtools/dvdrecord

[kraada]

Well, I don't know if this is the fault of dvdrtools/dvdrecord or just the fact that I bought generic, cheap disks . . . but 1/3 disks I burn are unreadable immediately thereafter (ie- after the burn is finished, mount the disk and md5sum the files). And some 6 months later I've found that almost every disk I ever burned won't mount right . . .
I can use readcd to get everything back with errors (~4000-5000 errors per disk), but it's really quite annoying.

So either it's my crappy disks (bought for about 44 cents a pop online in bulk) or it's dvdrecord. I've no idea which, though I'm leaning towards blaming the dvds (in which case, just be aware that cheap dvds aren't worth it! :)

Just my .44 worth of useless dvdness . . .

If you're using scsi emulation

[rsilvergun]

You should already have DMA, since it's on by default in scsi emulation (I used to turn scsi emulation on for just that purpose). Still, you're better off w/o scsi emulation, it can do weird things with the device nodes. Check your lilo.conf or grub.conf for the line 'hdc=ide-scsi' and remove it.

If you want better speed, upgrade to the latest DVD+/-rw-tools. There's a ton of recently fixed speed bugs with newer drives. Install from source is easy. just make && make install as root and it'll copy itself in /usr/local where k3b will find it (you'll have to go in and tell k3b to use the new binaries). I couldn't set my speeds correctly until I upgraded, and was left choosing between 8x (not happening on my 4x media) or 1x. Once I upgrade everthing just worked.

OSS DVD Extensions

[stock]

checkout http://freshmeat.net/projects/ossdvd/

install the RPMS for your distro, and after that its a breeze to burn/read your DVD stuff from the commandline:

http://crashrecovery.org/oss-dvd/HOWTO-ossdvd.html

Robert

Re:Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I knew the answer to this as well.

All I can say is the entire reason I went through the hassle of SCSI on my old system was just to avoid the hassle of ide-scsi with cdrecord. The entire ide-scsi flap seems to be centered around cdrecord and Joerg Schilling's stubborn refusal to accept reality and deviate from his beloved SCSI. Never mind the reality that almost no one carries optical SCSI devices anymore! (Save hard drives you can't find SCSI *anything* anymore!)

Schilling also has his own "make" program, IIRC, because he refuses to write a makefile that works with GNU's make. This was discussed on the amd64 gentoo forum recently.

Then there's cdrecord-prodvd and its annoying nagware license. Again, Schilling at work.

Then recently there was some flap on LKML, though I have not read it because, frankly, I don't know the best place to even look at LKML.

Heck, you can almost get a sense of his attitude from the wording of his website:
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glon e/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html

I saw this problem brewing in 2000 when I got my SCSI CD burner--about the last one available. The problem is as long as Schilling is the only person with disc burning software we are all subject to his whims.

So bring on the free and open alternatives. growisofs, for example, is fantastic, although also dependent on mkisofs (which I think is also Schilling software, but at least it doesn't seem to suck yet). Take Schilling out of the loop and then we aren't 100% dependent on him.

Simple Answer - Lxdvdrip

[newdles]

http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=l xdvdrip This above link is where you can find the software. This link below is how you can use it to perfection. Lxdvdrip is quite literally configurable to a 1 click dvd backup software. You can set it up to where all you do is click an icon and you're done as it does everything else for you (if configured right and with a dvd r/w and a seperate dvd rom to read from unless you want to switch dvd's in the middle of the process). http://pcpitstop.ibforums.com/index.php?showtopic= 59445&hl=lxdvdrip Read this thread here and you'll find out how to configure it to work for you as well as delete all the temp files when done.

Re:Is this a joke?

[Just Some Guy]

First, note that "k3b" is one of the least-informative program names imaginable. It provides ZERO descriptive data (aside from possibly the fact that it uses KDE).

Excellent point! I'd stick with something more logical like "Roxio" if I were you.

Re:Schilly is the Dawes of CD recording

[swv3752]

You forgot Mandrake, who pays the developer who actually maintains the cdrecord fork.