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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?"
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
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
K3B, dvdbackup, and dvdshrink (ran under wine, 3.0b5) work awesome.
Hi there
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?
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I use it like this:
It gives a warning about accessing the drive via
I just use growisofs! It comes with the dvd+rw-tools and it works like a charm. It only requires mkisofs.
/dev/dvd -r -J my_directory
/dev/dvd -dvd-video my_dvd
So to burn a data DVD:
growisofs -Z
and to burn a video DVD:
growisofs -Z
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.
- 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!Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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?Thou shalt not ask slashdot a question which can be answered by searching the gentoo forums.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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...
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.
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.
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.
.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). /> /> />
4. Generate the DVD file structure.
/dev/dvd -dvd-video my_dvd
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
<dvdauthor>
<vmgm
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<vob file="/path/to/first.mpeg"
<vob file="/path/to/next.mpeg"
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>
dvdauthor -o my_dvd -x my.xml
5. Burn it with growisofs
growisofs -Z
Voila! Alot of steps and very slow, but not too painful otherwise. And no annoying menus!
Kernel 2.6.8 has effectively killed non root users from burning CDs and DVDs.
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
You never know...
For lighter work, there is Q DVD-Author. It is FOSS and works well for making DVD's with menus, etc.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
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.
/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.
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
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I wish I knew the answer to this as well.
n e/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html
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/glo
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.