Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.