ldo / dvdauthor

dvdauthor is a program that will generate a DVD movie from a valid
mpeg2 stream that should play when you put it in a DVD player.

To start you need mpeg files that contain the necessary DVD VOB
packets.  These can be generated by passing '-f 8' to mplex.  See the
included utility makevob.

There are 3 steps to building the DVD directory structure on your HDD.

1. Delete a previously authored dvd

  dvddirdel [-o dir]

    WARNING!  This will delete without discrimination the contents of
    the directory that you specify!

2. Create your titlesets

  dvdauthor [-o dir] [audio/video/subpicture options] [chapters]

    To create 1 chapter per mpeg, simply do

  dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] chap1.mpg chap2.mpg chap3.mpg...

    To manually specify chapters, use the '--chapters' option

  dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] -c chap1a.mpg chap1b.mpg -c chap2a.mpg chap2b.mpg ....

    To add chapters every fifteen minutes, do

  dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] -c 0,15:00,30:00,45:00,1:00:00,1:15:00... longvideo.mpg

    Call dvdauthor for each titleset you want to create.  Note that
    due to the DVD standard, all audio, video, and subpicture options
    must be set once for the entire titleset; i.e. you cannot mix pal
    and ntsc video in the same titleset.  For that you must generate
    separate titlesets.

    Run dvdauthor -h to see the audio, video, and subpicture options.
    Note that dvdauthor can autodetect most parameters except the
    language.

3. Create the table of contents

  dvdauthor -T [-o dir]

Viola!  You now have a DVD directory structure that will probably
work!  You can now write this out to your DVD, mini-DVD (CD), or just
play it from your HDD.  To generate the UDF image to burn to DVD, use
mkisofs from cdrtools-1.11a27 or later.  Simply pass it the -dvd-video
option.

BTW, if you have an old HDD that you use for generating dvd images,
you can create /usr/local/etc/dvdauthor.conf or ~/.dvdauthorrc and add
the line:

  WORKDIR=foo

Then you won't need to specify -o to dvddirgen or dvdauthor.
Alternatively, you could just set

  WORKDIR=mydvd

to always have it create a DVD in the current working directory.


links:

cdrtools: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html
  includes a version of mkisofs that can create udf images, but it's in the alpha directory
mjpegtools: http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net
  includes mplex for building an mpeg2 system stream with hooks
  for DVD navigation packets
mpucoder's site on dvd specs: http://mpucoder.dynodns.net/dvd/index.html
  details on the DVD format
libdvdread: http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/downloads.shtml
  includes ifo_dump for disecting DVD's.  the library
  also serves as the basis for vob_dump.
libxml2: http://www.xmlsoft.org/
ImageMagick: http://www.imagemagick.org/