BigSmoke » DVD

Burning media with wodim

halfgaar — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:30:07 +0000

Every time I want to burn media, I have to look up again what the syntax is. So, for future reference, this post.

CD ISO image:

wodim dev=/dev/sr1 -eject  ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso

For DVD’s it’s different. If you mimick the above command, you will have a DVD with the ISO file on it. I don’t know exactly, but you have to specify /dev/dvd=image.iso or something. When the next time I burn a DVD ISO arrives, I’ll update this post.

Create DVDs from any random movie format on Windows

Rowan Rodrik — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:42:49 +0000

Ewald wanted to be able to create DVDs from the Quicktime movies exported by his digital camera. As a result of being away from my familiar Linux tools, I had to find something that´d work on Windows XP.

First, I tried MediaCoder, a Windows front-end (done in XUL) for mencoder, ffmpeg and more of these familiar tools. It was flexible enough, but quite awkward from an end-user perspective and also frustrating if you’re used to calling the supporting commands directly from the CLI.

Luckily, I stumbled upon ConvertXtoDVD, a commercial Windows-only program which proved to be very user-friendly and intuitive without requiring the user to understand the ins and outs of each an every supported media format.

At 40 euro it’s a bit expensive if, like me, you’re used to staying at the free software side of things, but I’d daresay it’s actually worth the money if you’re not an obsessive geek with obscene amounts of free time on his hands.

Fixing “expected NAV packet but none found” error on some downloaded DVD’s

halfgaar — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:21:20 +0000

With certain DVD’s, Xine fails when seeking in the movie saying “Expected NAV packet but none found”. It seems that I have finally found out how to fix this and it is not even difficult. If the theory is correct, it only happens with DVD’s obtained as an ISO image.

What you need to do, is mount the image over the loopback, copy the data files to another location and playing those copied files should work. You can then burn them to a video DVD if you want to, of course.

I have no idea why this works or what causes the error, but I’m glad I finally figured it out.

Also, some of these DVD’s don’t even play on normal players (so it’s not just Xine). This should fix that as well, but I have yet to test that.