How to: Make your own DVD using Linux

Sure, you’ve been able to do this by fiddling around with arcane stuff for ages. But now it’s EASY.

Tovid is the tool to use — download it here, and install it. There is a UI, which I haven’t played with; the command line options are so straightforward, though, that it is worth getting familiar with them.

1. Prepare the content.

o    Gather your clips. Let’s assume you have 3 short videos you’re going to put on the dvd, and that you want a menu.

o    Convert them to dvd format, if necessary; e.g. tovid -ntsc -dvd -in myclip1.mpg -out myclip1-dvd. (If you’re in Europe, use -pal insteal of -ntsc.) See the wiki for more examples. On my AMD64/3400, conversion takes about 5 minutes for a 4 minute video.

2. Build the menu.

o    First, find an image or a video you’d like to be the menu backdrop. For the purposes of this howto, let’s assume you go with an image named sally.jpg.

o    Next, invoke the makemenu command, e.g.: makemenu -ntsc -dvd -align left -textcolor “#FFF” -highlightcolor “#FF0? -selectcolor “#F00? -font “Helvetica” “Sally Jumping” “Sally Singing” “Sally Running” -background sally.jpg -out “Main_menu”. (This is going to make 3 menu options on the left hand side of the screen. Order is important here; match up the order of the options above with the order of the clips you supply in the next step.)

3. Now, build the xml metadata that’s needed to author the dvd, e.g.: makexml -menu Main_menu.mpg myclip1-dvd.mpg myclip2-dvd.mpg myclip3-dvd.mpg sally
4. Finally, run the command to build the dvd filesystem, e.g.: makedvd sally.xml (This will create the directory structures that you can burn directly as a video dvd project using, e.g. k3b.)

Thanks to hhttp://flavor8.com/index.php/2006/05/29/how-to-make-a-dvd-in-linux/ for this how-to.