91.36 ToVid: Consumer DVD Creation

20221017

The older Tovid package, which was available with Ubuntu, allows you to convert an avi file to DVD format that can be burnt to a 4.7GB DVD and played in a standard consumer DVD player. The GUI version is also available as tovid-gui.

$ tovid -pal -quality 10 -in ab.avi -out AB (can take several hours)
$ tovid -pal -quality 10 -in yz.avi -out YZ
$ makemenu "The AB Video" "The YZ Video" -out main_menu
$ makexml -menu main_menu.mpg AB.mpg YZ.mpg -out my_dvd
$ makedvd -burn my_dvd.xml

Then burn the resulting my_dvd.iso to a DVD and play on a consumer DVD player!

91.36.1 K9Copy

{#sec:k9copy}

A GUI to read a DVD and duplicate as much as possible the content including menus and make it fit on a 4.7 DVD, for backup purposes only.

91.36.2 Audio Backup Command Line Tools

mjpegtools dvdbackup, dvdbackup, dvdbackup cpdvd cpvts

A useful command line script to backup a DVD to SVCD is mencvcd:

$ mencvcd battles dvd://3 -w -a 2 -vfr 3

You can obtain information about the contents of title 1 of a DVD with the tcprobe command:

$ tcprobe -i /dev/dvd -T 1

To extract title 1 of your dvd into the file video.avi:

$ mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc copy -o video.avi

Using acidrip is simpler though (see Section ??), and the GUI is more informative as to the processing to be performed (e.g., to limit the encoding to a particular size with a particular resolution). Indeed, it is often useful to view the tab of acidrip to see the actual mencoder command that is being run.

You can copy the raw video data from a DVD to your hard disk with either dvdbackup, dvdbackup, dvdbackup or cpdvd. With cpdvd simply identify the device and a folder which will be created to store the data:

$ cpdvd -d /dev/dvd xyz

You can identify the DVD mount point and a specific title to extract with:

$ cpdvd -m /media/dvd -t 1 xyz

To include subtitles use -s 0 (to get channel 0 subtitles).

Alternatively you can use dvdbackup, dvdbackup, dvdbackup to extract the data. It will create its own directory for the DVD based on the DVDs title:

$ dvdbackup -F -i/dev/dvd -o. 

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