Overview

My wife and I recently went on a trip to Key Largo, FL for our 5 year wedding anniversary. We took a bio-tour of the area and I took some video on my phone of manatees. When I downloaded it from Google Photos it downloaded as an mp4 file. We wanted to show some of the videos to a friend and they wanted it in DVD format. I figured I would hit Google and just find out what program I need to convert and burn for me. What I found wasn’t so easy…

The best I can tell, in April 2019, there is still not an end-to-end documented way of going from a mp4 or mkv to a full DVD. This seems extremely strange to me. I typically keep my blog to more esoteric topics, but I am going to document this once and for all.

My System: I am running the Fedora 29; current as of time of this writing. Most of the CLI tools I am going to use should be standard or available in any general purpose Linux distribution. The only non-standard tool required is ffmpeg and dvdauthor. Both packages are in the RPM Fusion repos with instructions.

Process

Convert mp4/mkv to vob file

$ ffmpeg -i myfile.mp4 -target ntsc-dvd mydvd.vob

In the directory where you created the mydvd.vob file create an XML file called video.xml with these contents:

<dvdauthor>
<vmgm>
<menus>
<video/>
<audio/>
</menus>
</vmgm>
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc pause="0">
<vob file="mydvd.vob" chapters="0"/>
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>

Next run the following commands to create the ISO for the DVD:

$ mkdir dvd
$ dvdauthor -o dvd -x video.xml
$ mkisofs -dvd-video -o dvdimage.iso dvd/

Next check and note the device we used for burning:

$ wodim --devices
wodim: Overview of accessible drives (1 found) :
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 dev='/dev/sg1' rwrw-- : 'HL-DT-ST' 'DVDRAM GP65NB60'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Burn the ISO to DVD:

$ wodim -eject -tao speed=2 dev=/dev/sg1 -v -data dvdimage.iso

 

I’m going to try and diversify my blog a little bit more and focus on areas not so esoteric. Look for more smaller post coming soon.