dvd

For long time I've been wondering why I can't seem to burn DVDs or Blu-Rays properly using k3b in Linux (or any other graphical burning software for that matter). The problem is cdrkit (a fork of the original cdrtools).

You can get the latest version of cdrtools, which actually supports burning to Blu-Ray and also should create DVDs properly, by installing cdrecord from this PPA. You might as well also install mkisofs from there too.

Prior to finding this PPA, I had compiled cdrtools from source, which is pretty easy. That also involved installing smake, also from the cdrtools author.

On ubuntu systems, you'll need the following packages: genisoimage and dvd+rw-tools.

If you have a folder named "mydvd" in your home directory containing a VIDEO_TS folder, cd to your home folder mydvd, then run:

cd ~
mkisofs -dvd-video -o mydvd.iso mydvd

This will produce a mydvd.iso file. To verify, run

isoinfo -l -i mydvd.iso

At this point, you don't actually have to create a DVD. As a commenter pointed out If you have mplayer, you can play the .iso like this:

mplayer dvd:// -dvd-device mydvd.iso

Otherwise, you can mount the ISO to a mount point and play the DVD as if it were mounted from disc.

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/iso
sudo mount -o loop mydvd.iso /mnt/iso

I use totem or vlc and I can open this dvd by doing:

totem dvd:///mnt/iso
vlc dvd:///mnt/iso

To burn the ISO to a DVD:

sudo growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd1=mydvd.iso

You might need to change /dev/dvd1 to /dev/cdrom1 or /dev/dvd, depending on your system. Or