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DVD creation


neddie
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I've got a couple of questions here, maybe they belong in a "multimedia / video" section but I guess "software" will have to do...

 

Firstly, what's an easy way to copy a DVD? There's no DRM, it's just a home-made DVD from a friend's camcorder, and it plays in a regular DVD player (ie, it's not a data DVD with an mpg on it). So what's the best way to copy this to another DVD, which will also play in a regular DVD player? I assume it's not just as simple as copying each file over, right? I see K3b has an option for a "New Video DVD project", and I assume that's what I want, right? So can I just copy the files from the DVD to the hard drive, then use K3b to drag the files back into the same structure on a new video DVD project? (Note: this machine only has one optical drive) Anything else I should watch out for?

 

Secondly, and this is probably more complicated, there's another friend who's taken a video with their HD camera. At the moment the film is just sitting in a 30 GB, apparently uncompressed, file, which sounds something like "DVRS" or something like that (they're not sure). So I'm guessing the first step is to transfer this 30 GB file to my Mandriva box, and use some tool to convert it and compress it down to fit on a DVD. Which tool(s) do I need, and how do I do it in an efficient way (ie not converting backwards and forwards between lossy formats)? How can I make sure that the resulting DVD will play in as many regular DVD players as possible?

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The first as Ken says, just copy the DVD with K3B, since it won't need to be ripped and re-encoded.

 

The second, will probably need something like DeVeDe installing so that you can make a DVD from the video file that you have. I've used DeVeDe with my JVC camcorder that generates MPEG2 files.

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Great, thanks for the tips! :thumbs:

I had seen the "copy DVD" function in K3b but it looked like you needed two drives - it asked to select source drive and destination drive so I didn't think it was able to go via the hard drive (and "rip" sounded like a transcoding rather than a straight copy).

 

Also Devede sounds cool, it was a bit of trouble to install (as both devede and dvdauthor have corrupted rpms on my mirrors, had to import them from another mirror in France). But it looks like it should be able to do what I need. It talks about "titles" though, do I need to chop the film up into separate files if I want to arrange them as "titles" on the DVD? And apart from the resolution there doesn't seem any way to control how much compression is used, ie how to squash the movie onto the DVD, right? Does it matter whether I choose PAL or NTSC?

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Nope, I have one title, and then many mpegs which I dropped into the right hand side. Then, I just let it make indexes so that I can have each mpeg as a chapter. Alternatively, if you want you can make titles to go to each mpeg, but then there'd be a lot of titles. Mine was just of my son, so one title for him and then each video was a chapter.

 

With K3B if you only have one drive, then copy the dvd to an ISO. Of course, if a dual layer DVD, then it would be 8 or 9GB, and so would require a drive to write this. Otherwise, you'd have to use something like acidrip or dvdrip to rip it to mpeg first, and then DeVeDe to get it to fit on an 4.7GB DVD.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks for that, I gave it a go and sure enough K3b worked magically, creating an image on the hard drive, prompting to change the disc, writing it out and then automatically deleting the image. Neat! :thumbs:

 

Next step may be a bit more complicated - what do I need to edit the video, let's say selecting a bit in the middle and making a separate file for that, selecting another bit to a separate file, and then combining files to make a new DVD? Can I do that straight from the DVD or do I need to expand it to an uncompressed format first and then recompress it again (ideally without losing quality) ?

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kdenlive might be what you are looking for to edit the video. You will need to decompress it to use this application so that you can edit it frame by frame if you want. You can add fade in, fade out, cut etc. Chop it up and move it about as you wish. When you are done recreate a dvd again. I had many happy hours using it to make dvd's out of tv capture films. Cutting out the commercials and stuff.

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