ArsGeek

Recently we looked at how to join multiple avi or mpg files together. Now let’s look at how to get these files onto a DVD so you can bring it to your friend’s house and impress them with just how geeky you are, you Ubuntu fiend you.

To do this, you’ll need a neat little tool called tovid (pronounced Too Vid).

First, go here and make sure that you have all of the dependencies required. This is easier than it sounds. Simply open Synaptic and do a search for each dependency. You’ll want to get all of the core and all of the recommended.

Now that you have all that, go here and download the Tovid .deb file made especially for Ubuntu.

You can download this to your desktop, and simply double click on it to start the install process. Read on once this is installed, because we’re going to journey into command line interface (CLI) land.

The Ubuntu Forums have an excellent guide to using tovid’s GUI here however you’ll find you have a bunch more flexibility using CLI.

Going back to our previous example, say you have all of the Bloodspell files (all 7 of them) and you want to convert the .avi files into something usable for building a DVD and then make the DVD. Some popcorn and a soda would be nice too, but Linux can’t make everything.

First, let’s create a folder on your desktop, called “build-dvd” and another called “burn-dvd”.

Move the Bloodspell .avi files into the build-dvd directory. Rename them to something short, like b1.avi - b7.avi. Then open up a terminal session and type the following:

cd Desktop/build-dvd

Now you’re in the folder with the .avi files. Let’s convert them to a usable .mpg format.

tovid -in b1.avi -out bloodspell_1

This can take a little bit of time, so go get a cup of joe or a nice spot of tea. When this process finishes, repeat it for all the files you want to convert. For sanities sake in this guide, we’ll do just two of the Bloodspell episodes.

If you’ve decided to read ahead a bit, good for you! Let’s make the dvd menu while we’re waiting for those files to be converted.

Move into the burn-dvd folder:

cd ~/Desktop/burn-dvd

Now that you’re here, enter in the following command:

makemenu “Bloodspell Episode 1″ “Bloodspell Episode 2″ -out bsdvd

This command uses the makemenu script to create a menue with the two entries in quotes, and then tells it what file to output too. When finished you should have a bsdvd.mpg file in your burn-dvd directory.

Now we really have to wait until tovid has generated our .mpg files fom the .avi files. Once this is done, read on.

Got the files? Good, move them into the burn-dvd folder:

cp blood*.mpg ../burn-dvd/

Now you should have your two bloodspell .mpgs and the menu in the burn-dvd folder.

Now let’s create the structure of the disk. The script we’ll use to actually burn the dvd automates a whole bunch of things, but it needs a .xml file to tell it what to do. Don’t know XML? Well good thing you’re reading this! We’ll use the makexml script to do it for us. Ready?

makexml -menu bsdvd.mpg bloodspell_1 mpg bloodspell_2.mpg -out BloodSpell

The first mpg file is the menu we created earlier. The next two mpg files are the bulk of the DVD and the last bit, “BloodSpell” will be the name of the .xml file this script will generate.

Got it? Good. Now let’s burn the silly thing.

makedvd -burn BloodSpell.xml

Make sure you have a blank DVD in the drive while you do this.

There are lots of other options available as well, such as including an audio track and animated menus and whatnot. You can use man makemenu for more info (same goes for the other scripts) or go here
for all of the man pages online. This tutorial is just to get you started.

Hope you found it helpful!

geek out.

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