[Mostly solved] DVD-playable AVIs without converting

[LindseyD.]

EDIT: If anyone else is following this thread, see below for explanation of the [Mostly]

According to this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1776657 I should be able to burn AVI files to a Data DVD using K3B, and watch them on my regular DVD player. I know the DVD player can do it, because a friend of mine sent me a DVD with a bunch of .avi files on it and it works. I cannot for the life of me figure out how he did that. When I asked, he said he just used Roxio (he's on Windows) and it worked automagically.

He lives in another town so I can't just go to his place to watch him do it.

I've wasted a couple of days on the web & several DVDs now, so I'm admitting defeat and asking for help.

What am I missing?

PS: I've tried Devede, Bombono, etc. They all convert the files, unless there's something I'm failing to understand.

[MarkLaw19]

Well, i did this all the time as my mom asked me to find nice movies and put it in DVD to play in Home DVD Players.

All i do was to convert all videos to avi with video format xvid and audio format mp3. To convert i use avidemux. Its great to convert videos and configure them before exporting it. Sometimes avidemux are too lousy in working with some other video types so i use openshot or pitivi. Then i open a new data dvd project with k3b and put all my converted videos into it and then burn it with file systems UDF.

Sometimes you don't even have to convert your videos if it is already in the format avi with xvid/divx and mp3. You can check this in VLC through file properties.

[rhodry]

There are approximately 200 different video codecs that are usually used with .AVI files. AVI itself isn't a video format, but a file structure and therefore it basically doesn't have anything to do with the video quality, method of encoding or anything like that. Read more about this from here:

http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/

You will find that what Roxio did was convert the files to a DVD compatible codec within the AVI framework.

You need to do exactly as MarkLaw did;

All i do was to convert all videos to avi with video format xvid and audio format mp3. To convert i use avidemux

Avidemux is THE best tool in Linux (other than using mencoder or ffmpeg on the command line) for creating DVD compliant files. You can then use DeVeDe etc if you want a menu structure and K3b etc to do the actual burning. You must have relevant video & audio codecs installed for the conversions to work.

I have done hundreds of these convert/create/burn jobs using these tools. It works.

rhodry.

[LindseyD.]

rhodry, thanks for all of this. That site is amazing! Much better than Wikipedia. It should be a sticky someplace.

I'm downloading Avidemux now (it'll take some time, I'm on dialup) and am eager to get to it.

Thanks again.

[LindseyD.]

After some experimenting, I've managed to get some DVD-playable AVIs. Others have been a bust. It seems to depend on what the original codecs were, and your own DVD player, among perhaps other things. Avidemux is definitely the way to go, but on many of the files I got the message: H.264 detected. If the file is using B-frames as reference it can lead to a crash or stuttering.

I assumed this meant Avidemux would crash or stutter. It didn't, and the files played just fine on my computer. But once burned to the DVD, they crashed/stuttered. So now it's a question of more experimenting & fine-tuning & being prepared to waste a few DVDs.

[MarkLaw19]

Well, you must be working with video files MKV format, or any H264 format. I found this format to have problems with AVIdemux, for this sort of video formats, i use openshot to convert it to avi with xvid and mp3. Thats what i say in my previous post that avidemux are sometimes lousy in dealing with some types of video format.

[LindseyD.]

Well, you must be working with video files MKV format, or any H264 format. I found this format to have problems with AVIdemux, for this sort of video formats, i use openshot to convert it to avi with xvid and mp3...

Hi MarkLaw19:

I checked out Openshot on its website. It looks a lot like Kdenlive, which I already have. What I don't have is the muscle to convert videos over about 15 minutes, and even that essentially takes overnight. However, many of these videos are under 15 minutes, so I'll give Kdenlive a try. But it'll take a while. Stay tuned. And thanks for the tip.

[MarkLaw19]

If that still doesn't work, you can try Pitivi video editor, its not that great but still it did ok with mkv files or any H264 format files. I'm not sure if it is available in KDE Platforms but i did many mkv file conversion on this editor, furthermore its faster than openshot possibly faster than kdenlive too depending on the video resolution.

Just to let you know, in openshot there is no xvid video codec, only mpeg2 or mpeg4, so you can try msmpeg4 or other msmpeg4 codecs to see which works for your DVD Player, but then i'm not sure about kdenlive so i guess you should do some experimenting to see which works for you.

[LindseyD.]

Just to let you know, in openshot there is no xvid video codec, only mpeg2 or mpeg4, so you can try msmpeg4 or other msmpeg4 codecs to see which works for your DVD Player, but then i'm not sure about kdenlive so i guess you should do some experimenting to see which works for you.

Yep, experimenting. It all takes such a long time, though! Thanks for giving me other options. I don't understand this whole codec thing well enough to know what has a possibllty of working, and what will never work at all.

I've also learned that DVD players differ, so what works on mine won't necessarily work on someone else's machine. Since I embarked on this project in order to produce a DVD for a friend, the whole thing may be an exercise in futility. Oh well, at least I'll have my videos backed up.

[MarkLaw19]

I've also learned that DVD players differ, so what works on mine won't necessarily work on someone else's machine. Since I embarked on this project in order to produce a DVD for a friend, the whole thing may be an exercise in futility. Oh well, at least I'll have my videos backed up.

Well that's true that DVD Players differ. But since you want to produce DVD for a friend, i guess you should make a DVD playable by any DVD Players, the original MPEG DVD. Though it requires plenty of DVD s than normal AVI DVD s but it provides a better compatibility to all DVD Players and that it gives better quality than normal DVD s.

Such softwares for creating DVD are DeVeDe and DVD Styler. Both are great for DVD production but then i'm not sure that it is available in KDE repositories.

[LindseyD.]

i guess you should make a DVD playable by any DVD Players, the original MPEG DVD. Though it requires plenty of DVD s than normal AVI DVD s but it provides a better compatibility to all DVD Players and that it gives better quality than normal DVD s.

Okay, thanks for that tip.

Such softwares for creating DVD are DeVeDe and DVD Styler. Both are great for DVD production but then i'm not sure that it is available in KDE repositories.

MarkLaw19, it gives me great pleasure to be able to inform you for a change

Unlike some other operating systems, Linux is layered. That is, you have the basic OS which can be run without any graphics at all. It's what we do in the terminal emulators. Then you have the desktop environments (KDE, Gnome) or window managers (Openbox, Flux box, etc) which are just graphical layers over that basic command-line stuff. That's why, as long as you have the right libraries, you can run any Gnome program on KDE or Openbox or whatever, and vice versa*. For example, some transcoding applications use ffmpeg, and some use mencoder. Both ffmpeg and mencoder can be run in a terminal. If you like to type, you can do that. But it's much easier with a graphical interface.

So I use the same repositories as you. If you wanted to, you could install KDE on your computer, and then when you log in you'd get a choice of using KDE or Gnome. The applications themselves would not change, but the look of them might, just a little, to integrate better with your KDE theme. If you ever get bored looking at the same desktop, try it. It won't hurt anything--just take up a lot of hard drive space.

*There are minor exceptions. Applications that run in the panels, for example, may not be happy if they're not in their native panel. I once tried running kppp in Gnome, and while I was able to dial, the modem icon didn't know where it should park itself.

[MarkLaw19]

Thank you for the posts. No one has ever told me about that.