Hi gregoryshock,
gregoryshock wrote:It all started out 2 Sundays ago. My dad wanted me to make him a Video DVD of some AVI files from a nature cam. I first started with a program called DeVeDe. In sort it failed me. Then I moved to other DVD authoring programs and got totally lost. Not one would work for me. They either failed or they wouldn't do all the files I needed to be changed into a Video DVD. Some people on this forum has tried to help me, but my problems don't end there.
You are already being helped in your other post regarding DVD Authoring software. The "Avi" video format is an older video format, and requires that you install the video codecs for that which was explained in your other post. Depending upon what types of video files, of which there are a fair amount of video types and variations of those, that you want to process could also require adding more video and audio codec support packages. In Linux you have to install those one time. It is entirely possible in MS Windows or Mac as well depending upon the application, that you would have to install various video and audio codec packages. MS Windows and Mac are paid for operating systems as are most of the software applications whereas Linux and most of its software are free, so there are licensing issues, but most of the video and audio support packages are available, you just have to install them. Because I enjoy video and audio editing, I try to install all of these that I can find when I first install Linux Mint so that they are available for various applications that might want to use them. Although installing the 3rd party software (the "mint-meta-codecs") as part of your Linux Mint installation covers a lot of these video and audio packages, I have found that installing "ubuntu-restricted-extras" and some other packages help with certain multimedia applications.
gregoryshock wrote:My favorite DVD burner program XFburn began giving me problems as well. The gstreamer complains when I try to add mp3 files to create a CD. It seems that some program or update my system got changed something. I spent the whole second half of a day just installing and re installing linux mint 18.3 xfce to try and figure out just which package is being changed, and by what program. I've never ran into an issue so extreme before. Especially on Linux Mint! I try to watch what packages are being installed in case something is getting replaced that shouldn't be. But I didn't see it. It's like looking for needle in a haystack. I can work around the xfburn problem by simply converting mp3s into wav files. But this has got me to thinking maybe linux isn't very good. I mean it's been good to me for around 3 years. But at any time something can come down and just change something without me knowing about it! What makes matters worse is sometimes I got to use PPAs which introduces more issues.
You just stated, "I mean it's (Linux Mint) been good to me for around 3 years." All operating systems can have updates or upgrades, as well as various software applications updates and upgrades, that can cause issues. These are uncommon in Linux Mint. You also have this wonderful free support forum to ask questions from very knowledgeable people even though you may have to wait a little time for good replies. Have you ever tried to get free support on MS Windows or Mac, unless you pay for support it is a challenge to say the least? Some PPA 's are perfectly okay to use and do provide the only method of getting newer updated software for some applications.
gregoryshock wrote:But xfburn had a trick up it's sleeve. It worked on the Mp3s that I was tasting it on, but as soon as I tried one from a different directory I got the error message. "Gstreamer did not like this file (detection timed out)"
Not all files are created equal. With all the various applications for video and audio in all the operating systems and various browser download extensions and add-ons, It is entirely possible that various video and audio files have different underlying structures, even some corruption, some are not even the file type they claim to be, in other words they are not really an mp3 audio file or avi video file, but actually something else, etc... Some applications and or devices may not like certain super high quality formats either, like mp3 at 320kbps, or HD video. FYI: There are applications in the "Synaptic Package Manager (SPM)" to check and or repair various multimedia files like mp3 files. Sometimes the filenames contain special characters (quotes, brackets, parenthesis, number signs (hash tag), etc... ) that need to be removed before using them in some applications. Also, sometimes depending upon your system's setup, you may have to move the files from an external drive or a separate (MS Windows) partition to your current Linux Mint partition because of Linux "permissions" issues; you can always right-click files to check properties, permission tab, to make sure the files allow your current user access to them.
Just last night while spending many hours testing the excellent Bombono DVD Authoring (DVD creator) application for you and others, I added some "webm" video files and one of which was apparently corrupted and or used a non-standard audio codec when it was recorded (created), so Bombono errored out (stopped processing) after 45 minutes which I tried a few times with a message unsupported audio codec although it let me add it to the project and I tested them first and they all played on my system using other multimedia software? I ran "curlew" a multimedia converter to convert them from webm to mp4 to see if that would help, and sure enough one of the webm videos used an unusual "aac" audio codec variation which the program could not handle, so I went into the "Synaptic Package Manager (SPM)", searched for "aac" installed some of those packages (faac and aac-enc) and told Curlew to use just aac and it converted them to mp4 and the Bombono application finished creating the DVD project. FYI: Bombono was able to process webm files, except for that one video file.
As for "xfburn" DVD/CD application, I rarely ever use it unless I am helping others in this forum because "K3b" is so much better with many more features. You probably needed to install some "dependency" software to get the xfburn version from the Software Manager or Synaptic Package Manager (SPM) to work for you, sometimes using the "Synaptic Package Manager (SPM)" you can right-click a software package and install the recommended and suggested packages to do that, other times may require more help. But, once you have that application working the way you want, it should work well from then on.
After doing some research on "xfburn" there is a slightly newer version available. I was able to compile from their source code archive v0.5.5 and install it, but compiling software is not for novices (inexperienced newbies). It sounds like you found an already compiled newer version of "xfburn" that you downloaded because you said you can run it from your downloads folder; this may be a self-contained archive file that can run fine from their folder which has all the supporting dependency packages where you can create a new desktop shortcut to that xfburn executable program to use that one over the installed version from the Software Manager or Synaptic Package Manager (SPM).
Xfburn-0.5.5
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/vi ... fburn.html
FYI: How To Install Nero Linux (nero Burning Rom) In Ubuntu 16.04
- Not sure if this is free software or not?
http://www.elinuxbook.com/install-nero- ... ntu-16-04/
Hope this helps ...