Recording a DVD of Your Own

After playing around with the tools this weekend for a Linux gaming promotion, we wanted to share how easy and available it is creating your own DVD-video. Many consider DVD-video to be the exclusive realm of big-name media publishers, but you have the tools and, with some time, you too can be creating handmade DVDs to share with friends and family over the holiday.

You can record your favorite videos and even captured video onto DVDs, in a way that will make it playable by any DVD player. This makes it a great way to share your content with friends, and these can be creative holiday gifts, too. The DVDs will be without encryption, so you can be assured they will play on every computer or television DVD player.

First, you should know that DVD-video encoders require MPEG format video. The application ffmpeg is widely available on every Linux distribution. Make sure the package is installed and run a command similar to " ffmpeg -i yourmovie.ogg -target ntsc-dvd -aspect 4:3 yourmovie.mpeg ". This will produce a MPEG format file from the yourmovie.ogg file, and ffmpeg will handle other video formats, too. If you are creating a PAL-format DVD outside North America, then you will use "-target pal-dvd", instead. And, so, it will take a while to crunch away at the data...

Next, capturing a film from your video game is easy with the xvidcap application. This is a graphical tool that should be straight forward to use, and, depending on your system, quality may need to be lowered so you are capturing 24 frames per second. The default recording format is MPEG, so it is ready for the DVD. You'll probably want to add a music soundtrack with the avidemux application. Or maybe you want a voice-over recorded with the audacity application. Now you have lots of audio+video content and are ready to make a movie!

Lastly, install the QDVDauthor application. There are other DVD authoring tools, but this one was very complete, easy to use, and included many features. Do a final check the quality of MPEGs before you get ready to commit. QDVDauthor is has a simple GUI interface, and you should be able to figure it out. Some additional features are being able to create a graphical DVD menu or a slideshow with photographic images.

One additional thing to consider, you can skip the burn-to-disk step and leave the DVD-video encoded on your hard drive. After exiting the program, you can add other files to the disk and use your regular burning software to copy the files onto a DVD-recordable disc. As long as the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories are in the DVD root, it will play. For example, you may want to include a Creative Commons License to encourage duplication and distribution of your work.

Hope these instructions will encourage you to create your own content and share movies with your friends. The tools are all freely available and very stable for you to create your very own movies which are open and non-encrypted.