Dahnielson

Oh, boy! It looks like this post is quite a popular one. Just keep in mind that I penned it in December 2003. But if you have any suggestions, modifications or updates, please, do leave a comment.

Traditionally, DVD authoring has been an expensive affair. Full-featured professional applications or hardware costs big sums of money, while low-budget products often come with severe limitations in features.

However, it’s now possible to author professional DVDs on Linux thanks to a group of open-source packages. Even if they do not yet support all features of the DVD specification new features are being added with each release.

This text was compiled from several sources mainly consisting of the manuals for each of the tools described herein. For more detailed information about their use and different option please consult those manuals. This is just a overview to paint the big picture how everything fit together and what steps is necessary to take when authoring a DVD on Linux.

Table of Contents

1. Planning
2. Content Creation
3. Video Encoding
4. Audio Encoding
   1. PCM
   2. MPEG
   3. AC-3
5. Multiplexing Audio and Video
6. Creating Menus
7. Subtitling
8. Assembling
9. Testing
   1. Burning
10. Tools

Planning

First, you have to plan exactly what content should be on the DVD in terms of audio, video and menus from the users point of view.

Next, plan how all this content will be layed out and ordered. The DVDs structure in terms of titlesets, menu, titles and chapters.

Now you can start designing the menus, and collect the audio and video.

Then begin to encode all source material properly into streams.

Finally, put it all together by creating the dvdauthor XML file according to your previous plans.

Content Creation

This text deals only with the encoding of content and assembling of DVD structure.