A simple DVD authoring program?

December 10, 2005 6:42 AM

Does anyone know of a program that will take a DVD-compatible MPEG2 file, and generate a very simple DVD VIDEO_TS folder - ie, no menu, just the file in a format that a DVD player can recognize

I use DVD authoring programs, but they generally have much more functionality than I need, so i was wondering if anyone knew of anything simple. A command line program would be quite good. I use Windows XP.

posted by ascullion to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Right - got my head together now! Is there any reason why, if the file is already in a DVD-Compatible format, that you can't just create a new Video DVD in something like Nero, which will create the VIDEO_TS folder structure for you and you can drag'n'drop the file in there and burn it..?
posted by benzo8 at 6:56 AM on December 10, 2005

Just use Toast (mac) or Nero (PC). Those dvd burning programs always know how to make dvd-compatible discs from just mpegs.
posted by mathowie at 7:39 AM on December 10, 2005

DVD Shrink does that quite well.
posted by riffola at 7:42 AM on December 10, 2005

Just use Toast (mac) or Nero (PC). Those dvd burning programs always know how to make dvd-compatible discs from just mpegs.

Are you sure they don't reencode the video? Because I was always under the impression that they did..
posted by ascullion at 7:43 AM on December 10, 2005

ffmpeg ought to be able to do this. I know ffmpegX does, and it's just a wrapper around ffmpeg.
posted by majick at 7:53 AM on December 10, 2005

Here's a relatively simple solution.

1) Download dvdauthor (latest win32 binary here)

2) Open up notepad and paste these few lines into it, changing the name of the mpeg file accordingly and saving as example.xml

3) Run "dvdauthor.exe -x example.xml" and it'll create a DVD filesystem for the mpeg file listed in example.xml.
posted by aiko at 7:58 AM on December 10, 2005

aiko, that is brilliant! i think. trying it out now.
posted by ascullion at 8:24 AM on December 10, 2005

Except that, when I run it, I just get a series of error messages. Will experiment further..
posted by ascullion at 8:37 AM on December 10, 2005

For reference, the error message is

"WARN: Skipping sector, waiting for first VOBU"

Could be related to my MPEG files.
posted by ascullion at 8:39 AM on December 10, 2005

Toast 7 does that trick.
posted by BorgLove at 9:15 AM on December 10, 2005