[NBLUG/talk] DV to VCD's Burn'in it up - The Linux Way.

[Mark Street]

I am successfully rendering digital video from my miniDV recorder to VCD's on 
my small Linux network at home.  Burn a regular CDR (~45min of video = 700M) 
with the image and plop it into the DVD player atop the set and play.  What a 
hoot.  Here is a basic rundown, the results have been good but I still have a 
couple of coasters.

1.  Machine 1 (RedHat 9) interfaces with the DV recorder - Firewire/ieee1394 
and extracts the movie frames I select using Kino, dvgrab or that thick hard 
type of mud company's app. and saves them to AVI data files.  Kino will 
actually do all the conversion to mpeg for you, I used both command line 
tools and kino on the AVI files, much more impressed with the command line 
tools..

2.  Machine 2 (Red Hat 9) (fastest one I own) accesses machine 1 and machine 3 
through nfs.

3.  Machine 2 reads and processes the AVI audio and video streams from machine 
1 with AVI to MP3 tools and outputs finished data to machine 3 (Red Hat 8) . 
Then machine 2 merges the two streams into 1 mpeg file. (I love command line 
tools.)

4.  Create a .bin image of the mpeg and .cue file with vcdimager and use arson 
or k3b on Machine 3 to burn CDR (VCD).

Lessons learned.  
- More CPU's working on a job is better when rendering gigabytes of data.
(I better hurry on the Mosix cluster.)  I need more horsepower!....

- Samba does not do well on huge multi gigabyte files accessed from a certain 
OS from Redmond beginning with X and ending with Pro when mounted with 
mount.smb. ; ), although a certain app from a company named after a certain 
type of mud does real nice interfacing with the DV recorder.... Oh well....

- Moving huge gigbyte size files over a home network is a burn on your time 
budget.... don't do it.  When is the home gigabyte network coming?

You need to have a way to get the data from the recorder devices.  I used a 
couple of Windoze apps and a couple of Linux apps, kino and dvgrab.

kino and dvgrab
http://kino.schirmacher.de/

A Good little VCD Howto
http://www.satlug.org/~bigjnsa/vcd-linux.htm

I also found this site helpful.
http://www.dvdrhelp.com/

http://freshrpms.net has most of the packages you will need for the latest 
redhat distros.  Or you can compile from source.

To convert avi files to mpeg we need these tools

http://avifile.sourceforge.net/
http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/
See the download section for packages and CVS snapshots.... bleed baby bleed.
We need avifile,mjpeg and divx4linux to convert .avi files to .mpeg for VCD


[root at duel]# lav2wav /mnt/data/dance.avi | mp2enc -V -o /video/dance-audio.mpg

[root at duel]# lav2yuv /mnt/data/dance.avi | yuvscaler -O VCD | mpeg2enc -s -r 
16 -o /video/dance.mpg

[root at duel]# mplex -f 1 /video/dance.mpg /video/dance-audio.mpg -o
/video/dance.mpg

Now create an image of the mpg file.
http://www.vcdimager.org/

[root at duel]# vcdimager -c my.cue -b my.bin my.mpg

creates a bin file and a cue file to feed to arson to burn a VCD.
my.cue
my.bin

Burn onto a ROM with arson or k3b or cdrecord using the write an image or 
write .bin/.cue image.

Pop it into the DVD player and hit play.

Have fun.
-- 
Mark Street, D.C.
Red Hat Certified Engineer
Cert# 807302251406074
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