[clug] DVD burning under Linux

[Damien Elmes]

Darren Freeman <daz111 at rsphysse.anu.edu.au> writes:

> I have tried gcombust, xcdroast and k3b. None of them *seem* to know
> about DVDs although a couple of them knew it was a DVD burner.
> (DVD-R)

gcombust and xcdroast (the latter I haven't checked) should be
configurable to let you specify a DVD size collect. Make sure you
turn on DAO mode, and "get size" if it isn't enabled automatically
(gcombust should do this for you). Then it should just work.

You'll also want to grab the dvd tools. The guy who wrote cdrecord has
turned his dvd port of cdrecord into a non-free product
(cdrecord-prodvd), complete with activation codes to burn more than a
GB, expiry dates, etc. It's free for non-commercial use, but I was
turned off at the thought of it.

There's a free alternative [1] that forked earlier from cdrecord. The
cdrecord author has been known to talk about how the free alternative
has problems and doesn't support as many drives - but it's worked fine
for me.

I haven't gotten around to using either of the GUI tools w/ it yet,
though. I just put stuff in 'cd' and run the following shell commands:

treeRoot="cd"
isocmd="mkisofs -J -r"
dvdcmd="dvdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,0,0 -dao"
isoSize=$($(echo $isocmd) -print-size -q $treeRoot)

nice -n -18 $(echo $isocmd $treeRoot) | nice -n -19 $(echo $dvdcmd) tsize=${isoSize}s -

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/dvdrtools/

Cheers,
-- 
Damien Elmes