This file is about how to convert an AVI video to a DVD video in linux. I am currently using Fedora Core 4, and this is the process that works well for me. I don't guarantee it will work for you as I have found that usually in Linux people's processes need to be tweaked for different distributions.
You will need the following programs in order to be able to follow this how to:
Transcode and mplex should be available through the yum or apt-get. batchtrans is a program that I wrote to quickly transcode and mplex a bunch of programs at a time without needing user intervention. It is available on this site and is released under the GPL. I have used it myself and it works for me, but once again no guarantees. In order for batchtrans to work you must have transcode and mplex in your PATH statement.
When you are converting to DVD video there are a few things that you need to know. The first is what audio bitrate you are going to use. The values that I have seen are 160,240,and 320. I am fairly certain that you cannot go outside of these ranges. batchtrans defaults to 160, this is because I have found that my DVD player does not play DVD burns at the same rate as regular DVDs.
The second thing you will need to know is the bitrate for the video. This setting does have an effect on the quality of the video that is produced, but once again I have found through trial and error that I really can't go over a value of 2500 with my dvd player. I have seen a couple of tutorials out on the web that use a bitrate of 5000. Unfortunately for me though this causes the video to become very jerky with a fair amount of pixelation, and some A/V desynchronization. batchtrans will default to a setting of 2500 if you don't specify a different setting.
The third thing you will need to know is the aspect ratio of the video that you are converting. It will either be 4:3 or 16:9. batchtrans defaults to a setting of 4:3 (-r2), but if you are using a video that is in widescreen then you will need to specify an aspect ratio of 16:9 (-r3). If you are converting video on something like an anime series then you will probably want to use the 4:3 aspect ratio as this is the standard for TV.
So what I do is provide two directories, in and out (so as to keep the files seperate). Then I type:
| batchtrans -oout/movie in/*.avi |
this will tell batchtrans to convert all the files in the in directory and put them in the out directory with a prefix of movie. So the files will be called movie1.mpg,movie2.mpg,movie3.mpg... Once batchtrans completes you should be able to progress to the part of this tutorial where you can create the menus.
There is more coming on this tutorial... For now you can try to run varsha and see what you get.