How to burn QuickTime *MOV movies for DVDs?

Here's one way to do it. I found the Superman Returns trailer online in quicktime format and used ffmpeg with the ntsc-dvd target, followed by dvdauthor and dvdrecord.

ffmpeg or vlc
ffmpeg worked on the quicktime movie I tried, but not on some other mythtv-recorded mpg files I wanted to add to the dvd. So another alternative is to use vlc.


$ ffmpeg -i superman_returns_tlrf3_qt_500.mov -aspect 2.35 -target ntsc-dvd superman.mpg


I got the aspect ratio by viewing the info in vlc under View --> Stream and Media Info ... --> Advanced Information tab under Resolution (Horiz/Vert = 2.35).

The -target option for ffmpeg is really great. ntsc-dvd (or presumably pal-dvd for Europe) is all you need to specify for the dvd format.

For vlc, I wrote the following script based on the instructions at http://wiki.videolan.org/index.php/How_to_Create_a_DVD.

#!/bin/sh
#usage: ./vlc2dvd.sh infile.mpg outfile.mpg
# $1 is infile.mpg and $2 is outfile.mpg
# Warning: the --sout options were ignmored if they were after the :sout line!
vlc $1 \
--aspect-ratio="16:9" \
--sout-transcode-fps=29.97 \
--sout-transcode-width=720 \
--sout-transcode-height=480 \
:sout="#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=4096,acodec=a52,ab=192,scale=1}:std{access=file,mux=ps,url=$2}" \
--stop-time=20


dvdauthor
I can't seem post to post the dvdauthor.xml file here, so just download it. Here's a picture of dvdauthor.xml

http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html has a nice simple explanation of the dvdauthor.xml file.

Then you just run
$ dvdauthor -x dvdauthor.xml

Edit: The ~'s do not work in the dvdauthor.xml file. You have to explicitly specify the path.

mkisofs

$ mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o dvd.iso ~/superman/dvd

dvdrecord

$ sudo dvdrecord -v -dao speed=4 dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 dvd.iso


I'm going to download some more quicktime movies before burning the dvd. I'll come back and edit this when it works.

Edit: I successfully produced a dvd iso file, but ended up with 4.9 GB, which is a little too big. But the iso file played in vlc, so I expect it would have worked. Of course, these steps using the command line tools were not the easiest method. If you have mythtv installed, you can install the dvd archive plugin and have mythtv do all of the work for you! But first you would have to get your video into mpeg2 format (using ffmpeg for example) and import your video. Also, maybe the people using KDE know if a program like K3b can automate more of the steps involved.