Free DVD Recording Tool For Linux?

jobsagoodun writes " cdrecord-ProDVD is OK for burning DVDs but (i) it grumbles pointlessly about device names and (ii) it has a weird binary-only license that expires every six months or so. There are some Free forks off cdrtools - dvd+rw/+r/-r ,dvdrtools and this patch - do any of them make a good replacement?"

What I'd like to see...

[polyp2000]

Is a a good DVD-Authoring system. Its easy enough to burn DVD's on linux and has been for some time K3b uses the command line tools to do its work seamlessly.

But i'd like it to be easier to dump footage via my DV Camcorder over firewire and dump it on a DVD with a nice little menu. Just by clicking a couple of buttons. Alas I havent come across anything like this yet. Which is why im still hankering after a powerbook.

Nick ...

Since the post was rather questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

let's ask another question that might be more interesting to the majority who seem to already be using K3B.
I heard that one of the big changes in the 2.6 kernel was that the SCSI emmulation was dropped for optical burning and that this should improve performance.
Well sure enough, my CD writing speeds went nuts. I had never burnt a CD at 20X using that PC which, granted was only a K62 500, but Nero had never gotten to speeds that high without using up the buffer in a few seconds. But with the 2.6 kernel I was getting 20X sustained without even touching the buffer. I was truly impressed.
BUT!
Unfortunately, the same thing didn't hold true for DVD. My DVD burner, which is the same machine, an 8X+/-RW CyQue AKA MET, that was giving me the insane CD writing speeds was still quite slow with DVDs.
This was disappointing because using the bundled Nero that had come with the burner I could get 4X easily even writing over the network and 8X was technically doable although it spent more time refilling the cache than writing. After seeing the CD write speed so high, I really hoped that the 2.6 kernel would give me equally fast DVD write speeds. Instead, my DVD write speeds are less than one speed which is quite slow.
However, I'm not saying Nero on Windows is better even though it is faster. I still use 2.6 kernel and K3B to write DVDs because Linux doesn't choke on filenames like Windows does and cheap media that fails in Nero still at least writes in K3B.
On this last note, I want to clarify that I've used many different media and all of them seem to give the same result. So, this isn't a cheap media related issue.
There's a better ask slashdot topic.

Re:11th Commandment

[October_30th]

And why not?

I ask questions on public "forums" like /. or usenet because I really can't be bothered to figure out what niche forums I should be searching in the first place - especially when I am pretty sure that someone else on /. has already found the answer.

You don't have to answer any questions you don't feel like answering, but don't bash people for asking on-topic questions.

Not so fast!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernel 2.6.8 has effectively killed non root users from burning CDs and DVDs.

UDF write support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would really like to see packet-writing working properly on linux, so I can use my CD-Rs and CD-RW as a read-write medium like a floppy (an ever shrinking floppy in the CD-R case, but that's okay). similarly for DVDs.

UDF and packet writing would rock!

Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx

[anagama]

Recently I installed Suse 9.1 and discovered that "cdrecord -scanbus" no longer did the job it used to do. Took me a while to figure out I could use a "dev/hdx".

As I understand it, the author of cdrecord is livid over this issue. I've read a bit on mailing lists, but I still don't understand what the big deal is either way. Although somewhere I heard a comment that it may be a way for the author to make money off his DVD burning program ... I still don't get it.

Can anyone summarize what this fight is all about?

Re:A bit difficult, but:

[maskedbishounen]

I know of a guy who runs Nero under WINE and claims to have no problems with it. Would be great if they released a native linux version. I would certainly buy a copy, at least.

The inability to burn certain (most) image formats with some (all?) of the existing tools drives me crazy more times than not. I know that there are some image conversion utilities, but still..

I keep a Window box around for burning. It makes me sad....

Before you reply that you need not burn anything other than ISO, just think of when Windows users come to you wanting a CD/DVD burned of a backup image (let's presume something legal, even! ;P), only to find out it's not something you can work with. Oh, how great those moments are great..!

"Sorry, I can't burn your CD of backed up data.. ask a Windows user!"

Re:Is this a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather sad that freshmeat isn't a good place to search for Free software...

That's because Freshmeat's search is now powered by Yahoo! Weeeeeeeeee! Don't belive me? Just look under the search box on the front page [freshmeat.net].

OSS DVD Extensions

[stock]

checkout http://freshmeat.net/projects/ossdvd/ [freshmeat.net]

install the RPMS for your distro, and after that its a breeze to burn/read your DVD stuff from the commandline:

http://crashrecovery.org/oss-dvd/HOWTO-ossdvd.html [crashrecovery.org]

Robert

Re:dvdrtools/dvdrecord

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, there is no way to do a "burn+verify" with this crap. You are forced to read the ISO back in (using readcd or whatever) and then do the comparison with "diff". Unless you mess around with truncating and pad-adjusting the data-stream being read back from the DVD, you pretty much have to mount the ISO --and guess what happens under Linux if you mount a corrupt ISO. Well nothing much until you go to access the corrupt filesystem structures --then this 2-bit public domain piece of crap will lock-up or come crashing down. That's right, there is no reliable software-only way to backup a LINUX box to DVD (and be sure the DVDs were written correctly). Those that claim otherwise haven't actually had the pleasure of discovering that their past DVD-Rs aren't really totally able to restore their system or they have just gotten lucky.

I long for the days of Linux 1.2 --when functionality was limited, but it was all reliable. Linux 2.4 and 2.6 are really fragile pieces of crap compared to 1.2. Can you believe those idiots who are actually selling Linux 2.6 for $350 a pop? Want to see how fast they will be out of business? Just go to finance.yahoo.com and punch in their stock-tickers --filled with investigation/corruption charges and takeover rumors. Even the non-public companies are hemoraging their founders leaving a sort of motley crew of hapless idiots behind. Unless these people hire kernel experts and _permanently_ fork away from the main Linux tree, I can't see any of them surviving. Of course, once these guys start to diverge (trying to find stability on their own), then we are back to the Tower of Babble problem that UNIX suffered from for its first 20 years. I think I'm babbling...this is, after all, /. --and very few of the readers have a clue of what I'm referring to, other than they don't like to hear Linux being "dis'ed" because it "rulzes" so much better than "windows". Heh, what a shit world we live in now.