Free DVD Recording Tool For Linux? 160
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?"
Some info (Score:5, Informative)
To burn a DVD I just do:
growisofs -Z /dev/burner -R -J /path/to/data
A very good option for doing all this very easily is to get K3b [sourceforge.net] which is part of the KDE distribution.
For authoring DVDs I recently discovered Qdvdauthor [sourceforge.net], and it works like a charm!, I was able to create my own DVDs with menus with custom backgrounds, sound, etc.
Also check my homepage for help about video conversions: http ://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de [berlios.de]
Re:Some info (Score:5, Informative)
I never had a single problem with it from day 1 :)
I'd like to mention that with the -overburn flag I can squeeze a bit more of data (above 4.7 billion bytes but below 4.7 million Kbytes(Kbyte=1024 bytes)) when needed.
In addition I update my dvd burners firmware with PXUpdate for UNIX http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employee s/joerg.schilling/private/firmware.html [fokus.gmd.de], something which is very important for people that don't dual boot.
As demonstrated in https://expressivefreedom.org/Projects/PVR/Firewir e-Methodology.html [expressivefreedom.org] a 4gb+ single file (ie a backup tar/bz2ball) can be squeezed in dvd, which is something that propably(I can't say for sure since I haven't used windows for ages) can't be done in windows.
Chris. PS Use the above at your own risk
Re:Some info (Score:2, Informative)
Sure it can be done in Windows. Why do think that your aging Windows knowledge is still current?
Re:Some info (Score:2, Funny)
Why do you think he thinks that? He did say "propably(I can't say for sure since I haven't used windows for ages)".
What do you suppose he meant by that?
Re:Some info (Score:3, Informative)
Just note that you don't need the entire KDE distribution to have K3b, you only need kdelibs from the KDE distribution.
Schilly is the Dawes of CD recording (Score:3, Informative)
Use the cdrecord that comes in your distro. Red Hat, Suse, and most others now come with patched versions of older cdrecord that handle DVDs fine.
Re:Schilly is the Dawes of CD recording (Score:4, Informative)
k3b (Score:3, Informative)
Re:k3b (Score:1)
K3B (Score:5, Informative)
dvdrecord??/ (Score:2, Informative)
dvdrtools (Score:4, Informative)
Re:dvdrtools (Score:2, Informative)
dev=/dev/foo or dev=ATA:x,y,z (there should not be a technical difference in between these two, just two different ways to specify the same thing) is the prefered interface on 2.6.x.
dvdrtools (Score:5, Informative)
I use it like this:
It gives a warning about accessing the drive via
growisofs is your friend (Score:5, Informative)
So to burn a data DVD:
growisofs -Z
and to burn a video DVD:
growisofs -Z
I don't know the story behind cdrecord-prodvd and all that license cruft (was Mr. Joerg "you must use SCSI" Schilling involved with that nonsense?)
The less you have to deal with Schilling the better.
Re:growisofs is your friend (Score:4, Informative)
Amen! Back before dvd+rw tools came out and all there was were some hacks to cdrecord I tried to buy ProDVD but gave up. As far as I could tell there's no way to actually buy it. When searching the newsgroups all I found were several Schilling rants, several people like me trying to buy it without luck, and finally a patch to an old cdrecord version that didn't require a license. If it was an intelligence test you needed to pass to get the damn license I failed miserably.
Re:growisofs is your friend (Score:2)
When I got my DVD writer I had already been using xcdroast [xcdroast.org] (and implicitly cdrtools [fokus.fhg.de]) for a long time with CD's. It seemed the simplest to just get cdrecord-prodvd for this setup.
It amounted to downloading one (1) binary file [berlios.de], placing it as executable in the xcdroast bin dir and a copy/paste operation of the license key from a README [berlios.de] found at the same place as the binary.
It worked right away, took a couple of minutes not counting the download and now I can use xcdroast with DVD's as well as CD's without
DVD for? (Score:2)
But for burning data, or formatting DVDs, or even copying or burning a DVD iso is very good.
Even love the kde trick of putting a blank dvd and offering me to launch (even by default) k3b to burn something there.
k3b (Score:5, Insightful)
I become more impressed with kde each time I use it, which is daily. The level of integration must surely be the equal of its closed-source rivals.
BTW I do most of my work on SuSE 9.1, but it (kde) seems much the same on the other machines, Xandros, FC2 and even FreeBSD (although I have not yet tried DVD writing on the latter).
I get the impression that each of kde and gnome is in itself a much bigger achievement than the kernel, and certainly they are important because new users or prospective users see the GUI first. They don't care about the window manager, or the X implementation, or even the kernel. But Linux distros are clearly doing something right.
BTW my DVD writer is multi-mode (+/-R and RW, and RAM) and the type of blank disc was correctly identified without any messing about by me, much to my surprise, as I have seen the "other" OS have problems.
Re:k3b (Score:4, Informative)
Re:k3b (Score:2)
I will say one thing about k3b, it does not mess with the system and cause bugs and instability the way Adaptec/Roxio used to, and apparently still does, on Windoze. Of course Open Source users and developers simply would not tolerate that, it would have to be fixed, either by the origi
What I'd like to see... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:4, Informative)
So here's my formula to get DV to DVD without crufty menus. With almost minimum fuss.
1. use kino to grab the DV and do basic editing. It can't do much editing (i.e. you can't trim in between clips) and it's sluggish in some respects but it works like a charm.
2. Inside kino go to EXPORT->MPEG and select option 8 for the file format.
This uses mpeg2enc, which is amazingly SLOW, but does a good job. Expect many hours encoding 1 hour of footage. My FX-53 is about 1/10th real time. If you want to retain chapters, make sure to select "scene split" before exporting!
3. So now you have one or more
<dvdauthor>
<vmgm
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<vob file="/path/to/first.mpeg"
<vob file="/path/to/next.mpeg"
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>
dvdauthor -o my_dvd -x my.xml
5. Burn it with growisofs
growisofs -Z
Voila! Alot of steps and very slow, but not too painful otherwise. And no annoying menus!
Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:5, Informative)
For lighter work, there is Q DVD-Author [sourceforge.net]. It is FOSS and works well for making DVD's with menus, etc.
Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:2)
A bit difficult, but: (Score:2)
The other thing to do is to dump some form of Windows (from 95 up to XP) to the virt
Re:A bit difficult, but: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 o
Re:A bit difficult, but: (Score:4, Insightful)
Global images (Score:1)
Re:Global images (Score:2)
Re:Global images (Score:5, Insightful)
That isn't to say that the proprietary varient isn't a simple variation of the ISO image, (perhaps both an md5 and/or sha1 signature attached to the end of the image to assure integrity, or additional information the tool does not use in the actual burning, but may update each time the image is used, or even checked to see if the user is 'authorized' to burn this iso, say a hash of the authorization key for the product.
From what I have seen, all of the burners out there can use the ISO format to burn CDs and DVDs, but everyone seems to like vendor lock in for some reason, and may not provide the ability to create an ISO in the 'free' version included with drives.
Then again, what do I know.
-Rusty
Re:Global images (Score:2)
Re:Global images (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Global images (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Global images (Score:2)
11th Commandment (Score:5, Funny)
Re:11th Commandment (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:11th Commandment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:11th Commandment (Score:1)
Let's try googling for DVD burning linux free [google.com] .
"Pretty useful"? I don't think so. Do you see the solution there? I don't. Believe me, I do check Google first, but if the excerpts on the first search page don't show much promise I'm not going to go about clicking on the links.
search through hundreds of slashdot comments?
You
Re:11th Commandment (Score:3, Informative)
That's a poorly-crafted search term. Too many words in the query means fewer good responses. In this case, the word "free" is basically redundant with "linux", and "burning" is just extra-syllables onto "burn" (try to use the root form of words whenever possible). "Linux DVD Burn" would've been better.
But regardless of that, the page of results given by your query is indeed useful. Two of the results go to forum discussions on LinuxQuestions.org [linuxquestions.org], where a
Since the post was rather questionable (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Since the post was rather questionable (Score:3, Informative)
hdparm -iI will reveal all.
Also try a UDMA 66/100 (80 wire) cable.
Re:Since the post was rather questionable (Score:2)
If you're using scsi emulation (Score:5, Informative)
If you want better speed, upgrade to the latest DVD+/-rw-tools [chalmers.se]. There's a ton of recently fixed speed bugs with newer drives. Install from source is easy. just make && make install as root and it'll copy itself in
Media Recording in Linux (Score:4, Informative)
For any kind of Linux-related media recording whatsoever, you should definitely check out dyne:bolic [dynebolic.org], i.e. a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD:
"dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives, being a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, all using only free software.
"dyne:bolic is a GNU/Linux distribution simply running from a CD, without the need to install anything, able to recognize most of your devices and periferals: sound, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb devices and more.
"It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning it into a full media station: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console--and if you have more than one, you can easily do clusters."
It is unquestionably invaluable to explore if you are not sure which software do you need to install and use on your own GNU/Linux system (e.g. Debian [debian.org] or Gentoo [gentoo.org]). I hope this helps.
There's nothing I can't do... (Score:2)
Not so fast! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not so fast! (Score:5, Informative)
UDF write support? (Score:1, Interesting)
UDF and packet writing would rock!
Re:UDF write support? (Score:2)
Re:UDF write support? (Score:2)
More importantly, do any GUI tools support files larger than 2GB yet? I can make a UDF filesystem on the hard drive with the command line, write large files to it, then write it to DVD, and even put that all in a script that's not too hard to use - but people still want to drag and drop their large files in something like k3b.
Re:UDF write support? (Score:2)
How about real UDF filesytem support from a GUI? (Score:2)
Exactly - but is there a GUI cdwriter that supports UDF writing correctly yet? The one's I've seen use a broken method to generate the UDF filesystem which is unable to produce files bigger than 2GB - they don't use something that works like "mkudffs".
Once you have the image file, you can burn it with just about anything - but "mkudffs" is just a bit too complex for a lot of users to deal with, even if you give them a simple script that takes everythin
And other architectures/platforms (Score:2)
Re:And other architectures/platforms (Score:2)
Besides, that would require him to open up his precious sourcecode to me..
I really wonder why the dvd recording portion of cdrecord is closed source and requiring 6 month expiring licenses when the cd recording portion is open source..
Re:And other architectures/platforms (Score:2)
Example, i use a program for my work that has a new license every month. I had to go to a client site shortly before the end of the month and stay for 2 weeks, during this time my license expired and i had to search around for hours to find a cybercafe where i could login to my mailserver and retrieve a new license, something which i was loathed to do from a public terminal.
Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Can anyone summarize what this fight is all about?
use -scanbus dev=ATA (Score:2, Informative)
That's unless SuSE did something really insane with their fork of cdrecord
Re:Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx (Score:4, Informative)
All I can say is the entire reason I went through the hassle of SCSI on my old system was just to avoid the hassle of ide-scsi with cdrecord. The entire ide-scsi flap seems to be centered around cdrecord and Joerg Schilling's stubborn refusal to accept reality and deviate from his beloved SCSI. Never mind the reality that almost no one carries optical SCSI devices anymore! (Save hard drives you can't find SCSI *anything* anymore!)
Schilling also has his own "make" program, IIRC, because he refuses to write a makefile that works with GNU's make. This was discussed on the amd64 gentoo forum recently.
Then there's cdrecord-prodvd and its annoying nagware license. Again, Schilling at work.
Then recently there was some flap on LKML, though I have not read it because, frankly, I don't know the best place to even look at LKML.
Heck, you can almost get a sense of his attitude from the wording of his website:
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glo
I saw this problem brewing in 2000 when I got my SCSI CD burner--about the last one available. The problem is as long as Schilling is the only person with disc burning software we are all subject to his whims.
So bring on the free and open alternatives. growisofs, for example, is fantastic, although also dependent on mkisofs (which I think is also Schilling software, but at least it doesn't seem to suck yet). Take Schilling out of the loop and then we aren't 100% dependent on him.
Re:Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx (Score:2, Informative)
No problem [icculus.org]. No UDF or DVD support yet though, I think. I've heard grumbles of speed issues as well, but it is 0.2 after all.
Re:Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx (Score:2)
He's stated a couple of times that cdrecord is developed under Solaris, then ported to Linux and other Unix and Unix-like OS's. While his SCSI over ATA may be baroque, it does have the advantage of being portable and consistent over the various flavors of Unix (as opposed to being convenient to use on Linux and a real pain on non-Linux environments).
Schily is not a big fan of the GNU tools -
Re:Dev=0,x,0 vs. dev=/dev/hdx (Score:2)
from linux weekly news: Alternatives to cdrecord (Score:4, Informative)
dvdrtools/dvdrecord (Score:3, Informative)
I can use readcd to get everything back with errors (~4000-5000 errors per disk), but it's really quite annoying.
So either it's my crappy disks (bought for about 44 cents a pop online in bulk) or it's dvdrecord. I've no idea which, though I'm leaning towards blaming the dvds (in which case, just be aware that cheap dvds aren't worth it!
Just my
Re:dvdrtools/dvdrecord (Score:2)
It's the media (for sure) and the burner/settings/program (unlikely).
Why am I certian? The media failing after 6 months means that it is unstable. After all, if you burn the disk -- it works -- and it stops working later though you haven't dropped it back in the burner, how is the burner or the software to blame?
If the failures were always immediately detected during or just after burning -- no good d
Free DVD burning tools ... for Windows? (Score:2)
Re:Free DVD burning tools ... for Windows? (Score:2)
OSS DVD Extensions (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Simple Answer - Lxdvdrip (Score:3, Informative)
lwn.net coverage (Score:2, Informative)
In case you happen to live under a rock somewhere lwn.net is possibly the best Linux/FOSS news source on the net.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
If all linux desktop user had to Ask Slashdot for this kind of question...
Freshmeat.net exists and its platform and even license independent. If you visit slashdot enough to use the ask slashdot feature, it is weird that you don't know the existance of freshmeat.net or at least use it if you already know it.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, note that "k3b" is one of the least-informative program names imaginable. It provides ZERO descriptive data (aside from possibly the fact that it uses KDE). Nobody can be expected to guess that she wants "k3b" to make DVDs. So what happens if you search for a "DVD burner" on freshmeat.net?
Searching for "DVD burner" gives 0 hits. "DVD burn" gives 8 hits, but k3b isn't one of them. "cd burn" gives 7 hits, again without mentioning k3b.
Searching for "DVD" by itself produces 128 results, but again, k3b isn't in there. So apparently a freshmeat search is useless, unless you already knew the cryptic 3-character app name.
A google-search (such as for "linux dvd burn") would've faster and more fruitful. Rather sad that freshmeat isn't a good place to search for Free software...
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess the reason for no mention of k3b on freshmeat is more kde's braindamaged way of packaging applications that anything else. They have so many apps that might be useful to non-kde-users but they insist on making some arbitary division into category-packages like "kde-network", "kde-pim",...
That is one of the things thats really sad about the kde project. The authors of every single app in the kde project artificially reduc
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. Freshmeat has a page for k3b [freshmeat.net], independent of any larger "kde-tools" package. But you can't find it by searching by reasonable keywords like "DVD burn"- you have to already know that k3b is what you want to search for.
The problem's not the completeness of freshmeat, but the lack of a good way to browse/search.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:4, Funny)
Excellent point! I'd stick with something more logical like "Roxio" if I were you.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
"Roxio" is the company name, the products they offer on the Windows platform include Easy Media Creator, Easy DVD Copy, and Easy CD & DVD Creator.
Which reminds me: no more Roxio [theregister.co.uk] burning software in the near future.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:4, Funny)
I've been having fun with my new Mandrake install - but coming from a Windows world, I'm puzzeled...
Does Linux have a text editor?
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
And where can I find a list of available software to install?
[/sarcasm]
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
True story -- I was installing SuSE personal the other day, just to see what you got on a 1cd distribution these days.
I went through my usual application selection routine, disabling the stuff that I can't stand (e.g. vim, joe).
By the time I was finished, the only console based text editor installed on the system was 'ed'.
WHAT? No emacs? Not even an emacs-compatible editor? (I used to be a big fan of jove -- like emacs, only loaded _instantly_, even on my old 386).
Was m
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:3, Informative)
it it just a front-end for programs like mkisofs and cdrecord.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:5, Informative)
I did not think there could be any desktop user that has not heard of k3b...
I did not think there could be any desktop user that doesn't understand k3b is a GUI FRONTEND to several command line tools, one of them being cdrecord-ProDVD for writing DVDs. Without these backends, your k3b will DO NOTHING. Another option for writing DVDs are the dvd+rw-tools, which also work for DVD-R now. THAT is what the question is about, not your GUI-of-the-day.
Perhaps for the next Ask Slashdot we could have a question about free web browsers? Or maybe a free Linux C compiler?
Or maybe have a question about what's the difference about a GUI frontend and an actual work-performing backend?Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't use KDE, and I try to avoid installing its libraries if I can. This is very hard to do sometimes, because some very good programs, like K3B, depend on those libraries. However, I like to run a lean system, so I try to steer clear of KDE-ized apps.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:3, Informative)
KDE is probably the most "well-known" application which uses Qt, and so they're associated together in many people's minds, but Qt doesn't depend on one inch of KDE.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
KDE-libs and maybe KDE-base. But it doesn't need any of the other KDE "crap".
Do you use GNOMEified apps? (Score:2)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
Anyway, it appears that SuSE and Mandrake [mandrakesoft.com] have patched versions of cdrtools which are able to write to DVD without restriction. I don't have personal experience with this tool, so perhaps someone else who regularly runs Linux can verify.
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:2)
Re:Is this a joke? (Score:1)
Never assume
Re:I dont know (Score:1)
That's only if you want... (Score:2)
And don't forget you need tons of space in your Local Settings/Temp folder (at least as much as you want to copy in an increment).
Re:Install Windows XP (Score:2)
Re:Install Windows XP (Score:2)
While I'm at it, I hope that someone gets around to making a better command-line tool to generate those ISOs sometime. The batch files I'm using to do it are really, really ugly.
Re:dvd+rwtools (Score:2)
By audio I'm not sure what you mean.. DVD-Audio is just a bunch of properly encoded files burned in the proper layout in an ISO9660 file system (Just like DVD-Video).
All you need to do for either should be growisofs -M /dev/scd0 -R -J [--dvd-video] /filepath.