April 7, 2009 Our new online-system, "Polepositioner" has started BETA testing. It's a great system that not only offers new ways of "finding" things (like jobs), but also offers unique and sophisticated security mechanisms to protect the indentity of our users.

However, I want to talk about a different topic today. We have one of those modern "hard-disk-recorders" that allows us to copy tv-shows with a simple push of a button. There was just one simple question: How to burn DVDs on Mac, Windows or Linux? Well, not just "burn" a CD, but shrink the shows so that we could burn two or even three episodes on one DVD+R - with a nice menu of course.

The HD-recorder was delivering a muxed, interlaced MPEG-2-stream with 9 MBit/s. A single 45-minute show would fill a complete DVD - unacceptable. We hunted for the easiest solution. Windows? Forgetaboutit. Everything is $$-ware and the test-suits just didn't deliver the results we wanted. There were some MAC solutions (pretty complicated) and the (free) software we tested didn't work well. We finally went back to our trusted Linux (should have done that from the beginning, mea culpa).

First step: Shrink the videos to an acceptable size (and de-interlace) while keeping acceptable quality.

ffmpeg -i source.mpg -target pal-dvd -b 4000k -acodec mp2 -ab 192k -deinterlace target.mpg

Well, yeah. It's PAL, we're in Europe currently. Ok. Now we needed a tool to do some DVD authoring. First and foremost, one needs 'dvdauthor', which can be installed with 'yum' (fedora) or similar tools.

Next step was the hunt for a graphical user-interface (dvdauthor is command-line only). I downloaded "qdvdauthor" just to find out, its qt3 only. Not really the tool I am looking for on a FC9-x64 platform. I finally stumbled over "dvd-styler", a nice, easy and well-working dvd-authoring tool. It allows to create menues and sub-menues and generally does most of the things we "video-amateurs" would need.

We have our working, easy to use solution now. It took us a few days to find and to sort things out. We get up to three episodes on to one DVD and are able to create our own menues with all the bells and whistles we want.

Just wanted to let you guys know.