by Christian Einfeldt May 3, 2006
How to create a VOB and XML structure for your DVD
DVDs? are great. You can peel off a decent amount of info onto a very light medium (the DVD) and then mail it. The problem with creating DVDs?, though, is that unlike VCDs?, you need to create the VOB and XML file structures first, which I find a wee bit annoying. Nonetheless, here we are in the US in 2006, and this is our reality. So, moving on, here's how you do it:
The tool that Kyle Rankin recommends to do this work is the makexml tool. Again, here I was able to use a very simple command, since I only had a very very short video slice of Larry Augustin's interview that I was using to test tovid and makexml:
linux:/video-store # makexml -dvd output_Larry.mpg output_Larry02
You are probably going to want to burn more than the mere 53 seconds that I burned to DVD for this first test, because otherwise, why would you be burning to a DVD? In that case, you might also want to include chapters, so that you can more easily skip through the video to the different segments. Kyle recommends a 5 minute interval, and the command would look like this:
linux:/video-store # makexml -dvd -chapter 5 output_Larry.mpg output_Larry02
As makexml works its magic, you get output that looks something like this:
--------------------------------
makexml
A script to generate XML for authoring a VCD, SVCD, or DVD.
Part of the tovid suite, version 0.26
with: core magick dvd vcd transcode
http://www.tovid.org
--------------------------------
Adding title: output_Larry.mpg as title number 1 of titleset 1
==========================================
Done. The resulting XML was written to output_Larry02.xml.
You can now author, image and/or burn the disc by running:
makedvd output_Larry02.xml
Thanks for using makexml!
I then used dvdauthor to create the DVD file system, as follows:
linux:/video-store # dvdauthor -x output_Larry02.xml
dvdauthor then runs its paces, while giving you some helpful info about the aspect of the file, and exits like this:
INFO: dvdauthor creating table of contents
INFO: Scanning output_Larry02/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO
You will then end up with an output file which in my case was named "output_Larry02". In that directory will be the files that you will need to drag into the K3B burn project, which is described in this page FossMovieSoftwareK3B. In my case, the file structure I was left with looked like this:
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 96 2006-04-30 19:22 output_Larry02
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 187 2006-04-30 19:18 output_Larry02.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33667072 2006-04-30 19:15 output_Larry.mpg