by Christian Einfeldt April 30, 2006
How to burn DVDs? with SuSE? 10.0
At some point in the creation of your movie, you are going to need to be able to burn your footage to a DVD for transportation. These tips are aimed at helping you do so. This page will show you how to install tovid. After you finish the steps on this page, you will be ready to actually burn DVDs? by first running tovid to make the video DVD-compatible at this page FossMovieSoftwareTovid; then you can go to this page FossMovieSoftwareK3B to learn to use the K3B burning tool.
Also, I'd like to thank Kyle Rankin for his excellent book entitled, "Linux Multimedia Hacks." I would not have been able to do any of the stuff that I have done without his book, and I highly recommend that you get his book if you want to do anything with multimedia under GNU/Linux.
As I mentioned on the previous page, before we go any further, you want to make sure that you use YAST to install as many video and multimedia-related packages as you can. SuSE? 10.0 comes with a bootload of packages for creating, editing and playing video, and you want to take advantage of the nice, tidy integration that you get with SuSE?'s YAST package handler. It will save you lots of time and headaches.
Here's a caveat emptor. I did not test the DVD in a commercial DVD player. YMMV. For me, the important thing was being able to copy the file and share it. (This was a file for which I am the copyright holder, and so I can do whatever I damn well please with it!). Since my purpose was just copying a video file onto a DVD, and not playing it in a commercial DVD player, I didn't do that test.
Unfortunately, tovid is not one of the packages that you will find in your YAST directory, probably, but take a look anyway, because you will need it to do this work. While you are searching in YAST, also make sure that you have mplayer, mjpegtools, ffmppeg, and normalize installed, because you are going to have to grab them from the Internet if they are not already there.
I like to create a new directory when I am installing software, simply because I am easily confused, and I like to make sure that all of the packages that I need will be the only packages that I see in the directory that I am using. So I recommend that you use Konqueror to create a directory called "tovid" and set your Firefox browser to place downloads into that file. tovid is available here:
http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5381&release_id=9653
You can also download tovid directly by clicking on this link. Of course, this link is only good until the next update, and then the file at this link will be old:
http://prdownload.berlios.de/tovid/tovid-0.26.tar.gz
Now you will want to cd into the directory that contains the file you have downloaded by using the change directory command:
linux:/home/cje/downloads # cd tovid
At this point, you probably want to see if the tovid file is actually in that directory by using the ls command:
linux:/home/cje/downloads/tovid # ls
By the way, the character after the "s" above is a lower case "L", not a "one". After doing your ls command, you should see something like this:
linux:/home/cje/downloads/tovid # ls
. .. tovid-0.26.tar.gz
Of course, the version 0.26 as shown above will change soon after this tip sheet is written, so don't be thrown off by a different number there. Now you want to untar the package with this command:
linux:/home/cje/downloads/tovid # tar -xzvf tovid-0.26.tar.gz
Hitting enter at the end of the line shown above should produce something that resembles this:
tovid-0.26/
tovid-0.26/src/
tovid-0.26/src/pyidvid
tovid-0.26/src/pytovid
tovid-0.26/src/idvid
tovid-0.26/src/tovid
tovid-0.26/src/makeslides
tovid-0.26/src/pymakemenu
tovid-0.26/src/makedvd
tovid-0.26/src/makevcd
tovid-0.26/src/makexml
tovid-0.26/src/makemenu
tovid-0.26/src/postproc
tovid-0.26/src/tovid-init.in
tovid-0.26/src/pymakexml
tovid-0.26/src/previd
tovid-0.26/src/tovid-interactive
tovid-0.26/src/tovidgui
tovid-0.26/src/tovid-test
tovid-0.26/src/tovid-batch
tovid-0.26/NEWS
tovid-0.26/docs/
tovid-0.26/docs/man/
tovid-0.26/docs/man/makemenu.1
tovid-0.26/docs/man/makedvd.1
tovid-0.26/docs/man/makexml.1
tovid-0.26/docs/man/makeslides.1
tovid-0.26/docs/man/tovid.1
Of course, the output is a good bit longer than the above and was edited for brevity. But I did want you to get an idea of what the output would look like. After Linux has spit you back out to a hash mark #, you should cd into the directory that has the source files, and type ./configure. In my case, it looked like this:
linux:/home/cje/downloads/tovid/tovid-0.26 # ./configure
After you hit enter in the line above, you will get output that looks a bit like this. Notice that you will be prompted for your next command:
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking for a Python interpreter with version >= 2.3... python
checking for python... /usr/bin/python
checking for python version... 2.4
checking for python platform... linux2
checking for python script directory... ${prefix}/lib/python2.4/site-packages
checking for python extension module directory... ${exec_prefix}/lib/python2.4/site-packages
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile
config.status: creating src/tovid-init
configure:
You may now type su -c "make install" to compile and install tovid.
Go ahead and type the command that the nice program suggested, and you will get out put that looks like this:
linux:/home/cje/downloads/tovid/tovid-0.26 # su -c "make install"
make[1]?: Entering directory `/home/cje/downloads/tovid/tovid-0.26'
test -z "/usr/local/bin" || mkdir -p -- "/usr/local/bin"
/usr/bin/install -c src/idvid /usr/local/bin/idvid
/usr/bin/install -c src/makedvd /usr/local/bin/makedvd
/usr/bin/install -c src/makemenu /usr/local/bin/makemenu
/usr/bin/install -c src/makeslides /usr/local/bin/makeslides
/usr/bin/install -c src/makevcd /usr/local/bin/makevcd
/usr/bin/install -c src/makexml /usr/local/bin/makexml
/usr/bin/install -c src/postproc /usr/local/bin/postproc
/usr/bin/install -c src/previd /usr/local/bin/previd
/usr/bin/install -c src/tovid /usr/local/bin/tovid
Eventually, the program will exit and return you to a hash prompt:
make[1]?: Leaving directory `/home/cje/downloads/tovid/tovid-0.26'
linux:/home/cje/downloads/tovid/tovid-0.26 #
You have now installed tovid and can go to the tovid page to learn to make DVD-compatible files for burning. FossMovieSoftwareTovid