by Christian Einfeldt April 30, 2006
How to burn DVDs? with K3B under SuSE? 10.0
K3B is a pretty good GUI tool for burning DVDs? and CDs?, but I to me it is not necessarily all that intuitive at first. There are just a few traps to avoid, and then you will have a pretty good experience. For newbies, the easiest way to launch K3B is by hitting Alt F2 and then typing K3B. You will get the funny splash screen of the penguin with the burning torch. Choose File > New Project > New Video DVD Project. You will then get a Window with several boxes. If you look in the lower left hand corner of the window, you will see a short directory tree, with the base of the tree being "K3b data project". Two directories will be growing off of that base: AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS. You will need to navigate to the file where dvdauthor placed your files. In my example from the parent page, the structure 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
In my case, I used the K3B GUI to open the output_Larry02 directory shown above, where I found several files. In my case, I draggged all of those files to the VIDEO_TS directory that I mentioned above. Then I simply hit the little burn button which is currently located directly above the words "K3b data project". Doing so will open another window, and in that window, I simply hit the "burn" button, and boom, the burning process started successfully, completed successfully, and was kind enough to eject the DVD drive when it was done roasting my video to the DVD. I tested my DVD in the same burner, and found that I was able to read and copy the video file from that DVD, and then play that copied video file with Noatun, Mplayer, Xine, and Kaffeine simply by right clicking on the file in Konqueror. I did not test the DVD in a commercial DVD player, so caveat emptor. 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!).