ZLB

Due to an upcoming release involving a DVD I’ve had to figure out how to make a dvd from a couple of multichannel tracks. I’m using a mac and I wanted to use open-source tools. The road wasn’t that easy to travel, so I’m posting my findings for other travelers in the brave new world of Linux.

1 - You will need to use dvd-author and some other tools. I tried to install them in osx, but it was just to difficult, in the end I decided to just make a virtual machine in parallels and install ubuntu 9.10.

2 - After installing ubuntu, install dvd-author (from ubuntu software center) and aften (from synaptic).

3 - The files should be multi-channel interleaved wavs. If you have them as mono files, interleave them on osx with de-interleave or use sox.

4 - In dvds the files always need audio and video, so you need to have a background image. For pal these can ben 720×576 png files.

5 - Put the png files and the wav files in a folder in ubuntu. They should be named dvd1.png, dvd2.png and dvd1.wav, dvd2.wav, etc.

6 - Depending on how many tracks you have to make a dvd.xml file for dvdauthor like this:

<dvdauthor>
    <vmgm />
    <titleset>
        <titles>
            <pgc>
                <vob file="dvd1.mpg" />
                <vob file="dvd2.mpg" />
                <!- etc -->
            </pgc>
        </titles>
    </titleset>
</dvdauthor>

7 - Then run this script on that folder and wait (one hour or so in my machine)

#!/bin/bash
# Miguel Negrão 2009
 
for file in `ls *.png` ; do
 
echo "File is $file"
# name without extension
name=${file%\.*}
# number of samples in audio file
SAMPLES=`sox --info -s "$name".wav`
echo "Number of samples is $SAMPLES"
# number of corresponding pal frames
PALFRAMES=`expr $SAMPLES '/' 1920`
echo "Number of pal frames is $PALFRAMES"
 
echo "converting to ac3"
aften -b 448 -smix 2 -dsur 1 -acmod 6 -lfe 0 -xbsi1 1 -dmixmod 2 -lorosmix 2 "$name".wav "$name".ac3
 
echo "making m2v from png"
pngtopnm "$file" | ppmtoy4m -F 25:1 -A 59:54 -I p -n "$PALFRAMES" -S 420mpeg2 -r  | mpeg2enc -a 2 -n p -f 8 -v 2 -o "$name".m2v
 
echo "muxing m2v and ac3"
mplex -f 8 -o "$name".mpg "$name".m2v "$name".ac3
 
done
 
echo "Creating DVD structure"
dvdauthor -o DVDFOLDER -x dvd.xml

8 - to make a dvd image in osx that is compatible with dvd players type in the terminal:

 
hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name MYDVD 
-o MY_DVD.iso DVDFOLDER

Tags: aften, dvd authoring, dvdauthor, linux, sox

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 7:54 am and is filed under Blog, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.