I needed to convert a home-made video (well slide-show with soundtrack really) that was sent over from the USA. Attempting to play this on a PAL-only TV results in unwatchable flickering monochrome output. Based on some instructions for DVD format conversion I was able to convert the NTSC disc to PAL using the steps listed below. This was on a Fedora 10 system with the rpmfusion repos installed.
# Note: about 1.3GB of workspace was required to generate 170MB output, in this case a short slide show with sound track.
#
yum install vobcopy mjpegtools dvdauthor
mkdir video_work
cd video_work
vobcopy -l
mkfifo stream.yuv
mplayer -ao null -noframedrop -vo yuv4mpeg VIDEONAME.vob &
cat stream.yuv|yuvfps -r25:1|yuvscaler -n p -O DVD |mpeg2enc -n p -f 8 -F 3 -o out.m2v
mplayer -ao pcm -vo null -vc dummy VIDEONAME.vob
# Note: 224000 bits per second (224kbits/sec)
ffmpeg -ab 224000 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -i audiodump.wav audiodump.ac3
mplex -f 8 -o ready-to-master.mpg out.m2v audiodump.ac3
mkdir dvdauthor_out
cat << EOF > dvdauthor.xml
<dvdauthor dest="/data_dir/video_work/dvdauthor_out">
<vmgm>
</vmgm>
<titleset>
<titles>
<video />
<pgc>
<vob file="ready-to-master.mpg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>
EOF
dvdauthor -x dvdauthor.xml
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video dvdauthor_out
One of tonight’s tasks was to burn a freshly downloaded Fedora 10 DVD ISO image. My dad gave me some blank LightScribe DVDs a while back, so I thought I’d give them a try, not having done so before.
After a quick look around it appears the only LightScribe labelling software available for Linux is proprietary. LaCie provide the software in RPM packages which is nice if you are a Fedora user like me. (Apparently they have tested it with the other major distros, which is nice to see.) It installed fine under Fedora 10 beta, which was a nice surprise given that it was apparently written for Fedora 5. It didn’t install a menu entry, but firing up the “LaCie Lightscribe Labeller”, ‘4L-gui’, provided a reasonably nice experience.
I grabbed some DVD media artwork from the Fedora art team. There were two labels in each image file, so I had to pick one and chop it in half with the GIMP. I then cropped it to remove the alignment patterns, and then did an autocrop to crop to the edge of the DVD label. Then it was a simple matter of importing it in the 4L-gui and selecting ‘fit image height to disc’.
Writing the disc label took a bewilderingly long 15 minutes. I suppose it is effectively doing the same thing as burning a CD, but it’s a big wait for little reward. The inscribed label is a hazy monochrome image that is below the surface of the disc.
In future I think I’ll just use a pen. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to the see the improvement in the quality of Linux software provided by a hardware vendor. It would be even better if they would free the code. This would enable distros to incorporate the software into the main repos, making the experience a bit more streamlined and integrated.