Month: October 2011

Revisited – make a DVD out of just about any video file.

I recently was asked to create a DVD from a .mov video file. I had already made a post about how to do this under windows using windows ports of various linux based applications. Coming back to it and this time running completely on linux, I have realised that it can be done much more simply.

The required software can be installed using

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg dvdauthor growisofs

First off the video file has to be transcoded into an dvd compatible mpeg2 file.

ffmpeg -i <video.mkv> -aspect 16:9 -target pal-dvd output.mpg

Then the file has to be authored into the correct VOB files using dvdauthor. To make sure that there are no errors in the process the following environment variable must be set.

export VIDEO_FORMAT=PAL

Rather than using an xml control file for simple DVD’s the following two dvdauthor commands will suffice.

dvdauthor -o DVD/ -t output.mpg &&
dvdauthor -o DVD/ -T

Finally the files are burned to DVD media using growisofs

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video -V "<name>" ./DVD
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RapCAD printer interface

I have been starting to think about how to integrate the controls for my Reprap Mendel into RapCAD. I was inspired by Kliments pronterface console which as well as being colorful also looks very intuitive and clutter free. So far all I have done is added a simple prototype GUI interface which can be accessed via the print button from the RapCAD main toolbar. This will allow basic integration and testing with the libreprap library.

Ideally of course I also need to finish off the remaining electronics on my Reprap Mendel so that the integration can be tested properly. So in many ways I want the features that I am developing now to motivate me to finish of my Mendel, which after an initial bout of progress has been sitting on the shelf and collecting dust for a year. The reason it has been so long is that I got distracted writing RapCAD. For some reason I thought that I would have enough time to spend on both projects, but as always I am going to have to manage my spare time more carefully.

Version 0.5.0 is available this month. See the Download Page for details.