Burning video DVDs

Burning a data DVD under Ubuntu: easy. Brasero has a relatively straightforward interface. Burning a data DVD under KDE3: easy. K3b's interface is probably even more straightforward. Burning a data DVD under KD4: less easy. K3b has not yet been ported to the KDE4 framework. K3b does currently work on this computer, but it meant installing KDE3 libs. Good luck doing that on, say, Fedora, which I'm told no longer makes KDE3 packages available in their repos.

Burning a video DVD under any version of Linux: hard. Neither Brasero nor K3b offers an obvious way of doing it. There is a menu option in K3b called "new video DVD project", but it isn't obvious to me that it does what I want it to do: convert miscellaneous types of video files into something that will play on a regular DVD player, and burn each individual video as a separate chapter on the DVD.

Fortunately there is a not-nearly-as-intimidating-as-it-looks guide to doing it all using command line tools. For bonus points, it lets you create a menu for the video DVD as well. It's the tovid suite of tools, and instructions for using them are available here.

HOWEVER, be warned. The tovid package for Ubuntu does not put the commands "makemenu", "makexml" and "makedvd" in locations that are in your $PATH (ie they will not be run if you type their names at the command line the way the linked instructions tell you to do). They are stored in the directory /usr/share/tovid/ instead. This was apparently done deliberately by the package maintainers. See post 8 on this thread at the Ubuntu forums:

This is not a bug.

These utilities were diverted because they're low-level utilities and most users aren't interested in them. Moreover, the names are too generic, resulting in namespace pollution. "makemenu"? "makexml"?

The result is slightly annoying, but not a showstopper once you understand the problem. You just have to remember to call the commands by their full path. For example, instead of typing "makemenu" you type "/usr/share/tovid/makemenu". The Ubuntu thread linked above has instructions about how to stop having to always do that if it gets too annoying.