burning a dual layered dvd video

[Andy Sparrow]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 12:47:17AM +0200, Philipp Ost wrote:
> Dave wrote:
> [snipped]
> > Can you get me pointed in the right direction?
>
> I use the following command line to burn DL Video-DVDs.
>
> # growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/cd0=$file.iso -speed=2
>
> It works for me.

+1 what he said, although there is a -dvd-video option, and that 
seems to work better for me when mastering DVD's I've authored 
myself (I forget why). You may find that:

a) Does the directory you started from play as a DVD correctly? Use
xine, ogle or mplayer to check this. If it doesn't, then burning a
copy of it - even with the -dvd-video flag - isn't going to work
either.

b) Your DVD-DL burner sets the wrong booktype (often DVD-RAM) in
the media, so your hardware player doesn't recognise it.

Does the computer itself play/recognise the DVD afterwards? If it
doesn't, there's likely some other problem.

Can you mount the DVD on the computer, and does it look like the
source directory you pointed it at? Does it have VIDEO_TS and
AUDIO_TS directoroes immediately under the root level? (Note that
CD9660 filesystems may look to be in all lower-case on BSD - this
won't stop the DVD from working)

Can you read the entire DVD without I/O errors reported? Some 
brands/batches are riddled with flaws. Use a large blocksize and   
just dump it to null:

        dd if=/dev/dvd of=/dev/null bs=2M

If booktype is the problem, you may find it possible to use
dvd+rw-booktype to reset the booktype. This only works with a
relatively limited number of drives - but often DVD burners are
actually OEM'd from one of the working ones, so you may get away
with frobbing the detect strings...

c) The pause when your set-top box switches layers on a DL DVD is
so intrusive to the video (2-3 seconds freeze for mine) that you
give up and just use DVD-DL for data disks anyway.

Most DVD's can be transcoded down to fit on a 4.3GB single-layer
pretty well. You can also dvdunauthor it, remove unwanted junk
(extra language tracks, extras etc.) and re-author it.

There's also a Win32 program that did both of the above quite well 
before DVD-DL came around, DVD Shrink I think it's called.
 
If you're just going to do a bit-for-bit copy, use 'dd' to create
the ISO file and set the blocksize to the DVD sector size, pad a 
partial read with zeros.