Burning video DVD is harder than you think. It involves transcoding, subtitles, burning and other complicated things. Each step may not work for you, let alone on Ubuntu!

I just created my first video DVD. My experience may help you get less trouble on burning your video DVD on Ubuntu/Linux.

Most DVD videos are encoded in MPEG-2 format. So, if your original video is not encoded into MPEG-2, the first thing you need to do is to transcode it into MPEG-2. There are lots of powerful tools to handle it, such as ffmpeg and mencoder. They are command-line tools. If you are a crazy fan of command line, you definitely should try them. However, the command line arguments will generally be 10 lines! If you cannot handle them(like me), just try some GUI tools.

The first option is Avidemux. It’s powerful and easy to use. However, its H264 support is poor. When I tried to transcode a H264 video into MPEG-2, it crashed every time. Maybe it works fine with other format, but I have no chances to take a try.

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A new blog has been set up. I will post my Chinese articles there.

Here, only English contents will appear from now on. All the old articles in both languages here will be reserved. I will use this blog to post some technique articles related to Linux, programming in English. It should be a good way to practice my English writing.

My Chinese blog: http://blog.chunhao.net