How to correctly write a video DVD from MPEG-2 files

[Richard Shaw]

Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> Long story short:
> 	I have a new video camera (sony dcr sr-42).  I've records 75 minutes of
> video on it.  I can mount its hdd over USB to my (fc6) laptop and access
> the .MPG files which are the recording.  Two of them, since the first
> one is 2GB in size, the 2nd file contains the remainder of the video.
> Seems to be an MPEG-2 video w/AC3 audio embedded.
> 	How do I write this to a DVD that anyone can stick it their stand-alone
> DVD player and play as a single "movie"?
> 	I tried using "dvdstyler", but it errors out while checking the video
> for MPEG-2 errors (lots of bogus packet sizes), and then "mplex"
> complains about the input files it gets as being unrecognizable.
> 	dvdauthor assumes that I have VOB files already (I don't).
> 	MythTV will write out its .mpg recording to DVD for me (and I've done
> it with MythTV recordings), but these files aren't a part of MythTV.
> 	Any pointers to some *GOOD* tutorials or HowTo scripts that don't
> assume anything?  Everything I've found so far assumes either AVI or
> DIVX as the starting video format, or assumes you already know how to
> build VOBs for the DVD (I don't).
> 	I was surprised that K3B will write data DVDs, but not video DVDs
> (unless I already have the VOB files).
> 	What packages/scripts have the knowhow to comvert my MPEG-2s into a
> playable DVD?  Nothing fancy, just insert the DVD, and have it play the
> single "movie".  No menus needed.  No submenus/chapters.
> 	Thanks!
>
>   
I downloaded the DVDStyler manual and it states dvdauthor is a 
dependency so it looks like it uses it to generate the DVD compatible 
file system. That leads me to believe that if it doesn't seem to work 
then you probably will not have better luck using dvdauthor directly but 
it is still worth a try as you may get a more useful error message.

Are you sure that the files are fully MPEG2 compliant? If you play with 
something like mplayer from the command line does the video and audio 
codec's it says it's using seem correct?

Richard