Notes on Linux

A common error message people may encounter when making a DVD:

"WARN: Skipping sector, waiting for first VOBU..."

I come by this error fairly often when presented with video files that were created in half-dvd format (352x480 resolution).

The solution is to demultiplex and remultiplex the file. It's useful to know how do to this manually as some automatic scripts like tovid may not always work as expected.

Let's say we have a video file called start.mpg which is already in half-dvd resolution. We make use of the mpgtx and mplex utilities:

mpgtx -d -b test.mpg start.mpg
mplex -f 8 -M -V -o final.mpg test.mpg-0.m2v test.mpg-0.mp2

Now that we have our remuxed file we can process to make a DVD from it like so: (replacing /dev/cdrom1 with the device name of the burner in your system)

makexml final.mpg -out MyDisc
makedvd -device /dev/cdrom1 -burn MyDisc.xml

To perform the burning you may need to be root.

mpgtx can be downloaded from mpgtx.sourceforge.net

To learn about the other utilities the best place to start is tovid.