[vdr] Archiving on DVD *on the Mac*

[Daniel Schneider <d.r.schneider@gmx.ch>]

>My question would be: What solution are you guys using? What are the
>advantages/disadvantages? If you are using DVD, which one: DVD-R, DVD-RW, or
>DVD+RW? Is any special software needed for DVD mastering? On the Mac I'd use
>the iDVD application to master a disc,

You can't use iDVD for mastering a DVD from VDR MPEG-2 files, because 
iDVD only accepts DV files as input format (which are encoded 
automatically by iDVD to MPEG-2). On the Mac you can use DVD Studio 
Pro, but you have to convert the VDR MPEG-2 transport stream to 
demultiplexed MPEG-2 program stream with the PC tool PVAstrumento, 
which is the only reliable converter (others produce a delay between 
video and audio). You can run PVAstrumento on your linux box with the 
"Windows emulator" Wine, but if you're no linux crack I recommend 
doing it on your Mac with Virtual PC. If you want to cut the vdr 
recordings frame accurate, you'll need the Windows tool M2-Edit 
(commercial), but this one is very slow and doesn't run acceptably in 
Virtual PC (at least not on my 867 MHz G4), so you'll need a Windows 
machine (or you'll have to boot your linux box in Windows). If you 
plan to archive movies which are quite long (longer than 2 hours) on 
DVD, depending on the datarate of the TV channel these could be 
larger than 4 GB, that's a problem for Windows 98/ME, so you'll need 
Windows 2000 or better XP which must be on a separate machine to be 
able to mount the Windows 2000/XP volume with samba on the linux box, 
then you can copy the > 4 GB VDR recordings (after joining the parts 
of the recording) to the Windows 2000/XP volume and process it with 
M2-Edit and/or PVAstrumento.


>  but it would be nice to have software
>which is integrated into VDR.

That would be great, but there's no linux DVD-Video authoring 
solution at the moment.

We also would need a frame accurate cutting routine integrated in VDR 
(which isn't easy to program, because you need to reencode some 
frames around the cutting point) and a linux version of PVAstrumento, 
which was talked about some time ago but nothing happened until today 
:-(

cu Dany