Not everyone can watch media on their computer (apparently not everyone even has a computer -- who knew?). Anyway, I had occasion to need to convert some media stored in a good quality avi ino a DVD that would play on an average standalone DVD player. This is quite straightforward with Linux and relies on a few small and useful command line tools. You will probably find many GUI tools that do the same thing but I like to have a scriptable command line method, and anyway, the GUI tools are usually just front ends to the command line tools but with less functionality.
The process is straightforward; first convert the avi into an mpg using ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i in.avi -y -target pal-dvd -sameq out.mpg
Now create the DVD file structure:
dvdauthor --title -o dvd -f out.mpg
Build a table of contents:
dvdauthor -o dvd -T
Now convert the DVD structure into an ISO which are easier to handle and archive so that you can quickly run off a physical disk as required:
mkisofs -dvd-video -o dvd.iso dvd/
