dvdauthor is a program that will generate a DVD movie from a valid mpeg2 stream that should play when you put it in a DVD player. To start you need mpeg files that contain the necessary DVD VOB packets. These can be generated by passing '-f 8' to mplex. See the included utility makevob. There are 3 steps to building the DVD directory structure on your HDD. 1. Delete a previously authored dvd dvddirdel [-o dir] WARNING! This will delete without discrimination the contents of the directory that you specify! 2. Create your titlesets dvdauthor [-o dir] [audio/video/subpicture options] [chapters] To create 1 chapter per mpeg, simply do dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] chap1.mpg chap2.mpg chap3.mpg... To manually specify chapters, use the '--chapters' option dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] -c chap1a.mpg chap1b.mpg -c chap2a.mpg chap2b.mpg .... To add chapters every fifteen minutes, do dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] -c 0,15:00,30:00,45:00,1:00:00,1:15:00... longvideo.mpg Call dvdauthor for each titleset you want to create. Note that due to the DVD standard, all audio, video, and subpicture options must be set once for the entire titleset; i.e. you cannot mix pal and ntsc video in the same titleset. For that you must generate separate titlesets. Run dvdauthor -h to see the audio, video, and subpicture options. Note that dvdauthor can autodetect most parameters except the language. 3. Create the table of contents dvdauthor -T [-o dir] Viola! You now have a DVD directory structure that will probably work! You can now write this out to your DVD, mini-DVD (CD), or just play it from your HDD. To generate the UDF image to burn to DVD, use mkisofs from cdrtools-1.11a27 or later. Simply pass it the -dvd-video option. BTW, if you have an old HDD that you use for generating dvd images, you can create /usr/local/etc/dvdauthor.conf or ~/.dvdauthorrc and add the line: WORKDIR=foo Then you won't need to specify -o to dvddirgen or dvdauthor. Alternatively, you could just set WORKDIR=mydvd to always have it create a DVD in the current working directory. links: cdrtools: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html includes a version of mkisofs that can create udf images, but it's in the alpha directory mjpegtools: http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net includes mplex for building an mpeg2 system stream with hooks for DVD navigation packets mpucoder's site on dvd specs: http://mpucoder.dynodns.net/dvd/index.html details on the DVD format libdvdread: http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/downloads.shtml includes ifo_dump for disecting DVD's. the library also serves as the basis for vob_dump. libxml2: http://www.xmlsoft.org/ ImageMagick: http://www.imagemagick.org/