standalone compatibility

[bgrant]

I've noticed lately as I've started doing video projects for church and distributing burned video DVD's to lots of people that discs I author with dvdauthor in Linux do not play correctly in a large percentage of standalone players. The same footage authored with iDVD on the Mac and burned on the same USB burner with the same brand DVD-R's plays fine in most all standalone players that people I know use.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Anyone know why and what the difference in the disc structure may be that causes the different results? Any suggestions? Thanks.

[Baldrick]

how do you burn in linux?

[bgrant]

qdvdauthor -> mkisofs -> k3b

From the Mac: iDvd to dmg file -> xfer to Linux -> rename dmg to iso -> k3b

I don't have a DVD burner on the Mac. So K3B is burning dvd-video iso images from Linux in both cases.

[spectroelectro]

K3B is T*H*E DVD burning app in Linux, so you don't have a choice there. Must be something hinky in K3B. Unfortunately this is a common problem, regardless of your operating system. iDVD comes from Spruce; Apple bought Spruce and deep-sixed their excellent Windows software SpruceUp and DVD Maestro and ported Spruce's products to the Mac to produce iDVD. I've always had superb results when authoring DVDs with either SpruceUp or DVD Maestro, so I'm guessing that Spruce did a great job of writing DVD authoring software that generates 100% compatible DVDs. Alas, K3B doesn't seem to produce 100% compatible DVDs and it's not obvious why or how.

The only suggestion would be to author DVDs on your Mac. Linux just isn't there yet as far as DVD authoring support is concerned.

[bgrant]

I don't think it's K3B but is dvdauthor instead. This is because a DVD authored on the Mac and generated to an image file, then transferred to my Linux box and burned with K3B works fine. It's only DVD's created with dvdauthor that seem to be incompatible with several players. It is doing something "non-standard" to the disc structure that Apple does not, I guess.