Burned a DVD using Linux! Success!!

Such small things make us happy. Well, this was not a small thing, as I've been wanting to use Linux to burn a DVD of my custom videos created from Cinelerra for a loooong time. Up until now, I've copped out and just rebooted to XP to get the dirty work done. This was the first time I really sat down and muddled through the arcane commands to get a DVD burned. In fact, not only did I get a DVD-R burned, but I also figured out how to get a DVD-RW formatted and a DVD image burned to that! F'n A!!

I will work on a doc later, but here are the quick and dirty steps to burning a DVD on a Fedora Core 4 system:

REFERENCES
http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra/cinelerra.html#MAKING%20A%20DVD
http://dvd.chevelless230.com/
http://www.kerklied.com/adrie/presentatiedvdmakeneng.html
http://users.dslextreme.com/~craig.lawson/linux_notes/video.html#Writing_to_DVD_media
growisofs syntax

PREREQUISITES
I needed ifogen, so get the latest copy of dvdrtools found here:
http://www.arklinux.org/projects/dvdrtools

CREATE DVD-READY MPEG
[root@computer 20060319]# ffmpeg -i test.m2v -i test.wav -target dvd output.mpg

TEST DVD-READY MPEG
[root@computer 20060319]# mplayer output.mpg

MAKE THE DIRECTORY TO PUT DVD IMAGE IN
[root@computer 20060319]# mkdir -p dvd/VIDEO_TS

CREATE DVD READY FILES (VOB/BUF/IFO)
[root@computer 20060319]# ifogen output.mpg -o dvd

VIEW DIRECTORY
[root@computer 20060319]# ll dvd/VIDEO_TS/
total 34444
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12288 Mar 26 14:58 VTS_01_0.BUP
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12288 Mar 26 14:58 VTS_01_0.IFO
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35205120 Mar 26 14:58 VTS_01_1.VOB

CREATE TABLE OF CONTENTS
[root@computer 20060319]# ifogen -T -o dvd
INFO: dvdauthor creating table of contents
scanning dvd/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO

VIEW DIRECTORY
[root@computer 20060319]# ll dvd/VIDEO_TS/
total 34460
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6144 Mar 26 14:59 VIDEO_TS.BUP
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6144 Mar 26 14:59 VIDEO_TS.IFO
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12288 Mar 26 14:58 VTS_01_0.BUP
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12288 Mar 26 14:58 VTS_01_0.IFO
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35205120 Mar 26 14:58 VTS_01_1.VOB

CREATE THE DVD IMAGE
[root@computer 20060319]# mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o dvd.iso dvd/

USE -scanbus SWITCH TO VERIFY DEVICE NAME
[root@computer 20060319]# dvdrecord -scanbus

THIS COMMAND DID NOT WORK WITH MY ATA NEC DRIVE LABELED 1,0,0
[root@computer 20060319]# dvdrecord -ignsize -dao -v dev=1,0,0 fs=67108864 dvd.iso

THIS COMMAND CHECKS YOUR DRIVE
[root@computer 20060319]# cdrecord -dev=ATA:1,0,0 driveropts=help -checkdrive

THIS COMMAND BURNS A DVD-R WITH THE DEVICE LABELED ATA:1,0,0
[root@computer 20060319]# dvdrecord -ignsize -dao -v dev=ATA:1,0,0 fs=67108864 dvd.iso

THIS COMMAND FORMATS A DVD-RW
[root@computer 20060319]# dvd+rw-format -f /dev/hdc

THIS COMMAND BURNS A DVD ISO IMAGE TO A REWRITEABLE DVD DISC
[root@computer 20060319]# growisofs -Z /dev/hdc=dvd.iso

Until next time..good burning to you!

5/30/07 update: Here's a great article on the many types of DVDs and how to use them in Linux:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/creating-dvds.html

motion stabilization effect experiment

Update 2009/03/17
I finally put together a motion stabilization tutorial. Hopefully, it helps folks who are as confused as I using the thing.
*** end update ***

Tonight, I used Cinelerra's motion tracker to stabilize a section of shakey video. The source was some sunset footage taken in high wind. The wind was so blustery that the camera and tripod were shaking. Cinelerra's motion stabilization saved the day, though.

Here is the video before motion stabilization
Here is the video after motion stabilization applied
(both vids ~7MB)

Pretty good, no?

Update:
Here's the next in the series:
/2006/10/motion-experiment-part-ii.html

a foul up

Last night, I encoded my first full length video podcast as a Quicktime from Cinelerra. I brought it into iTunes and used the 'Convert Selection for iPod' feature and it spent all night (from 11pm to 11am) converting. The .MOV file specs were pretty heavy:
- 50 minutes long
- 720x404 resolution
- 524MB

I used a PIII, 1.5Ghz laptop w/512MB of memory to do the conversion, hence the slowness. Once the file was converted, both audio and video tracks played back! Hooray! This was a lot better than my previous result wherein the audio was gone. So, I found the new .M4V file on the filesystem and looked at the metadata in the properties. I saw that there was no metadata, so not thinking that it could have a deleterious effect on the file, I added the missing metadata to the file as it existed on XP. Bad, nary I say REAL bad idea!

After adding the metadata to the file, the .M4V would no longer play in iTunes (6.0.4) or Quicktime. To put it politely..RATS!! I tried removing the metadata, but no go..the file still would not play. So, the twelve hours I spent converting the video was all for naught, cause now I have to do it all again. Wunnerful.

Let me be clear though..
1) you CAN edit the metadata for an iTunes video podcast within iTunes
2) you CANNOT edit the metadata for an iTunes video podcast in the filesystem. This will break the audio for the podcast.

This being the case, I decided to move my website over to my audio workstation in order to allow me to use my main video editing workstation to do the iTunes conversion. Screw the portable..conversion took way too long there. Copying the website from the video editing box to the audio workstation would allow me to use either of my primary machines to serve web content depending on which one I was using at the time. Both are dual boot setups, XP or Win2K and Fedora Core 4, so at least now I have flexibility. Of course, I wish it was under different circumstances that I make that improvement to my workstation setup. Argh.

So now the file is converting on my P4, 3.2Ghz, 1GB box. I'm hoping to get at least a 3x improvement in conversion time. So, I'm looking at 5pm today for the file to be done. 1-5pm..4hrs. Yeesh. I need a faster box..ain't it always the case!

UPDATE: Good news! It only took two hours to convert the file..sweet! I think the remarkable improvement may be bolstered by the MPEG compression available in my All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro video card. I should switch video cards and try this to verify..

Other things of note I'd like to get done:
- setup RSS feed for newly created video
- update Beginner's Guide for bitrate calculation/QT M4V metadata warning
- change rendering partition to ext2 (non-journaling file system)
- eventually get RAID0 back up and running for rendering partition

At least my cam should be coming back from the shop this week!

problem rendering files with custom resolutions

Last night, I exported an MPG stream and put it into iTunes. The MPG in iTunes plays just fine. When I converted it using iTunes, though, the resulting file had no sound. What is going on here? If I use the Cinelerra standard YUV4MPEG pipe, with -target DVD, the video renders fine and comes back into Cinelerra in its' entirety. But when I use a custom resolution size (480x320), the video track gets truncated shorter than the audio track when I reimport the rendered MPEG back into Cinelerra. So something is definetly wrong about how Cinelerra is rendering files with custom resolutions. I guess I'm going to have to enter a bug because no one seems to be responding to my posts on cvs.cinelerra.org.

Tonight, I'm rendering the file as MOV and hopefully that will solve my issues. Of course, this is all extra work, because my original intent is to do all of this within Cinelerra, instead of having to go out.

More evidence of strangeness is that even though xine and mplayer played the MPG, ffplay played the video stream, but there was no audio. That may be telling me something.

optimal drive/partition setup for Cinelerra

To keep it simple, I would use five drives and do four logical partitions. This would allow for all filesystems to be on separate drive spindles:
- one system drive for /root, /usr, etc - ext3
- one storage drive for source files - ext3
- one working drive for index files in .bcast - ext2
- two working drives in RAID0 (stripe set) for destination render - ext2

If you only have four drives, just keep the source files on the system drive. I would think the index files would be the most used/most reads. I have to test this use "iostat -x " to monitor read/write stats of each physical device. I assume the render partition would be the heaviest hit, so make that your RAID stripe. You can do software RAID, but as a person who runs a decent sized HP web server farm, we've always depended on hardware RAID because CPU cycles are offloaded to the RAID card itself, rather than the operating system using CPU cycles for software RAID. Since rendering is pretty much all CPU, except for the input/index file reads and the destination render file writes, it makes sense that software RAID would tend to slow your rendering down.

Finally, ext2 is very important..no journaling necessary for the working drives..just storage.

When I used Adobe Premiere, I noticed that my ATI All In Wonder actually sped up the MPEG2 render times by 50%. However, I haven't been able to get the fglrx driver to work w/my dual monitor setup on FC4. Fglrx works with one monitor, but dammit, there's no way I'm going back to just one monitor! But I will need to test out whether or not the fglrx driver speeds rendering for Cinelerra as it does Premiere.

Exporting Video from Cinelerra for a Video iPod

So. I really, REALLY wanted MPEG-4 output from Cinelerra to go directly into iTunes and my brother's iPod. I had output a test file:
http://content.serveftp.net/video/renderTest/test.mpeg4.mov (7.8MB)
that loaded and played in iTunes. However, when I went to upload it, iTunes gave me the message:

"Some of the songs in the iTunes music library, including the song "(Video name)",
were not copied to your iPod because they cannot be played on this iPod."

Luckily, Apple provides a feature called "Convert Selection for iPod" when you right-click.
But GEEZ! I already rendered this thing. I've got to do it again? Ugh. OK. And OH NO! The conversion utility takes a RIDICULOUS amount of time! Even on a very fast machine like mine, a 3.2Ghz P4 with 1GB of PC3200 memory, the conversion speed is roughly 1.5 minutes per minute of video. Argh!! That is way TOO slow. But I went ahead and did the conversion with my short test video. On the bright side, once the video was converted, I could then update my iPod and the video was on my iPod. Hooray!!

I continued playing around and loading many different videos into iTunes. In my travels, I stumbled upon one that did not require a conversion. I was shocked! I then reasoned that I'd save a helluva lot of time if I just produced the videos in the format that iTunes expects in the first place. But how to do that? So, my next course of action was to research why that one file worked in iTunes without a conversion and why mine needed the conversion.

To do this, I analyzed the output of MPlayer to determine the differences between files. I learned quite a bit over the past couple of days about audio and video formats by reviewing the output of MPlayer. It helps to have the text of both files displayed in two windows next to each other in order to more easily compare the files line by line. I've done this for you in the image below (click this link with SHIFT-click to open a second browser window):
http://content.serveftp.net/video/renderTest/cinItunesConversion.jpg

Reviewing the diffences, I noticed the following:
1) iTunes compatible file had the audio track as the first track in the MOV container, my file had the video as the first track
2) iTunes compatible file was 44.1Khz audio, my file was 48000Khz
3) iTunes compatible file included an extra audio header, my file didn't have the extra header
4) iTunes compatible file audio compression method was MPEG-4, my file was twos complement
5) iTunes compatible file FPS rate was 15, my file was 59.97

After way too many hours of trial and error (and scowls from my girlfriend and dog), I am proud to say that I have found the settings in Cinelerra that will make an MPEG-4 video totally compatible with iTunes so that iTunes does not need to re-render (the "Convert Selection for iPod" feature) the video!

Here are the specs:

    For the project:
             Set Format
                         Sample Rate to 44100khz
                         Number of Channels to two
                         FPS can be the FPS of your source video
                         (try lower to 25 or less if problems)
  Width 320
  Height 240 (320x180 fine as well)
    For the render:
 Audio
  MPEG-4 Audio
  Bitrate 128000
  Quantization of 100
 Video
  MPEG-4 Video
  The rest of the parameters are Cinelerra's
                defaults, but I will reiterate here:
   Bitrate 7000000
   Tolerance 500000
   Fixed Quantization selected
   Quantization 10
   Keyframe Interval 45

I don't care how you do it, but you have to get your videos in that format
because iTunes is COMPLETELY STRICT when it comes to these settings! If you expect your video to upload into iTunes without needing a re-render, you
CANNOT deviate from ANY of these settings!!

Caveat: with the possible exception of the MPEG-4 Video defaults. But I
would only deviate from the settings after you've got the file uploaded into
iTunes without any issues first.

Please let me know how this works for everybody,
scott

References:
http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html
http://www.ipodwizard.net/showthread.php?t=4413
http://members.shaw.ca/Kyle-Rogers/
Beginner's Guide to Exporting Video from Cinelerra

Update 10/15/2008
Making a Podcast, by Apple

Beginner's Guide to Exporting Video from Cinelerra

Alright! I've just created a Beginner's Guide to Exporting Video from Cinelerra! In Cinelerra speak, "rendering" means exporting. I hope all you Cinelerra fans out there appreciate it! Please let me know how you like the doc.

:)
enjoy

NYC video posted on Google

This was the first video I created with my JVC HD10U, back in 2004. Got some good jazz keeping the action going in this one:
One Weekend In NYC

using ffmpeg to combine an audio and video file

In order to get my NYC video onto Google, I had to go through a number of steps to get it to a Google-acceptable MPEG2 format:
1) in XP, re-render the original Microsoft WMV file into an AVI using Adobe Premiere
2) again in XP, demux the AVI file (split apart into separate audio and video streams) using TMPGEnc into a DVD-ready, MPEG2 video stream (.m2v file) and a Windows waveform audio (.wav)
3) in Fedora, remux the video using ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i OneWeekendInNYC.wav -i OneWeekendInNYC.m2v -target dvd -hq -minrate 8000000 -title "OneWeekendInNYC" -author "Crazed Mule Productions, Inc." -copyright "2005" -comment "Video of downtown NYC, summer 2005 with jazz accompaniment shot with JVC HD10U" OneWeekendInNYC.mpg

In the above example, ffmpeg has a number of inputs:
1) the audio file: -i OneWeekendInNYC.wav
2) the video file: -i OneWeekendInNYC.m2v
3) a target media type for the combined audio and video file: -target dvd
4) high quality transcode: -hq
5) a minimum bit rate for the compression: -minrate 8000000 (This doesn't seem to work based on the second to the last line of output which shows a lower average bitrate, below)
6) various descriptive metadata (-title "OneWeekendInNYC" -author "Crazed Mule Productions, Inc." -copyright "2005" -comment "Video of downtown NYC, summer 2005 with jazz accompaniment shot with JVC HD10U")
7) the filename of the combined audio and video streams: OneWeekendInNYC.mpg

Here is the output of that command. Note the input files, output filename and second to last line with the average bit rate. I believe the -target dvd overrides the -minrate option:
[root@computer video]# ffmpeg -i OneWeekendInNYC.wav -i OneWeekendInNYC.m2v -target dvd -hq -minrate 8000000 -title "OneWeekendInNYC" -author "Crazed Mule Productions, Inc." -copyright "2005" -comment "Video of downtown NYC, summer 2005 with jazz accompaniment shot with JVC HD10U" /root/OneWeekendInNYC.mpg
ffmpeg version 0.4.9-pre1, build 4753, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
Input #0, wav, from 'OneWeekendInNYC.wav':
Duration: 00:01:57.6, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1536 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Audio: pcm_s16le, 48000 Hz, stereo, 1536 kb/s
Input #1, mpegvideo, from 'OneWeekendInNYC.m2v':
Duration: 00:01:57.6, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 7998 kb/s
Stream #1.0: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480, 29.97 fps, 7998 kb/s
Assuming NTSC for target.
Output #0, dvd, to '/root/OneWeekendInNYC.mpg':
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg2video (hq), yuv420p, 720x480, 29.97 fps, q=2-31, 6000 kb/s
Stream #0.1: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 448 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #1.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.0 -> #0.1
[mpeg2video @ 0x7f6a330]Warning min_rate > 0 but min_rate != max_rate isn't recommended!
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame= 3526 q=0.0 Lsize= 91494kB time=117.6 bitrate=6373.5kbits/s
video:83347kB audio:6431kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 1.911009%

Obviously, there will be some loss of quality with these many rendering steps, but quality is not of primary importance when posting to Google video.

Hope this helps!
mule

Reference
FFMPEG HowTo

working with the Google Video Uploader for Linux

One of the most irritating things about working with the Google Video Uploader for Linux is
1) knowing which Java tool you need to install to get the uploader to work and
2) the damn syntax for executing the JAR archive.

First, install the latest Java Runtime Environment, found here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/jre/install.html

Secondly, once you've got the latest JVM installed, use the following syntax to start the Google Video Uploader for Linux:
java -jar GoogleVideoUploader.jar

Finally, if you are so bold, you may install the entire Java JDK found here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/install.html

These few steps took me about four hours to figure out one day. Frustrating.

Hope this helps folks.

flowery video

Oh, a little Vivaldi is good for the soul! Enjoy this video, full of flowering, buzzing things:
One Weekend in Virginia

Finally. My first video is posted on Google Video!

Enjoy my Nags Head video people!

don't be in the drum section of a music store when your website is down

I had gone into the city to Manny's music yesterday to look at a Roland PD80R drum pad based on the fact that the guy on the phone at Manny's told me they had the pad in stock. Well, when I got there, the idjut who was at the desk couldn't find the pad in the system. Argh. Trip wasted. But just at this moment, I received a system down call. Double yarg!!

Word to the wise: when you're on a SEV 1 call, the worst place in the world is to be in the DRUM section of a music store.."What? The system card failed??! Site down??!! What??!" Truly frustrating and nerve racking. In the end, I bugged out of the city thinking they didn't have it. Also, I was more interested in getting back to Jersey to be available to help.

So today I call back to speak to the original guy to ask him "what the F happened?" This guys' name is Brian, and Brian indeed told me they had it; however, it is shared inventory with Sam Ash across the street. Apparently, the guy who helped me in the store when I got there didn't check. YARG!! So I went home, double-pissed, cause I didn't get to lighten my wallet with a new toy AND the fcking web site was down!! 16 hours later and I'm finally catch some zzz's. Harumph.

Well, today Brian was good enough to walk across the street to Sam's and verify they had the pads in stock. So I may or may not go.

how's that for a friggin weekend?