From KODAK PlayFull HD MP4 to DVD on Ubuntu Linux

One of the great difficulties you run into in Linux is video editing.  And what I mean by that is that the push and go solutions often don’t work with the formats you want to hand them.

So here’s my scenario:  I recorded a church service of 1 hour and 50 minutes in 1080P.  The PlayFull split the video out over 3 files after 3.9Gb each.  The Linux tools I tried for dropping straight to DVD didn’t merge the videos, nor did it go smoothly to even play what it did convert.

And after trying different methods such as MP4Box, mencoder, and ffmpeg; I found a working solution.  The web page that gave the best instructions, that didn’t raise errors when I ran the commands, was from ffmpeg’s website.  How to concatenate (join, merge) media files The second set of commands under the Concat Protocal title has the working solution.  I will go ahead and place the commands I used here.

avconv -i PART1.MP4 -c copy -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -f mpegts in1.ts
avconv -i PART2.MP4 -c copy -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -f mpegts in2.ts
avconv -i “concat:in1.ts|in2.ts” -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc output.mp4

One thing to note is that using ffmpeg is depreciated.  Simply type avconv where it says to write ffmpeg. Also you’ll notice the mostly duplicate lines 1 & 2.  You can process as many parts as you want by handing in another one of the lines per segment.  Then just add the outputted files in the third line as part of the “concat:file1.ts|file2.ts|file3.ts” etc.  You should do this even if it’s only 1 file you are working with.

The greatest benefit of this is that the outputted format is both lossless and now usable by the push and go software a.k.a. COMPATIBLE!  So in my case I open the video with Bombono DVD. Then I right click on the video file within the application and I click “Adjust Bitrate to Fit to Disk”.  Then I output to ISO image (this is because I want to verify everything before I go and burn the DVD).  So under output I chose the file name and an empty folder for the output.

Once the ISO image is finished being made the DVD is pretty much done.  I open the ISO in Gnome MPlayer to verify everything, including video/audio sync, video parts paired in right ordering, and quality.  After that I like to use K3B to burn my discs.  This is just personal preference.  It is the sweetest CD/DVD burner app ^_^

The last test is to pop the disc into a DVD player.  And it works!  I’ve had no problems with this sequence of steps.  The most CPU intensive step is the transcoding Bombono DVD does in the background as it shrink the video to fit to DVD.  I’m running a 64bit AMD Quadcore with 8Gigs of RAM for this.

Happy DVD making ALL!  May your projects all be successful, or may you atleast learn from them ;-).

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God bless!
– Daniel P. Clark