#Ffmpeg

I was converting a TV show I’d  to DVD format using ffmpeg, but the resulting file had the wrong audio channel. At first I thought it had no audio at all, but then I noticed it had a voice over occasionally explaining what was happening; “so-n-so has just entered the room…”.

It appears that ffmpeg had selected the wrong audio stream. For some reason, it had had selected the second audio stream instead of the first. The fix is simple enough, you can manually set the streams to use with the -map option. The command below works well for UK freeview.

There are many GUI programs that allow you to convert avi/divx/xvid files into DVD format, such as DeVeDe, but I somehow prefer to use command line tools. I know, I’m just weird like that!

There are 3 basic steps in creating a simple DVD:

1. Convert the video files
2. create the DVD structure
3. Burn the DVD

So, to convert a file to a DVD compatible format use something like:

ffmpeg -i "non dvd format input video.avi" -y -target pal-dvd -sameq -aspect 16:9 output.mpg

Next we need to create the DVD structure. We’ll use dvdauthor for this.
Rather than pass eveything into dvdauthor via the command line, it’s easier to put the settings into an xml file.