dvdauthor

dvdauthor is a program that generates a DVD-Video movie from a valid MPEG-2 stream so it will play when inserted into a DVD player.

To start, you need MPEG-2 files that contain the necessary DVD-Video VOB packets. These can be generated with FFmpeg, or by passing -f 8 to mplex.

Quickstart

Build and install

./bootstrap
./configure
make
make install

If you do not want to install into /usr/local/bin, pass a custom prefix to configure:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Build on Windows

You can build dvdauthor on Windows using MSYS2, which provides a Unix-like environment with MinGW toolchain:

1. Install MSYS2 if you haven't already
2. Open MSYS2 MINGW64 terminal
3. Install build dependencies:

pacman -S base-devel autoconf autoconf2.72 automake libtool gettext gettext-devel \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-gettext mingw-w64-x86_64-pkgconf \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-libdvdread mingw-w64-x86_64-libpng mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 \
  mingw-w64-x86_64-fontconfig mingw-w64-x86_64-freetype mingw-w64-x86_64-fribidi

4. Build dvdauthor:

./bootstrap
WANT_AUTOCONF=2.72 WANT_AUTOMAKE=1.16 autoreconf -fiv
./configure --prefix=/mingw64/local
make
make install

Alternatively, you can download pre-built Windows binaries from the releases page.

Build with Nix

Two Nix package definitions are provided:

• nix/nixos-26.05.nix The canonical nixos-26.05 derivation from SourceForge with patches applied from upstream.
• nix/package.nix A local repository variant that builds from this source tree

Using nix/package.nix (from local repository)

To build directly from this repository:

nix build --impure --expr '(import <nixpkgs> {}).callPackage ./nix/package.nix {}'

The result will be symlinked as result/ in the current directory, containing the built dvdauthor binaries.

Installing the Nix build

To install the built package into your Nix profile:

nix profile install --impure --expr '(import <nixpkgs> {}).callPackage ./nix/package.nix {}'

Basic workflow

1. Delete a previously authored DVD:

   dvddirdel [-o dir]

2. Create your titlesets:

   dvdauthor [-o dir] [audio/video/subpicture options] [chapters]

   For a single chapter per MPEG file, you can do:

   dvdauthor -o dvd chap1.mpg chap2.mpg chap3.mpg

   To manually specify chapters:

   dvdauthor -o dvd -c chap1a.mpg chap1b.mpg -c chap2a.mpg chap2b.mpg

3. Create the table of contents:

   dvdauthor -T -o dvd

After that, you have a DVD-Video directory structure on disk that should work. You can then write it to a DVD, mini-DVD (CD), or play it directly from the HDD. To generate the UDF image used for burning to DVD, use mkisofs with the -dvd-video option.

Note for Windows users: On Windows, run commands with the .exe extension (e.g., dvdauthor.exe instead of dvdauthor), or ensure the installation directory is added to your system Path environment variable to run commands without the extension.

How to Use

There are 3 steps to building the DVD directory structure on your HDD.

1. Delete a previously authored DVD

dvddirdel [-o dir]

To guard against mistakes, this only deletes files and subdirectories that look like part of a DVD-Video structure.

2. Create your titlesets

dvdauthor [-o dir] [audio/video/subpicture options] [chapters]

To create 1 chapter per MPEG file, 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. Due to the DVD-Video 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, generate separate titlesets.

Run dvdauthor -h to see the audio, video, and subpicture options. Note that dvdauthor can auto-detect most parameters except the language.

3. Create the table of contents

dvdauthor -T [-o dir]

Example

Linux/macOS:

./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

# Create a DVD structure from an MPEG-2 source
# (example assumes a valid DVD-Video MPEG-2 file exists)
dvdauthor -o mydvd -a 0:en /path/to/input.mpg
dvdauthor -T -o mydvd

Windows (using pre-built binary):

1. Download dvdauthor-windows-x86_64.zip from releases
2. Extract the archive to your desired location (e.g., C:\Program Files\dvdauthor)
3. Add the bin directory to your system Path (or use full path when running commands)
4. Use commands as shown above, with .exe suffix:

# Create a DVD structure
dvdauthor.exe -o mydvd -a 0:en C:\path\to\input.mpg
dvdauthor.exe -T -o mydvd

The exact audio/video options depend on your MPEG stream and desired DVD settings. See dvdauthor -h for the full list.

See also

FFmpeg

See http://www.ffmpeg.org/.

Note that packages included with your distro are almost certainly out of date. Always use the latest version from the Git repository or the latest release.

mjpegtools

See http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net.

It includes mplex for building an MPEG-2 system stream with hooks for DVD-Video navigation packets.

mpucoder's site on DVD specifications

See http://www.mpucoder.com/DVD/.

It contains details on the DVD-Video format.

Inside DVD-Video on Wikibooks

See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Inside_DVD-Video.

This is a work-in-progress wikibook designed to contain all publicly available information on DVD-Video, in a readable format.