XLAB Tech

How to make a DVD from Sony camcoder MTS files in Ubuntu

First I would like to explain what is our goal. Sony camcorder records the movies in *.mts files. Those are not compatible with all DVD players. Our goal is to make a DVD from Sony camcorder movies that can be played with almost every DVD player. First we shoot some movies and transfer them to the PC. Than we need to install mplayer. To get the latest version is good to get it right from the repository.

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
./configure
make
make install

To get the more popular AVI file from a MST file just go to the folder where the MTS file is saved and run the next line in the console.

mencoder INPUT.MTS -o OUTPUT.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=10000 -fps 50 -vf scale=1280:720

Ok. As you can see I scaled the movie to the lower resolution. You can skip that if you want and you will have the full AVI resolution. But if you would like to make a DVD that could be run on all DVD players, than your movie resolution will have to be lowered during the DVD production. You can also downscale the frames per second (fps) to the desired value.

Now translate one file from MTS to AVI. If there are more files to do, it is good to have a script that will run on all files in the folder:

#!/bin/bash
for file in *.MTS
do
outfile=${file%.MTS}.avi
echo $file ” ” $outfile
mencoder $file -o $outfile -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=10000 -fps 60000/1001 -vf scale=1280:720
done

Now we have all files in AVI format. The next step is to use the DeVeDe program to make the DVD. DeVeDe is a nice and easy program to make a DVD. At the beginning we see the window where we can chose what we would like to do(Screenshot 1). The first option “Video DVD” is the best if we would like to make our movies playable on all DVD players.

DeVeDe Screenshot 1

After we choose the first option, we get the window with the settings for our DVD (Screenshot 2). At the top there are two text-boxes. In the first box we can add the titles that will be shown in the menu, in the second we can add files that belong to each title.

DeVeDe screenshot 2

When we have added all the movies to the DVD, we make the DVD menu. Press the “menu options” button and adjust the menu settings and see the preview. For a demonstration I have put the XLAB logo as background and pressed the preview button (Screenshot 3).

DeVeDe screenshot 3

When you are satisfied with your creation you just make the DVD. DeVeDe makes an iso-image that can be burn to your DVD or DVDs with your favorite DVD burn program.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 22:30 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.