My First Dvd

A couple of friends of mine got married recently. A friend of theirs had given them a powerpoint and they wanted it to be on DVD so the hall could play it on the large screen. I went ahead and offered to do the transition. Let me tell you it was a bit more work than I expected, mainly because I was trying to get it going with a regular CD/burner and the open source tools all let me down.

I mainly tried qdvdauthor and DVD Flick to try and get it going. While they are both nice and I made and burned ISO's, neither worked. Now to be fair, I was using regular CD's, and I think my player may be at fault. I also used dvd-slideshow to make the pictures into a video. The main problem with dvd-slideshow was that the AC3 didn't work. It could probably be a gentoo issue that I should look at, but for now I'm a bit sick of it.

So on the day of the wedding, I broke down and bought a DVD-R drives, some recordable DVDs, and the package came with the Nero 7 tool suite. It's a memorex drive for $45. Memorex is a decent brand, it was the cheapest, and it came with software, all big pluses. In like 20 minutes I had it going, so I'm happy with it. The drive is a bit noisy, but any CD drive that really spins up usually is. Overall though, I'm a bit happy. I made some assumptions and mistakes with the audio, but it worked out. I think I'll definitely have to look into doing DVD Christmas cards this year, it will be a hoot I think.