MPEG-2 Movie allows you to synthesize elemental audio and video streams from Quicktime movies, and multiplex them into a single program stream suitable for burning on DVD or uploading to the internet. This package contains all the command line utilities needed to do so, but no interface to integrate them all.

DVD encoding on a Linux box? NO WAY!

There is a way to generate MPEG-2 movies containing full motion video and stereo audio on a Linux box. These movies utilize the same compression found on a DVD. The encoding sequence is hard but you really aren't doing video until you write MPEG-2 files.

It's unknown whether movies created by MPEG-2 Movie actually play on a DVD decoder because the decoders are too expensive. Your alternatives for playback are XMovie and Broadcast 2000, which can be found at heroine.linuxbox.com.

Step 1: Generating the source movie

Generate a Quicktime movie containing the video and sound. You can also create separate Quicktime movies for video and sound. The sample rate must be 44100 or 48000. Lower sample rates invoke MPEG-2 LSF encoding. If you encode an MPEG-2 LSF stream you won't be able to multiplex it. The framerate you choose must be one of the following:

24000.0/1001.0  // Official rates
24.0
25.0
30000.0/1001.0
30.0
50.0
60000.0/1001.0
60.0

1           // Unofficial economy rates
5
10
12 
15
The unofficial economy rates can only be decoded by libmpeg2. Libmpeg2 is the decoder used by Broadcast 2000 and XMovie.

With the movie rendered, it's time to encode it.

Encoding the video

Run encode in the video directory to encode the video track of the Quicktime movie containing the video. Alternatively you can split the video into two Quicktime movies, encode each movie on a seperate CPU, and merge then using mpeg2cat in the libmpeg2 directory. Trying to merge more than two movies usually breaks the audio synchronization.

Encoding the audio

Run encode in the audio directory to encode the audio tracks of the movie containing the audio. You can also split the audio into two Quicktime movies, encode them on separate CPUs, and merge the output using mpeg2cat in the libmpeg2 directory.

Final step: Multiplex the streams

Run mplex in the mplex directory to multiplex the video and audio streams into a single program stream.

Voila! Instant DVD.

Harass the author at broadcast@earthling.net

(C)2000 Adam Williams