DVD writing woes

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 08:30:03PM -0400, Peter King wrote:
> I just got a Plextor 712A, which has gotten good reviews from
> Linux users for compatibility. I flashed the firmware to the
> latest available version, 1.04. It reliably and readily will
> read CDR, CDRW, DVD-video, DVD-R, DVD+R. (It should read the
> rewriteable DVDs too but I don't have any to test yet.) And it
> will write data DVD-R and DVD+R with growisofs, though not, I
> should note, with dvdrecord (which returns a SCSI error at the
> first write command).
> 
> What I somehow can't do -- why not? -- is to write a readable
> DVD-video. It might not be the fault of the Plextor, though.
> Here's what I've done:
> 
> 1. Run dvdbackup on a DVD-video, which creates a "mirror image"
>    of the structure on the DVD. The command:
> 
>    # dvdbackup -M -i/dev/dvd -o/temp/DVD/
> 
>    This creates a structure under the name of the DVD -- say,
>    7THSEAL (for Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"), a directory that
>    contains VIDEO_TS which itself contains the actual .VOB files
>    and so on.

What is dvdbackup?  What does it use for writing and reading?  Are you
using ide or scsi access to the drive?  With later 2.4 and all 2.6
kernels you should be using ide access.

> 2. Run growisofs on the ripped image, preserving the structure
>    of the files (and the capitalization):
> 
>    # growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video /temp/DVD/7THSEAL/
> 
>    Here the option "-dvd-video" is passed to mkisofs to get the 
>    files in the right order for writing, and "-dvd-compat" gives
>    compatibility with commercial DVD-video formats; the "-Z" means
>    to burn the first session on the blank DVD-/+R.
> 
> And that's it... growisofs executes this command with no complaints,
> and the result should be a DVD-video. But when I try to play it on
> the computer I get the message that dvdcss can't open /dev/dvd (?),
> and my home DVD deck, a Panasonic that claims to support DVD-R, does
> not recognize it.
> 
> Any ideas, suggestions, advice?

Are you writing the excact same files that the original DVD had to the
new one?  If so they are likely still encrypted and there is absolutely
no way to write the css keys to a DVD-R or DVD+R on a dvd-writer (except
the high end DVD-R(A) authoring drives where media is about $50 a
piece).  You must make sure the video files are not encypted with CSS at
all before writing them to a DVD if you want them to work.  The region
on the disc where commercial DVDs have the decoding keys and copyroght
info is unwritable (you can visibly see the line on many blank DVDs)
I suspect this is why you get css decoding errors.

Also you may want to look at the mkisofs options for making DVD video
since you might need to pass some of those options at the end of
growisofs.  All the options at the end are passed directly to mkisofs.

Lennart Sorensen
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