This method of burning DVDs has the advantage that it “works for me”. It's based on information supplied to me by Jürgen Lock, and with all recognition that it gets the job done, I have my doubts that it's optimal. Given the current unbelievably bad state of documentation of multimedia software, you can't blame Jürgen (or me) for any imperfections; just let us know if you find anything to improve.

Jürgen's recommendation is Project X to disassemble the file into its component streams, then dvdstyler to put them back together again. That doesn't seem to make sense: the VOB files are an MPEG-2 stream, so it seems unnecessary to take them apart and put them back together again; replex doesn't need that. On the other hand, replex also doesn't seem to work. Also, dvdstyler is really a program for creating menus for a DVD, something that I don't want. But can you create a DVD without a menu? I don't know. So I'm guessing that Jürgen's method is one “that works” rather than an optimal procedure.

Project X

Project X is based on Java, which doesn't make things any easier. Installing the port failed with:

===>  diablo-jdk-1.5.0.07.01_1 :
 Because of licensing restrictions, you must fetch the distribution
 manually.  Please access

 http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/cgi-bin/download?download=diablo-caffe-freebsd6-i386-1.5.0_07-b01.tar.bz2

 with a web browser and "Accept" the End User License Agreement for
 "Caffe Diablo 1.5.0".  Please place the downloaded
 diablo-caffe-freebsd6-i386-1.5.0_07-b01.tar.bz2 in /usr/ports/distfiles.
.*** Error code 1

After doing that, it installed, but there was no documentation. The initial screen looks pretty, but is completely confusing:

I was about to give up on it until Jürgen came along and helped me through it, step by step. In the past I've always refused such offers of help: they shouldn't be necessary. But, sad as it seems, they are necessary, because people write programs without any documentation. Basically, the procedure is:

• Select a file to process. Like so many brain-dead GUI programs, Project X doesn't understand the concept of a current working directory, and presents you with my home directory instead of /spool/Images, the directory in which it was started. Unlike newer versions of firefox, it does understand the concept of path names, so I could type in the entire name and got a jumble of icons spaced so that I had to use a horizontal scroll bar to see them all:

  

  Project X does remember some window size settings, notably for the home window, where additional size makes no difference. Here you can enlarge the window and show more files, but it forgets the settings and opens the same small window the next time around. About the only thing you can do to improve things is to select the Babylonic cuneiform icon at top right, which changes the display to something containing information, including dates written the wrong way round:

  

• After selecting a file, the main window changes to show the first frame of the stream, and also displays a lot of other information:

  

  If the text weren't so tiny, it would be quite helpful. Clearly there's a lot of stuff to play with here.

• Next, press the QuickStart button on the left, which gives a window something like this:

  

  In my case, though, the results were completely different: I hadn't selected demux in the Action: bar at the top, and by default it's set to PIDFilter (1:1 Copy). This is another thing that gets remembered, so it's understandable that Jürgen had forgotten it. After selecting that, and restarting, it created a number of new files:

  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel   7889485824 Dec 26 01:20 asterix-contre-cesar
  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel     53206192 Dec 27 11:06 asterix-contre-cesar.$ts$1
  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel       131056 Dec 27 11:06 asterix-contre-cesar.$ts$1.pts
  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel   1887659776 Dec 27 11:06 asterix-contre-cesar.$ts$2
  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel       131056 Dec 27 11:06 asterix-contre-cesar.$ts$2.pts
  

• That's not the end, though. When it's finished copying, it reformats these files again, so the final result looks different again:

  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel   7889485824 Dec 26 01:20 asterix-contre-cesar
  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel   7460490139 Dec 27 11:15 asterix-contre-cesar.m2v
  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel    218412096 Dec 27 11:16 asterix-contre-cesar.mp2
  -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel         2417 Dec 27 11:16 asterix-contre-cesar_log.txt
  

dvdstyler

After tearing the stream apart with Project X, use dvdstyler to create the DVD itself. dvdstyler is unusual for a couple of reasons: it has nicely formatted documentation, and the error messages it produces are intelligible:

To be fair to the program, I didn't read the documentation, since Jürgen was navigating. The first thing you'd expect to do with the initial screen would be to select something from the Files tab:

In fact, that's just for loading project files (and has this same stupid, brain-dead ignorance of the working directory that all “modern” programs seem to have nowadays). To get at your files, use the Directories tab on the side. Then drag the files shown on the right in specific sequence:

1. First, drag the video (.m2v) file to the bottom. This appears here as “Title 1”.
2. Next, drag the audio (.mp2) file on top of the title. The text at the bottom is the only indication that anything has happened, and it disappears when you move the cursor off the icon.
3. Don't do anything with the _log.txt file. It's really just the log of the conversion, and it's a little strange that it's there in the first place.

At the end, it should look something like this:

Next, create a menu:

• Select the Backgrounds tab and drag one of the backgrounds to the area on the right:

  

• Next, right click on the Menu 1 icon and select the Root Menu option:

  

• Next, select the Buttons tab and drag an image (here an arrow) somewhere into the menu:

  

• Then right click on the arrow image and check the Action. In a simple case like this, it's probably what you want:

  

• Next, use the File–>save as menu option to save the configuration file, which by default has the name ~/dvd.xml. Try not to curse as you navigate the file system hierarchy with the mouse.

• Finally, use the File–>burn dvd menu option to burn the DVD. Again, dvdstyler shows a lack of understanding of directories by trying to build the DVD image in ~/dvd. You can change the name, though, and this time it even lets you type in a path name:

  

  This image can be over 9 GB in size, so that's a non-trivial problem.

• After that, the DVD image is created:

  

  This is done with mplex, which is not a ball of fire. In this example it took several hours to create the image.