Copy mp4 files to DVD

Question

How can I copy mp4 files from my Hard Disk to a DVD in UBUNTU 13.10 in my laptop? Is there any program or application compatible with Ubuntu 13.10 to do this?

Answer 1

The answer to this question depends on what kind of DVD you want to burn. If you simply want to copy the .MP4 files to it in order to play them on a computer or a hardware player with MP4 support, you can use the preinstalled program named Brasero, or you can even do it in File Manager.

If, however, you want to create a video DVD that can be played by any hardware DVD player, you'll probably first need to transcode the files to DVD compatible MPEG-2 with MP2, AC-3 or PCM Audio, then master a DVD image and burn it using the appropriate DVD-video compatible UDF filesystem.

To save you a lot of reading, I'll put the probably most simple answer right at the beginning: While writing this, I stumled across Bombono (available in Software Center). I don't have any experience with it, but it seems to be a single tool that does everything you need (transcoding, mastering, and even burning).

Now to the gory details, if you want to do everything by hand ;-)
There are plenty of video transcoding tools available for Ubuntu. I personally use mencoder (available in software center), although, since it is a command line utility, it might have a rather steep learning curve. But don't fear, the documentation for mencoder is excellent (and by the way worth reading, no matter which transcoding software you use, since it also has some tips on how to get the best quality at a certain bitrate).

Once you have a suitable MPEG2 file, you'll need a DVD mastering software. The tool of choice for this task is dvdauthor (again: available in software center). To use it directly is pretty cumbersome, since it requires the whole DVD menu structure written as an XML file. Nevertheless, there are several frontends available for it (see the respective website - I only have experience with qdvdauthor, which is rather outdated and therefore no longer available in software center...).

After you've prepared the files for your DVD, you need to burn them with a DVD-video compatible UDF filesystem. The easiest way to do this is to use k3b (did I mention Software Center yet?) as DVD writing application and to burn your project as Video-DVD (of course, this can also be done on the command line, see man growisofs and man genisoimage).