vineyard saker wrote:
Today I bought three DVD+R(DL) and all went perfectly until I stuck the DVD into my regular (living room) DVD player which could not read it! I tried on my computer with mplayer and it could read it with no problem whatsoever so the DVD itself is not at fault. I can only conclude that some DVD players do not play DVD+R(DL). Except. Except that I was given several copied DVD by friends which my DVD player *did* play. Which brings me to the only logical conclusion: there must be a way to "squeeze", for example, a 6.9GB movie into a "regular" 4.7GB DVD+RW. (This is what the software of my windoze-using friends seemed to have done.)
It could be a region lock issue. I may be running into this on one of my (single sided) DVD players. You might try your DVD on another player. If that's the problem, however, I am not able to help. I'm not even sure how to identify a region lovk issue. Maybe someone else on this list can help. At least you might be able to use a web search check up on your player to see if it's region locked.
HOW DO I DO THIS WITH DEBIAN?!?!?!?!?!?!??!
One thing to keep in mind is that Debian tends to lag behind in multimedia for a number of (good) reasons. Some of these tools may not even be considered "official" Debian programs for legal reasons. I know this wanders off the topic of this list, but if you can't solve your problem with Debian, you might want to wait for the next release (always RSN), try a spinoff like Ubuntu or a different distro entirely, or else try Etch if you are inclined to experiment.
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==>>Also - how can I 'rip' a DVD into an mpeg or avi file?<<==
AFAIK the DVD already comes in MPEG(-2) format, so no conversion is necessary, but you do have to "un-demux" the audio and video files to recombine them into a single file. There are various tools in Debian that do this, but I am not familiar with them. Some of the packaging front ends with search features, like xara, will give you an idea of what's available.
Kind regards & may thanks in advance! VS