DVD burning from files on the hard drive

Okay, before I lose this information forever…
My mom recently had some old 8mm home movies converted to DVD. While I was home for Thanksgiving I copied them to my laptop’s hard drive. There were three disks, which amounts to quite a lot of hard drive space. My goal was to burn the files back to DVD.
This sounds straightforward enough but was not. The files for each disk sat in a folder called VIDEO_TS. I could burn those files as “data”, but the number of bytes in each VIDEO_TS folder exceeded the capacity of the DVD disk.
Much more preferable would be to burn the data as a regular viewable DVD. My Macintosh has a program called iDVD which is supposed to be able to do this. But I can’t figure out how to get it to import the files in the VIDEO_TS folder. *sigh*
So the trick seems to be, you first do something called “creating an image file”. You can do this by using a command-line utility called “mkisofs”. Getting this program installed and working turned out to be its own adventure. But anyway, here’s the syntax:

mkisofs -dvd-video -o /DVD_PROJECTS/homedvd.img /DVD_PROJECTS/HOMEDVD/

Once you have the image file, you can use the OS X program called “Disk Utility” (in Macintosh HD -> Applications -> Utilities) to burn the image to DVD. Launch the program, click Burn, select the image, and start. It takes about an hour.

3 thoughts on “DVD burning from files on the hard drive”

In the future, the easiest way to duplicate a CD or DVD in any *nix environment is as follows:

dd if=/dev/dvd of=file.iso

then later use the Disk Utility as mentioned above, or in Linux something like cdrecord to burn the iso file back to a disc.

For those who don’t know, dd simply copies data from one thing to another. In this case, copies the entire data on the DVD (/dev/dvd, file system and all) to a single file (file.iso). You could do the same to a hard drive if you wanted, but that’s generally not the most efficient way to make backups.

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