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DVD-Audio How-To

Introduction

This page describes how to author and burn a DVD-Audio disc using dvda-author.

Pre-Requisites

dvda-author - As of June 2008 dvda-author source code and binaries have been distributed through the file release sytem. Git is being currently used for on-going development.

mkisofs - this is part of the cdrtools package, and comes as standard with most Linux distributions. For Windows, a binary version is available through either Cygwin or Msys2.

Short note on the cdrtools package
cdrecord is included in binary packages shipped through the file release system. If you wish to rebuild this tool from source, bear in mind that extracting the source code from the compressed packages should be performed using 
tar -xjvf
or 
tar - xzvf
on a Cygwin or Msys2 console. Winzip and other Windows tools may break symbolic links in the original source code. Also, under Unix-like platforms, cdrecord should be granted root privileges or suid rights.

A DVD-Audio player - DVDs created with dvda-author will only play on DVD players displaying the DVD-Audio logo. They are not compatible with Video-only players.

Quick start

A simple invocation is as follows:

dvda-author -o DVD -g *.wav -X 'working directory' --cdrecord


This will create a directory called DVD in the current directory containing a fully-authored AUDIO_TS directory and an empty VIDEO_TS directory. The DVD-Audio disk will contain all the .wav files in the current directory.
The working directory should indicate in which directory input files are taken with the -g option.
Alternatively you can use:

dvda-author -o DVD -i 'input directory' --cdrecord


in which the input directory has subfolders labeled g1, g2, g3, ..., gn   for n groups, each containing the audio files to be played back in the corresponding group.

If you installed the application under Windows or using .deb or .rpm binaries, or from source code using the make system, you do not need to install a configuration file.

Otherwise, either install a configuration file, use a project file or add -W to command line, meaning 'no configuration'.

The --cdrecord option creates the ISO file and burns it to disk. This option can be replaced by --mkisofs to create an ISO file only, later to be burned.
If you have several burners, you should scan your bus as follows:

(sudo) cdrecord -scanbus

will give the adequate dev value for the cd recorder (typically 1,0,0 or 2,0,0). Then type:

(sudo) cdrecord dev=x,y,z /path/to/image.iso

to burn the disc.The path to the ISO image differs depending on the platform. The file name is by default dvd.iso The directory path is dvda-author under Windows and .dvda-author under *nix platforms.

Alternatively you can execute the dvda-author command line again adding --cdrecord x,y,z instead of just --cdrecord 




Users are strongly advised to use the original cdrtools version of cdrecord rather the forks (genisoimage or wodim among others).

Please send any comments or questions to the dvd-audio-devel mailing list.