Learning by doing....mostly wrong!

By trying and trying, again and again, you learn alot! but you also get frustrated alot!
I'm going to write a good portion of my experiences on "How to make homemade DVD's." here.
I wanted to be able to edit my video, place this video on a DVD with a nice title screen and a menu. The menu should make it possible to jump to different chapters/sections...this happens to be a little more difficult than I expected.
I have, as mentioned before, Kino to edit my video, uh ohh, did I mention that this piece of software is awesome...Well it is! I tried to install the new 0.8.0 version, no-go! had to compile it myself, and ran into 'dependency hell'(that's another story).
Stick to the old version which rocks anyway :)
Then I've done different trials to find the perfect menu generation tool for DVD's. There's actually only one - 'dvdauthor' but it's command line, and you have to do a lot of stuff before you can generate your menu. For a 'non commandline' guy you'll be better off with an easy and userfriendly gui.
I tried some of these out, here's a list :

• Varsha, Java based front end, problems with saving.
• Qdvdauthor, becoming an overall DVD author Gui, but not quite there yet!
• Tovid, more problems with error messages, probably the mjpegtools version.
• DVDstyler(get the file from post#23), very simple intuitive and userfriendly, but I still had to downgrade the mjpegtools.

The mjpegtools problems might have solved the problems I had with both qdvdauthor and Tovid. I don't know, I don't wanna find out either.

Anyway, to get the DVDstyler working I had to downgrade 2 programs :
mjpegtools and libmjpegtools0 to version 1.1.6.2 from the Breezy version 1.1.6.3. This might interfere with Kino and encoding to divx, but I use the normal mpeg2enc anyway to encode my movies, so I have no worries.
The way I accomplished the downgrade was, I added the marrilat repository in my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ etch main

Then in Synaptic, select the file, mjpegtools in this case, and choose 'Package' > 'Force version', to select another version than the one you have.

One thing I did, and you should'nt, was getting Kino to encode every scene to a different file, that way I thought I could choose whichever scene to jump to, but this was too big a job for DVDstyler, and dvdauthor. So don't do that!
I did get the files merged though, by just doing this

# cat file1.mpeg file2.mpeg > outfile.mpeg

But this broke my internal file counter somehow, and spumux refused to work with the files. After hours of searching I found the command, to run my merged files through a re-encoding, here's the command :

# mencoder -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -o %newfile.mpeg -oac copy -ovc copy %sourcefile.mpeg

or with an AMD64 version of mencoder:

# mencoder -of mpeg -o %newfile.mpeg -oac copy -ovc copy %sourcefile.mpeg

Now I had no errors at all, the DVD was ready to burn. And lucky me :) My dad gave me some DVD+R in a bulk with 25pcs, I thought it was the same as a DVD's he'd handed me over to test, that DVD was 4x, but these new ones was 8x, wohoo!

I'm thinking of writing a howto, but let's see, the time is limited, and it's soon going to be christmas. I need to do at least 4 new DVD's.... capture, edit, encode, and package before 24th of December...

Later I have learned that this command could do it :
mencoder -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf /somedirectory/* -o test.mpeg -ovc copy -oac copy