If you want to generate SVCDs from your Camcorder and you can speak German, read Linux/Videoschnitt.
At first, you have to get the video from your DV Camcorder to your computer. How to do it, using firewire and dvgrab or kino, is the same as in the case for SVCDs. I prefer the quicktime format to grab from the DV Camcorder.
Now you can load all the quicktime videos into cinelerra and modify and cut the video to your needs. There is a nice howto do this on robfisher.net. After having modified the video how you liked it, you have to render it in cinelerra. I realized, that the best way for me to render it and to prepare if for the further process is, to render it as quicktime again with the following settings:
- video: quicktime, DV
- audio: IMA-4
After a while, cinelerra has rendered. Now you can leave it and return to the command line. The DVD needs an mpeg2 stream. So we have to transcode the quicktime to mpeg2 using transcode:
transcode -V --export_fps 0,3 --export_asr 2 -x mplayer -y mpeg2enc,mp2enc -F "8,-q 4" -w 9000 --encode_fields b -E 48000 -i cinelerra-out.mov -o myvideo
Now what are all these options about?
- Always use -V!
- the –export_fps give me the suitable result for PAL.
- –export_asr 2 means, that we have a 3:2 DV Camcorder.
- -x mplayer is the reliable import module, that can read the quicktime.
- The export module is -y mpeg2enc,mp2enc since we are doing a DVD.
- -F „8,-q 4“ means we are generating a DVD with quantization 4. You could change this to another value
- -w 9000 gives us a variable bitrate with a maximum of 9000bits. Thats a rather nice quality. You can lower this value, if you want to put more minutes on the DVD.
- -E 48000 the DVD audio is 48000 bits
- –encode_fields b: Thats a tricky part. Since your DV Camcorder records the video interlaced. But your Camcorder records the interlacing with the top field as the first field. But a DVD player plays interlaced material with the bottom field first. So we have to change the order, using the key 'b'.
- Last but not least there are the input and the output files.
MPlex the output of transcode:
mplex -f 8 -o myvideo.mpg myvideo.m2v myvideo.m2a
Now we have all the video material for our DVD. We either could use dvdauthor directly and write all the xml files. But I am a bit lazy, so I searched for qdvdauthor. Here you can also add a nice menu and buttons. But the generated output of qdvdauthor did not work for me. I had to change the generated dvdauthor.xml file this way:
- Add pause=„inf“ to the pgc entry, that holds the menu and remove it from the vob entry with the menu file.
- Remove the chapter option from all button entries.
Someone who knows dvdauthor well, could this explain to me 
The rest is quite common: Start dvdauthor with the xml file generate by qdvdauthor and modified by you:
dvdauthor -x tmp/myvideo/dvdauthor.xml
The structure of the DVD gets written to the directory, you specified in qdvdauthor. Now you could make an isoimage or burn the directory directly by:
growisofs -Z /dev/scd0 -dvd-video .
Where you should change the device for your DVD writer and the directory.