DVD-Audio How-To

Introduction

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

DVD-Audio discs can also be burned using Hplex, which embeds dvda-author. See Hplex how to for instructions.

Pre-Requisites

dvda-author - As of June 2008 dvda-author source code and binaries have been distributed through the file release sytem. CVS code has been kept for archiving purposes.

mkisofs - this is part of the cdrtools package, and comes as standard with most Linux distributions. For Windows, a binary version is available here (the site is German, but the programs are in English). For Mac OS X users, copies can be found as part of the Fink project. This is required to create the UDF disk image containing the AUDIO_TS directory created by dvda-author.

Short note on the cdrtools package
cdrtools source files
Compiling cdrecord
cdrecord must be compiled by using the smake utility. You'll find a copy of sources for version 1.2 here. Linux binaries are included in the package. smake can be compiled with the usual GNU make tool. A shortlink to the Linux smake binary is here.

To compile cdrecord, just cd into the cdrtools directory and type 'smake' on a command line.
Windows users should perform these operations using Cygwin. Winzip and other Windows utilities damage symbolic links and should not be used to extract packages; use the tar xjvf command instead on a Cygwin console.

DVD recording software - any DVD recording software capable of burning .iso images can be used.

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.

Step 1 - create the AUDIO_TS directory

This step is performed by the dvda-author program. A simple invocation is as follows:

dvda-author -o DVD -g *.wav

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.

Step 2 - create the .iso disk image

Until DVD-Audio support is added to mkisofs, the .iso image must be created by passing a sort file to mkisofs. An example file is included in the dvd-author distribution (local copy).

If your DVD-Audio contents are in a directory called DVD in the current directory, then you can create the .iso image with the following command:

mkisofs -o image.iso -sort sort.txt  -udf DVD

NOTE: The sort.txt file must contain the full path of each file, including the top-level output directory (e.g. "DVD") passed to dvda-author via the -o option. If you don't specify an output directory of "DVD", you will need to edit the sort file.

mkisofs patches

Three mkisofs patches are available to date for dvda-author, which make it possible to run mkisofs without the -sort option:
  • Dave Chapman's initial patch against mkisofs (version 2.01)
  • Fab Nicol's patch against a newer version of mkisofs (2.01.01a40) for DVD-Audio discs.
  • Jerome Brock's patch against a recent version of mkisofs (2.01.01a58) for DVD-Audio/Video discs, including a -dvd-hybrid switch as a comibnation of -dvd-audio and -dvd-video
All versions perform the correct sorting of the files when the -dvd-audio parameter is specified. If you apply that patch before compiling cdrtools (it is not yet included in the official cdrtools), you can create the UDF image as follows:

mkisofs -o image.iso -dvd-audio DVD
Applying patches
It is advised to apply the latest patch against version 2.01.01a58 as follows: First cd into a directory cdrtools-2.01.01 containing the original code (unpacked) then enter the following command-line: 
   $  patch  -p1 < /full/path/to/patchfile

A patched cdrecord (2.01.01a58) package is available here. To recompile it, first run 'smake clean' before running 'smake' again.
A shortlink to a patched mkisofs (against version 2.01.01a58) compiled under Linux is available here.

A patched mkisofs binary for Windows is available as part of the Hplex package (in the bin/ subdirectory) for both -dvd-audio and -dvd-hybrid switches. If you did not install Cygwin on you Windows platform, you will need to copy cygwin1.dll in the same directory as the mkisofs binary.

Step 2.5 - OPTIONAL

For in car and other audio only players to play your disc you need to pass the -pp option to dvda-author when it runs. As of now the only way to do this is as follows:

Run the command 

isoinfo -i image.iso -l
and look for the start sector of the AUDIO_PP.IFO file. e.g.

----------   0    0    0          131072 Mar 18 2005 [    284 00]  AUDIO_PP.IFO;1

Then re-run dvda-author, passing the sector of AUDIO_PP.IFO (in this case 284) using the -pp option:

dvda-author -pp 284 -o DVD -g....

Complete step 2 again then proceed

Step 3 - burn the disk image

Any DVD recording software capable of burning .iso files can be used.

Under Linux, I have had good results with the growisofs option as follows:

growisofs -Z /dev/hdd=image.iso

Or you can combine steps 2 and 3 as follows:

growisofs -Z /dev/hdd -udf -sort sort.txt DVD/

An alternative is to use cdrecord from the cdrtools package (see above) as follows:

(sudo) cdrecord -scanbus

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

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

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