Iron Chef America is one of my favourite programs, but annoyingly it has never been bundled into a DVD distribution and there has never been any intention by the producers (at least from the google searched I spent hours on) of ever doing so. I was resigned to having to watch it only on the brief occasions the repeats showed up on TV; always repeats in this country, have already seen everything I like to watch on Sky in this country at least three years ago. And no sense of timing, we didn’t get the first ‘search for the new iron chef’ episode until after many episodes of Iron Chef with Michael Simon in it had already been aired so winer was no supprise there, of course the ‘search for…’ has now been shown about five times.
Anyway, on with the story. One of the websites I was browsing one day had a link to a funny ‘section’ of an Iron Chef America episode on YouTube, and I thought… and did a search of Iron Chef America in YouTube.
There were some full episodes there, broken into 4-5 chunks as FLV files of course; but they were there. And while all the US ones I had seen before there were a lot from the Japanese Iron Chef stadium that I had never seen.
So I used downloadhelper to save some of the flv files of the American stadium ones I really liked (although I couldn’t find all my favourites, still looking), and a few from the Japanese stadium that had the ‘supprise ingredient’ of something I cook with.
And then the fun began. I didn’t want to be tied to the PC to watch them, I wanted to watch them on the DVD player in the bedroom. And I wanted a proper DVD with menus so I could resume where I left off. As the FLV files were already segmented I could use them as chapter selections but how to get them onto a DVD as a proper DVD filesystem with the menus and all.
Eventually I settled on the tovidgui front end to convert the FLV files to MPG and create the DVD menu video sequences and the DVD layout XML file. I did not use it’s ‘beta’ burn option as I found I needed to adjust the XML file produced.
This way before creating the DVD structure itself I could edit the XML file, by default it created ‘chapters’ that when each chapter finished playing would jump back to the chapter selection menu. I found I could edit the XML file produced so that when each chapter finished playing it would immediately start playing the next chapter (no need to reach for the remote when each chapter ended), and when the last chapter finished get it to jump back to the main episode selection menu rather than the chapter selection menu for the episode just watched.
Of course it took me a while to find that out, after I had burnt a DVD and tried to watch it, and found the repeated jumps back to the chapter menu annoying.
But anyway, that was all to convert the FLV files to MPG and create the video menu layout.
To create the DVD file structure, once the XML output from tovidgui had been customised to my likeing, I used dvdauthor to create the actual DVD structure itself.
And then mkisofs to create the iso file to be copied to DVD. I admit I did initially use nero to burn the DVD structure directly to DVD, but (apart from having to boot my dual boot machine into windows to use it) when I started having issues with the default menus and started playing with customising them I found it easier to create an ISO image as then I could play that in VLC to test the result without wasting blank DVDs, and only burn when I was happy with the result.
So now I have some DVDs of Iron Chef America (and from the Japanese stadium) I can watch on the DVD playing in the bedroom; but it wasn’t easy.
So the steps were, for anyone that wants to burn FLV files from the internet onto a playable DVD…
(1) ‘tovidgui -s’ to interactively add the video clips, edit the menu and submenu titles, convert the FLV files to MPG files, and generate the XML file that can be used by dvdauthor.
(2) manually edit the XML file created by tovidgui to change the way the chapter menus handled, to jump to the next chapter immediately instead of the menu; and to change the end of the last chapter to jump to the ‘main’ episode menu rather than the current episodes chapter menu.
(3) use ‘dvdautor -x /blah/blah.xml’ (blah being where you let tovidgui create the xml file) to create the DVD file structure needed
(4) Then use ‘mkisofs -dvd-video -o blah.iso /tmp/blah (assuming /tmp/blah is where the dvd root eas created (the directory with the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories)
(5) test it in VLC
(6) if happy with the iso, then burn it using your favourite burner
There actually were a lot more steps to get to that point; to install tovidgui required that I add an extra repository for yum to use (atrpms), and removed a few conflicting rpms from the fedora system and replaced them from the new repo; and yes at one point had to force an rpm in by bypassing dependencies (it wanted an older version that the one more current one I had installed). But got there in the end.
Thats not the worst of it of course.
To actually create the structure and convert the files in the (step 1) tovidgui step took about six hours; and had to be repeated every time I got the menu titles wrong, which I wouldn’t know until the VLC test step (the other steps were really fast though).
And I was at one point using downloadhelper in the windows version of firefox to download the FLV files, which would consistently hang. But as I had decided all the authoring was to be done on the linux side of the dual boot server that wasn’t an imediate problem, I just booted into linux and carried on. I had a script somewhere that saved the FLV files as they were viewed, must find it again, sigh; with download helper they have to get downloaded twice.
But, I have managed to get three (after two weeks) DVDs (8 episodes) I have watched in comfort. An improvement on having to wait for it to show up on TV.
