DVD Burning

[Christopher Schmidt]

For Christmas, I got a DVD RW drive as a gift. For the last couple 
months, I've left it in the box, but a couple days ago, a kitty stepped 
on my powerstrip and killed my 83 day uptime, so I decided it was time 
to install it.

Took the machine down last night, got the thing screwed in, plugged in, 
and everything seems like it's working. When starting up/via dmesg, I 
see:

hdc: PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-108, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: ATAPI 40X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2000kB Cache, UDMA(33)

so I'm assuming that it is being noticed by the stuff I have installed. 
I tried cdrecord -scanbus and didn't see anything, and just now, looking 
at this window, I remembered something about adding ATAPI to the 
commandline args, specifically, "dev=ATAPI" to search for IDE drives. 
After scanning with:

   cdrecord -scanbus dev=ATAPI

the DVD RW showed up just fine, and the entire point of my email is now 
null and void.

(I knew when I was doing this last night that there was *something* 
missing in what I was doing, but I could not remember for the life of me 
what it was. It's good to know that at least I know when I'm making a 
mistake.)

So, I suppose the question now is what resources do people use for DVD 
burning? I found:

  http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/

last night, which seems as if it should take care of creating normal ISO 
images and burning them, but says that burning DVD Video is out of 
scope. 

Some things I'd like to be able to do, in no particular order:

 * Take the .img from an iDVD session (which is supposedly just a normal 
iso9660 image, according to `file`) and burn it to a DVD.
 * Take DivX encoded video that I have and burn it to a DVD such that it 
can be played in a normal DVD player
 * Create backups of directoreis, possibly including ones that are 
larger than a single DVD if possible, by having something automatically 
split it up in a way that is easy to put back together

Are these things possible? What are the best resources to find out how? 
(Note that although I could probably just google for most of these 
things, I'm trying to spur discussion among list members. so 
www.fuckinggoogleit.com is not the answer I'm looking for, as 
appropriate as it may be.)

I'm running a 2.4.20 kernel (-gentoo-r6, specifically), and I'm scared 
to rebuild it, so I'll be on it for a while :)

So, what's your favorite way to do these things? Interested to hear what 
other people have done with their DVD RW drives.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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