Recording a directory on a DVD through the command line

[Amadeus W. M.]

On Mon, 09 Jan 2006 11:24:19 +0000, Paul Smith wrote:

> Dear All
> 
> I would like to record an entire directory and all its subdirectories
> (recursively) on a DVD by using the command line. Could someone here
> please help me? That is true that I could do that, easily, with k3b,
> but I would like to learn how to do that with the command line.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Paul

It's very easy, this is how I always do it. 

There are two steps:

1) Create an iso image to write onto the media.
2) Write the actual image to media.

In detail:

For video dvds:

mkisofs -dvd-video -o movie.iso /path/to/movie/directory

For data:

mkisofs -r -J -o data.iso /path/to/data/directory



Then you write to cd/dvd:

cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrwiter movie.iso  # or data.iso

Here /dev/cdrwiter is a link to the actual writer. If you have more
than one writer, it may be /dev/cdwriter or /dev/cdwriter1, etc.
Don't worry, if you try one, e.g. /dev/cdwriter and it's not the one with
the blank cd in it, it will tell you it's not the one, so nothing bad
happens, just try another drive.

For more options, do man mkisofs and man cdrecord.

Another way is to write using growisofs.