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Burnstation Prototype – Design decisions relating to DVDs

This post was previously published in the official Plumi blog

When first envisaged for Plumi, the Burnstation module was to produce either VCD or DVD format discs for distribution. During the design of the prototype, it was decided to focus solely on DVD format discs for the following reasons:

  • DVD is more popular than VCD and more people are likely to have DVD players than VCD players
  • DVDs use mpeg2 encoding providing a higher quality and more compressed file than the mpeg1 encoding used by VCDs
  • No need to ask the user to select VCD or DVD

The Burnstation prototype will take video files that have been mpeg2 encoded by the transcode daemon (as normal), convert them to VOBs and then produce a DVD ISO file using the tovid utility.

The restriction to solely produce DVD format discs will also need to be reassessed. Research is required to determine whether the VCD platform is still common in Indonesia and other parts of Asia or whether it has been replaced by DVD players and is no longer required.