Convert Audio TS / Video TS folders to .dvd iso file

While LinuxMCE supports adding your DVD collection in the form of folders containing the Audio_TS and Video_TS folders, I prefer to have all of my DVD videos in the form of *.dvd iso files. Linux has a commandline utility to do this conversion for you if you wish to convert your Audio_TS and Video_TS DVD rips to the LMCE standard .dvd format. For this conversion, I uses Ubuntu linux, though any Linux distribution should do.

To do this, you need to use the mkisofs command (make ISO filesystem) with some specific command line options. For this example, we are going to assume that we have the DVD folder structure for the movie "Moby Dick" located in our home folder. The folder hierarchy looks like this:

home
     username
          Moby Dick
               Audio_TS
               Video_TS

In ubuntu, open a terminal window. We are going to now use the mkisofs command with the -dvd-video option (which tells that it is a special DVD filesystem) and the -o option (output file). We will also specify the path to the root folder containing the Audio_TS and Video_TS folders. For our above example, I would enter:

mkisofs -dvd-video -o "/home/username/Moby Dick.dvd" "/home/username/Moby Dick" 

This basically says: Make a new ISO file named Moby Dick.dvd from the information stored at the folder /home/username/Moby Dick. The -dvd-video option is very important, as this will not work without it!

Thats it! You now have a single packaged ISO .dvd. file for LinuxMCE to use. This will help keep your media hierarchy clean and neat, as well as make it very easy to use many different burning programs to make copies.