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I ripped some DVDs I own the other day as I wanted to create a back-up for the kids travel DVD players (so the originals don’t get scratched and trashed on the road), only the DVDs themselves were DVD-9′s (so single-sided dual-layer with a capacity of up to 8.54GB) while I can only write DVD-5′s (single-sided single layer with a capacity of up to 4.7GB) – this isn’t a big problem as I compressed them down to fit using Handbrake and elements of Shetboy’s meticulously crafted AVI to DVD technique. However, both Brasero and GnomeBaker would flat out refuse to burn Video projects – they’d just choke on the folder containing the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders – so why not covert the directory including the *_TS folders to an ISO and burn that? No reason why not! Let’s get it done! =P

Making the ISO

Once you’ve got a folder structure containing the AUDIO_TS folder (which is empty) and the VIDEO_TS folder (which contains your .BUP, .IFO and .VOB files), just run the following command to generate your ISO:

mkisofs -o ISO_FILENAME -V LABEL -r SOURCE_DIRECTORY

So, for example, you might use the following command to create an ISO of the directory containing the *_TS folders for the film Avatar:

mkisofs -o ~/AvatarDVD.iso -V Avatar -r ~/dvdprep/Avatar/

Once you hit return, you’ll see something like the following output:

I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
  0.22% done, estimate finish Wed Jul 27 12:30:27 2011
 
..... all the rest ......
 
 99.96% done, estimate finish Wed Jul 27 12:27:58 2011
Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 1353
Total directory bytes: 4096
Path table size(bytes): 42
Max brk space used 21000
2275896 extents written (4445 MB)

Measure Twice, Cut Once

If you wanted to make sure you got it right, as in, you ONLY have the *_TS folders in the iso, not the top level folder containing those two folders also, then just open the created iso file with Archive Manager and take a look, or mount it to a folder with:

mkdir test
sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 ./AvatarDVD.iso ./test
ls test
 
[ which should show "AUDIO_TS  VIDEO_TS" ]
 
sudo umount ./test

When you’re happy with the iso, burn it with your burning software of choice and you’re all sorted!

Cheers!

Update: You can convert compressed ISO images (.ciso files) using this method, too…

If you need to translate a Wii DVD image from the newer .WBFS format (which has lovely sparce-file support) to an old-school .ISO image, well you can jolly well do so with Wii Backup Manager! Now, WBM is a really useful program so congrats to the author (xzxero) – but it uses non-standard GUI elements in that it uses what looks like the category list as a second main-menu, and this makes it a little non-intuitive to use. But in fairness to the author, the download page has a tutorial (which I didn’t find until after completing this post!). Still, it’s easy enough once you’ve figured that out. The entire conversion process goes like this:

1.) Grab yourself a copy of Wii Backup Manager. Version v0.3.5 beta 1 is the most recent version available at the time of writing, and although it’s Win32 only, it works fine in VirtualBox…

2.) Extract and launch it

3.) From the Files tab, click on what looks like the Add category title, select Files and go pick a .WBFS image from the navigation dialogue box

4.) Still in the Files tab, tick the checkbox to the left of your .wbfs image, and then click on what looks like the Transfer category title and select ISO..

5.) Pick where you want the converted .ISO file to be created and click the [OK] button

That’s it – job done! Transfer your ISO to your WBFS formatted USB drive and launch it as you normally would via USBLoaderGX or whatever your poison is…