How to: Create an ISO image of directories in Linux

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!