Using Bombono DVD in Linux to create a DVD-Video disc from a MKV file

I had a .mkv file and associated .srt subtitles file, and wanted to create a DVD-Video disc so that I could play it in my stand-alone DVD player and watch the film on my TV set. I tried to create a DVD-Video disc by using Avidemux and following the procedure in Formatting an MKV container into DVD format with Avidemux, Mkvtoolnix, dvdauthor, and K3B, but both Avidemux and Avidemux2 crashed, displaying the error message “Crash. Segfault at line 0, file ??ADM_backTrack”.

So I installed Bombono DVD (package name bombono-dvd) and GNOME Subtitles (package name gnome-subtitles), required by Bombono DVD if you want it to create a DVD-Video disc with subtitles, and was able to burn a DVD-Video disc as follows:

1.  If you want subtitles, open the .srt subtitles file in a GUI text editor to check the character encoding. As I use KDE, I opened the .srt file in KWrite, selected Tools > Encoding, and found that ISO 8859-15 was the character set used in the particular .srt file that I had downloaded from the Web.

2.  Launch Bombono DVD as follows:

$ export VIDEO_FORMAT=PAL && bombono-dvd

(Replace ‘PAL’ with ‘NTSC’ if you want to create an NTSC DVD-Video disc.)

3.  In the top right corner of the Bombono DVD window, select the DVD-Video disc size. In my case, I had a 7.9 GB MKV file which I wished to transcode and burn to a 4.7 GB capacity DVD+R, so I selected ‘DVD 4.3 GB’.

4.  Select ‘Project’ > ‘Preferences…’

4.1  Select ‘Default project type’ as ‘PAL/SECAM’ (or ‘NTSC’ if you want to create an NTSC DVD-Video disc).

4.2  Under ‘Play authoring result in’ select ‘Xine’ (or ‘Totem’, if you use that media player).

4.3  I have a quad-core CPU so I selected ‘4’ for ‘Multi-core CPU support’.

4.4  Click ‘Close’.

5.  Click on the ‘Source’ tab.

5.1  Click on the ‘+’ sign and select the MKV file you want to transcode and burn to DVD.

5.2  Right-click on the resulting entry in ‘Media List’ and select ‘Adjust Bitrate to Fit to Disc’.

5.3  If you also have a subtitles file you wish to use, right-click on the entry in ‘Media List’ and select ‘Add Subtitles…’

5.3.1  Select the subtitles file.

5.3.2  Tick ‘Turn on subtitles by default’.

5.3.3  Select the character encoding. In my case I selected ‘ISO-8859-15’ (see Step 1 above).

6.  Click on the ‘Output’ tab.

6.1  Select ‘Write disc image’ and enter a Disc label of up to 15 letters.

6.2  Click on ‘Build DVD-Video’.

If the transcoding, subtitle addition and ISO file creation processes complete successfully, Bombono DVD will pop-up a window informing you and asking if you want to burn the image to a DVD. Make sure a blank DVD is in your optical R/W drive and then click on the appropriate button.