How to Create a DVD-Compatible Video in PiTiVi

I wanted to edit one of my geeky songs in PiTiVi and burn it to DVD. After searching around and trying a few things it seemed to work, so for reference, here’s how I did it.

Important: Save the PiTiVi project before you start, as I’ve found it to be prone to crashing.

1. Once the video and audio are ready, click “Render project”
2. Click “Choose File” and enter a filename with the extension .mpg
3. Click “Modify” and select either 576p PAL or 480p NTSC depending on your region
4. Change the export container to “FFmpeg MPEG-2 PS format (DVD VOB)”
5. Change the audio codec to “FFmpeg ATSC A/52A (AC-3)”
6. In the audio settings, change the Bit Rate to 256000
7. The video codec should be fixed at “FFmpeg MPEG-2″
8. In the video settings, change the Bit Rate to 6548000
9. Click “OK”, then “Render”

You can now use a program such as Bombono to burn straight to DVD, or DeVeDe (slightly better, in my opinion) to create an ISO which you can burn to DVD with Brasero or other tool.

Incidentally, before rendering I used “noise removal” and “normalize” in Audacity to create a clean soundtrack. I imported this into PiTiVi and removed the original audio. Result: success!