Create a Geexbox Movie DVD

An article by Bharat Balegere    3 Comments  Last Modified on July 29, 2009

You can create a movie DVD containing a tiny bootable Linux Operating System-GeeXbox.This can play your movies,music on any computer irrespective of whether the computer has an installed operating system or not.All you have to do is just boot from the DVD.

What is GeeXbox?

GeeXbox is a tiny linux Operating System which can play,stream videos and music(using Mplayer)It is only about 20mb and can be booted from a CD or a USB Drive.

GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC) or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it’s a ready to boot operating system than works on any Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.

Despite his tiny ISO image size, the distribution comes with a complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any driver to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind of audio/video and image files and all known codecs and containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through various physical supports, either being CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or Internet.

GeeXboX also comes with a complete toolchain that allows developers adding easily extra packages and features but that might also be used to give birth to many dedicated embedded Linux systems.

Download GeeXbox

You can either download the GeeXbox ISO image or the GeeXbox ISO Generator from here:http://geexbox.org/en/downloads.html

Using GeeXbox ISO image

Burn the downloaded iso image to a CD.
Whenever you want play a movie,you just have to boot from the CD.Once the interface loads the CD is ejected.You can now insert and play a video dvd or you can play movies and music located on the hard disk of the computer.

Drawbacks

The main problem with this method is that you will be wasting a CD only for the GeeXbox operating system which is only about 20mb.
A better option would be is to include the GeeXbox Files within a DVD/CD containing movies.

Why Create a GeeXbox Movie DVD?

Since most DVD rips are about 700mb,it is not possible to include both GeeXbox and the movie on the CD.

However if you are creating a DVD,then you can have about 6 movies(700mb DVD rips).You will still be left with 200mb of space on the DVD.Capacity of a single layered DVD is about 4400mb and size of the movies is 6*700=4200mb .You can include music and leave about 20mb for GeeXbox.

Creating a GeeXbox Movie DVD

Download GeeXbox ISO creator from here http://geexbox.org/en/downloads.html

1. Go to- Packages-Extra Files.
2. Add your movie files or a folder containing you movies.
3. Customize other Settings and hit Compile.

It will create an bootable ISO file containing GeeXbox and your movies.
Read this to test this bootable iso before burning it to a DVD.
Burn the iso image to a DVD.
You can boot your DVD and play all the media files in the DVD.