[Nottingham] a rather vague question about DVD writing

[James Gibbon]

Hi folks,

DVD writers seem to be eminently affordable now, and I'm about to
take the plunge.  I have two applications in mind, generally
speaking and I'd appreciate some general comments with respect to
how 'doable' they are, or perhaps a pointer to some resources on
the web.

First - file backups / archiving.  I expect this to be pretty easy
(mkisofs & dvdrecord?)

Second - copying video material.  I have a (Philips) standalone DVD
recorder, and would like to transfer DVD+RW material to DVD+R, so
that I can recycle the +RW discs for recording.  I'm hoping that it
will be fairly straightforward to make direct copies .. BUT in some
cases I'd like to do a bit of reorganising first - perhaps removing
titles (the standalone machine has a habit of leaving 'empty space'
titles in place when you erase titles), or combine selected titles
from other DVD+RWs onto the same DVD+R).  Is there a Linux
application that can do this?  What's the state of play with regard
to DVD video recording from Linux generally?

Any comments or pointers gratefully received.

Thanks,
James