LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring"

My Needs (are not your needs)

jimwelch — 2008-01-23T19:10:22+00:00

I have a VHS/DVD recorder. It has limitations that I want to overcome:
* Take the DVD it makes and edit the videos, menus, chapters, (everything)
* It won't pause while copying.
* I want to take out commercials on timed recordings.
* Every 8 minutes is the auto chapter.
* Limited top level menu gen.
Panasonic DMR ez-475V

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

jnelson — 2008-01-18T15:43:58+00:00

Consider giving dvbcut a look ( http://dvbcut.sourceforge.net/ ) and comparing it to avidemux.
It doesn't do nearly as much, but I've had much better success with it (specifically, it
doesn't cause A/V desync. like I have experienced with avidemux) and it can be significantly
faster - it only re-transports rather than re-encodes and, for files that come from ivtv,
means I can go right from ivtv to dvbcut to DVD without ever once re-encoding (only changing
the transport!).

Blender

zotz — 2008-01-10T12:09:19+00:00

Well, perhaps this will delay it further, but I believe Blender has abilities in this area as
well.

I think many of these programs could benefit from some simple beginner's howto's though.

all the best,

drew

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

rmano — 2008-01-10T09:27:02+00:00

Maybe the "easy to use" non-wizard application could be DeVeDe: 
http://www.rastersoft.com/programas/devede.html
It has not a lot of documentation, but it seems quite straightforward to use.

dvdauthor XML example

ldo — 2008-01-07T08:37:18+00:00

I have added some explanatory commentary to that dvdauthor XML example.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

set — 2008-01-06T05:03:54+00:00

Another tool I dont see mentioned here is dvdwizard, which is a command
line tool, but once its configured it can easily create a dvd struct with
multiple titlesets with fancy automaticly selected screen shots for
backgrounds and chapter selections. I guess it can do video and sound
for the vmgm menu, but I havent used that feature. In its most simple
invokation, you could author a rather slick looking dvd like:

dvdwizard -T "My DVD Title" -t auto foo.mpg -t auto bar.mpg ....

('auto' just has it make a reasonable guess for the name of the titleset
to use in the menu, you can specify it if you want.)

I use it when I want to get some video on a dvd, and dont care enough
to customize or mess around with it.

DVD-Video structure

ldo — 2008-01-04T07:33:45+00:00

It can help to understand the structure of a DVD-Video disc in order to appreciate some of the limitations of the format. There are various documents scattered around the Web, with various bits of description in them. I've put together an introduction here, with links to more details.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

smh.lwn — 2008-01-04T02:00:47+00:00

Tovid has a functional GUI component aswell, documentation for it is excellent.

kdenlive

neilbrown — 2008-01-03T23:29:04+00:00

Can I hope that you will keep an eye out for how well each editor
supports HD Video?  I suppose that isn't required for your "convert
VHS to DVD" project, but for many other projects it will become more
and more important over the coming months and years.
When I bought my HD camcorder the only things I found that came close
were PiTiVi and kdenlive, and the latter was much more mature at the time.
I look forward to reading what you find....

Re: Just add a subtitle

guinan — 2008-01-03T19:07:08+00:00

The dvdauthor package includes "dvdunauthor", which basically takes the structure from an existing DVD, and writes out an XML file that can be edited then fed back to dvdauthor. Can't remember if it extracts the data too, see "vobcopy" and other tools if not.

Just add a subtitle

NAR — 2008-01-03T14:10:59+00:00

Hello!

Is there a tool that just grabs a DVD (with menus, subtitles, etc.), lets me add a new
language subtitle, then burns the whole back to a DVD? There are a lots of really cheap DVDs
(less than 4 euros) in the supermarket, but sometimes they don't have Hungarian audio or
subtitle. However, subtitles can be downloaded, so these DVDs could be "upgraded" to be
enjoyable by non-English speakers too.

Part 2

hingo — 2008-01-03T13:34:01+00:00

Attentive readers may have noticed that part 2 has not yet been written

Me too, I was puzzled as to how it was possible that I would have missed a Grumpy editor article! I don't think I've missed an LWN front page for 10 years now... :-)

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

kleptog — 2008-01-03T12:30:13+00:00

Thank you for this article. I can tell you, I got frustrated and gave up long before
generating a large pile of coasters. Now I know it *is* possible without so much pain...

Some experiences I made recently

rakoenig — 2008-01-03T07:14:07+00:00

Since I got a DVB-T box for christmas I'm trying to capture some TV streams and put them on a
DVD. So I tried out a lot of DVD authoring apps too. 

What should be menitoned as a good app is mandvd (which is available for Debian at least from
debian-multimedia.org). Can help you to do a quick simple DVD.

qdvdauthor is currently in transiton to the 1.0.0 version (Release Candidates are available).
The 0.1.5 binaries for Debian come with xine support only which means that the length of your
MPG clip is predicted wrong (usually 1/3 of the real length). Compiling with mplayer support
solves that problem, but gives some more problems on thumbnail generation and as Jonathan
observed a lot of open mplayer instances. If you want to add several clips and a menu button
"play all" you need the 1.0.0 version at least. I managed to get RC2 working, but RC3 and the
latestst CVS won't work actually on my system. But since there is progress in the project I
think soon we will get those bugs fixed.

Simple dvd:s

eru — 2008-01-03T06:45:55+00:00

There is no reason why DVD authors should have to work at this level; dvdauthor is essentially an assembler which, while being absolutely essential to do most of the heavy lifting, should be hidden from most polite company.

There is at least one good use case for running dvdauthor directly: suppose you just want to make a DVD that, when inserted, starts to play the videos directly in sequence without menues, just like a plain old CD. This can be specified with a simple XML file that basically just lists your DVD-compatible MPEG files. The dvdauthor documentation provides an example. With a tiny amount of editing you can also add chapter marks.

Such simple DVD:s may actually be better for granny communications.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

josh — 2008-01-03T03:38:04+00:00

MythArchive, part of MythTV, works very nicely as well.  It does assume you have a MythTV
setup, but it makes the process of authoring and burning a simple video DVD quite trivial.
You pick the videos (or TV recordings) you want, choose a predefined menu style, and tell it to
burn the disk.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

flewellyn — 2008-01-03T01:52:21+00:00

From what you describe, I bet that was the motivation.

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

khim — 2008-01-03T01:26:47+00:00

embed background animations

You just need movie for that, not static picture.

animate menu transitions

Surprisingly does not exist in DVD format. What the "professional" DVDs are doing instead in series of menus:
1. Original menu
2. Transitional menu with no buttons and autojump to 3rd menu at the end
3. Next menu
As you can guess complex menu systems can produce literally hundred of such menus - and that's exactly why such DVDs are pretty expensive to author

easter eggs, changing DVD player settings like subtitles, language, and audio settings

Most of these things are only available if you play directly with DVD VM.

P.S. I've done some work with DVDs and the only thing I can say about this format: it's a mess. Why the hell they need to have 10 copies of everything in different places ? To confuse players if something is not 100% consistent ?

The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 3: DVD authoring

flewellyn — 2008-01-03T01:10:13+00:00

Do any of these tools enable you to do things like embed background animations, or animate menu transitions? How about setting easter eggs, or changing DVD player settings like subtitles, language, and audio settings?

kdenlive

corbet — 2008-01-02T23:59:51+00:00

You, sir, have just delayed the second part further.

I knew that putting up a list would bring others out. I'd encountered kdenlive before, but, somehow, it fell off my list. Thanks, it's back there now.

Part 2

morhippo — 2008-01-02T23:52:15+00:00

Dear Jonathan, I hope you do not forget to cover kdenlive in part 2, which is IMHO one of the
better linux video editors I have found during my search. Packages for debian are available.


http://www.kdenlive.org/

Part 2

Velmont — 2008-01-02T23:03:51+00:00

Hahahaha. I was furious when I saw this in the newsreader, «Where is part two!?». After
reading part 1, I said I was eagerly waiting for part 2 (or something); but I've already done
it myself now.

My work is in fact video editing, and I've got an Apple Mac (G5) with Final Cut Pro for doing
that - but this yule I wanted to really try Linux for video again; and I was suprised. It just
worked (this is on Arch Linux)!

I used dvgrab and Cinelerra, -- and after a day in Cinelerra CV, I must now say that it's not
as bad as I originally thought. I can actually use it!

So I made a small movie with some random footage I had on a tape. Before I was just pushing
Cin3; but now I see that I can use Cinelerra for my own projects if I want. (Yes, I'll still
use FCP for work).

Oh, sorry, that was long and off-topic; but anyway: I'm really looking forward to seeing part
2!