DVD Authoring With Unix?

An Anonymous Coward, with an interest in the multimedia sector, asks: "DVD authoring may one day be the next test of 'what you can do with a computer'. Can a professional-quality DVDs be created using Unix software? Are there sufficient tools, commercial or otherwise, to handle all the phases? MPEG-1 encoding? Different sound formats? Overlays? Branching? NTSC/PAL? And what's the user to do if s/he wants to do something simple, like burn some stills to a CD-R?"

Comments

MacOS I hate to sayt it.

[JumpSuit Boy]

One of the things Steve demoed at mac world was software to do it(MPEG encoding, menus, etc). Most of the software hardware combos to do it until now were industial only.

`burn some stills to a CD-R'

[dougmc]

And what's the user to do if s/he wants to do something simple, like burn some stills to a CD-R?"

I can't really comment on the rest, but this part's easy. Extracting the stills may be tricky, but buring CD's under *nix is trivial.

Maybe not

[dubl-u]

According to an article by John Gilmore, this isn't entirely true:

What is wrong is when companies who make copy-protecting products don't disclose the restrictions to the consumers. Like Apple's recent happy-happy web pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month (http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of glowing info about how you can write DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal right to do so, the technology will prevent you. They don't say that you can't use it to mix and match video tracks from various artists, the way your CD burner will. It doesn't say that you can't copy-protect your own disks that it burns; that's a right the big manufacturers have reserved to themselves. They're not selling you a DVD-Authoring drive, which is for "professional use only". They're selling you a DVD-General drive, which cannot record the key-blocks needed to copy-protect your own recordings, nor can a DVD-General disc be used as a master to press your own DVDs in quantity. These distinctions are not even glossed over; they are simply ignored, not mentioned, invisible until after you buy the product.

So caveat emptor.

vCD DLT and darwin

[johnjones]

hey

videoCD is a standard so write in this format and ALL the DVD players will play it
(depends how long your film is most of the time its a short and will fit)

most DVD is deliveded to presses on a DLT so its a case of writeing to a DLT not actualy writeing to a disk
(what to do about small runs is anouther question that I could not answer)

$ uname
darwin
$
writes to a DVD so all you have do is use this (-;

personaly vCD is what I use all machines can play it and DVD boxes under TVs are in all execs rooms and it helps being able to prototype something the night before and turn up and look like a pro droping a small silver disk into their new toy and show them whats what !

have fun

john jones

Re:vCD DLT and darwin

[Jethro]

And how do you make a vCD under UNIX? I uinderstand VCD is just differently encoded MPEG. Say I manage to get an MPEG encoder to create a MY_CAT_BEING_CUTE.vcd - how do I burn that onto a CDR? Just cdrecord and treat the VCD as an image? Or what?


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Re:vCD DLT and darwin

[RapaNui]

Actually most DVD players will play VCDs, but *not* all DVD players will handle CD-R media.
Some DVD players are designed with a dual laser pickup to handle both, as the DVD laser is red (around 650 nm) and a CD-R laser needs to be near IR (750 ?? nm). CD-RWs are apparently more reflective in the 650nm region, so if your DVD player is not specced to handle CD-Rs, it might very well work with CD-RWs.
Of course it helps to have one that simply states on the box 'designed for CD-R and CD-RW' ;-)

Re:vCD DLT and darwin

[DdR]

There's a very good page on that, with links to some utilities you might need: http://www.munich-vision.de/vcd/.

The hard part seems to be creating a VCD-compliant MPEG. Unfortunately, most of the tools that can be found on the web are home-brew Windows progs with very poor UIs (saying, for example, "Can't open file!" when they really mean "The audio layer is compressed, and I can't deal with that!").

Scenarist SGI

[bigdavex]

Scenarist (which handles the authoring, but not MPEG encoding) for Irix has been around for years. This has been an expensive (outside the reach of consumers) solution, but it's the standard. Mac & NT solutions came later.