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

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.