DVD Authoring In Linux

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Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @12:42AM from the diy-easter-eggs dept.

leming writes "This article in Linux Journal explains low-cost DVD authoring available in Linux. Traditionally, DVD authoring has been an expensive affair. Full-featured professional applications can cost thousands of dollars, while cheaper products, such as Apple's iDVD, have arbitrary restrictions that significantly reduce their usefulness. A new open-source effort, dvdauthor, is bringing the possibility of low-cost, professional-grade DVD authoring to Linux. Although it doesn't yet support all the features of the DVD specification, development is proceeding at a fast pace, and new features are being added with each release."

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Hm..i think this is a wonderfull step for linux by Brutus+(moo) · 2003-11-25 01:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

And for open source in general, if we can provide good open source solutions to things that until now cost alot of money, it is one of the strongest ways of supporting open source, providing however that the product really does do what is needed, and does it well (which in most cases i've seen with similar projects so far, was done extremely well, sometimes even better than the commercial product).
1. Re:Hm..i think this is a wonderfull step for linux by nathanh · 2003-11-25 15:40 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  And for open source in general, if we can provide good open source solutions to things that until now cost alot of money, it is one of the strongest ways of supporting open source,
  
  I disagree. I think that's one of the quickest ways of destroying open source.
  Open source is not about giving things away for free that otherwise would cost a lot of money. That's a recipe for a dead business and a lot of unemployed programmers. Open source is about empowering the user, empowering the third party developers, and leveraging the collaborative efforts of millions of programmers to achieve a common goal.
  If we start focussing purely on the monetary savings we lose sight of the actual benefits of open source; collaboration, community, sharing, empowerment, specialisation, customisation. All of those benefits aren't possible with closed-source software no matter what the cost.
It's nice but... by TheWanderingHermit · 2003-11-25 02:22 · Score: 4, Insightful

(And I'll preface this with a comment that I've only lightly skimmed the article.)

I've seen and heard, over and over, ad nauseum, programmers and OSS advocates continually ask me why I need more or say they don't see why people need all the extra UI features, since something like this can do it all. I'm glad to see this on Linux, the problem is that it still needs a good GUI before it'll get used by many people for DVD authoring (it might be used for the actual production process, but not as much for authoring).

And, as I go into this, we reach one of the primary problems with OSS. If you're a computer person, a program like this is easy to use, since you're used to command line switches and piecing everything together by adding in images from Gimp and pulling in fragments from a number of programs. On the other hand, if you're a video producer, your focus is on CREATING THE VIDEO and PUTTING YOUR VISION on DVD. It is NOT on using the tools, figuring out the command line arguments, or other activites. While I've spent several years working as a programmer, my primary function is writing screenplays. Until OpenOffice came out, there was no word processor on Linux where I could run the program and focus ONLY on writing my screenplays (part of that is the need for macros to handle margin changes). Programmers and other computer people would say, "But you can do this with all the OSS word processors," and I'd say, "I can, but that means I have to spend my time thinking about HOW I'm doing my work, instead of focusing on the work itself."

I love OSS, I love Linux. I know GUIs are a pain (I don't exactly love writing them myself), but for OSS to be used by professionals, like writers or DVD producers, the software has to be so easy to use that the end user can focus on their work instead of focusing on figuring out the software.

Don't get me wrong -- it's great we're this far along. If I had time, I'd love to write a GUI wrapper, but I don't, and it'll be a long time before there is a GUI that makes this software accessible to DVD producers who just want to run the program and use it as a tool to help them realize their vision.