DVD Authoring Under Linux?

phorm asks: "After getting a much-awaited DVD-burner for Christmas, I've yet to use it to actually burn a video DVD. The main reason thus far: I've yet to find decent DVD-authoring software (either for Linux or Windows) that does what I want and doesn't have a high pricetag. So far, Freshmeat projects seem to be extremely alpha/beta quality, with not much support for buttons, animated menus/backgrounds, and all the other things that make commercial DVD's truly beautiful. Does anyone know of any affordable/free DVD authoring software that has these features? Preference to open-source or Linux software, but Windows software will do if there's nothing better." phorm is not alone in this quest, read on for another query on this topic.

To add on to phorm's query, smz420 asks: "A few months ago, I acquired a DVD burner and have had a lot of fun creating discs. While they come out well, they're very much cookie-cutter, due to the software I've been using to create them. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of flexibility built into the consumer level authoring systems out there, and I'd like to take my discs to the next level. Can anyone in Slashdot-land recommend books, links or software packages that could lead me down the road towards 'prosumer' DVD authoring? I'd like to be able to take full control over authoring: design my own button shapes and structures; place text where-ever I want on a menu page; create custom navigation structures, and possibly plant an easter egg or two. So far, I've tried Pinnacle Studio 8, Sonic MyDVD and Nero on Windows 2000. While each had very good aspects to them, all of them fell short of enabling 'next level' DVD authoring. Any advice would be most appreciated."

Comments

You may find this link useful

[agm]

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6953

Re:You may find this link useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Trick out home videos with a fun, featureful menu system that viewers can navigate from a regular DVD player.

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. Together with a more established open-source toolkit, mjpegtools, this article explains how to construct a relatively complex DVD application, a photo album, with dvdauthor. We also illustrate the various features that dvdauthor currently supports and how to use open-source tools to construct a DVD-R that can play on almost every DVD player.

How a DVD Works (Quick Version)

A DVD is comprised of one or more video title sets (VTSes), which contain video information in the form of MPEG-2 video streams. Each disc can have up to 99 VTSes, and each title set can be subdivided further into as many as 99 chapters, allowing DVD players to jump to a certain point within the video stream. Within each VTS, a DVD can have up to eight different audio tracks and 32 subtitle tracks that the viewer can switch between at will. A menu system can be included within a title set, allowing the viewer to select between the different subtitle and audio tracks. An optional top-level menu, known as the video manager menu (VMGM), is used to navigate between the different title sets. One VTS may contain a feature film and another may contain a documentary on the film, and the VMGM allows viewers to select which one they want to watch.

The DVD format doesn't eliminate the differences between the two competing broadcasting formats, NTSC (primarily used in America) and PAL (the standard in Europe and Japan). I live in Britain, so the frame information and resolution details used in this article are for a PAL system, but I point out the differences you need to be aware of when they appear and offer appropriate settings for an NTSC disc.

The DVD specification includes advanced features, such as the concept of region coding, the possibility of viewing different angles of a video stream and simple computations using built-in registers provided by a DVD player. I don't know much about these features, and they aren't discussed in this article. The dvdauthor mailing list is a good source for further information.

Planning

Before we rush headlong into creating menus, subtitling and multiplexing, it's a good idea to sketch out the structure of the DVD with paper and pencil. Proprietary DVD tools offer GUI systems for creating this type of structure, but no such tools are available yet for DVD production on Linux. As you'll soon see, the command-line tools have a lot of different options, so having your ideas on paper is preferable to trying to keep everything in your head.

The DVD application I'm creating is a photo album, using pictures that I took while studying abroad at UNC-Chapel Hill this past year. For simplicity's sake, I have only six photos in each category. On paper, I decide that the main menu (the VMGM unit) should have five buttons, four of which are simple text buttons (one for each different photo category), plus a secret link unlocking extra pictures (secret extra features are a common occurrence in commercial DVDs) and a music track playing in the background. The four regular buttons link to one of four menus, one for each different section. The menu system for each section consists of two menus and an audio track, with selectable preview images of the slideshow, a button to move onto the next set of preview images and two buttons that allow the viewer to watch the complete slideshow or go back to the main menu. To keep things simple, the photo s

Roxio Easy Media Creator 7

[wo1verin3]

I'm pretty happy with this, although it was a bit on the pricey side (59.99 after 20 dollar rebate at best buy). the dvd builder app allowed me to add images or video clips (quicktime, mpeg1/2, etc) to my project, has a selection of 10+ themes I can use, you can choose your own background, button style from pre-defined themes, move the buttons anywhere you want on the main page, resize the buttons, create chapter menus by defining chapter points. When I created a longer movie, the auto detect scene automatically created chapter points at scene changes which was pretty sweet...

It's just damn cool :)

Try DVD-Lab

[pcidevel]

I recommend checking out www.vcdhelp.com. They have tons of links and guides and howtos on various tools. Here is a link to their authoring page.

I use DVDLab to author dvd's myself, which you can find here. It works in most cases, but sometimes I use ifoedit to do really advanced things. However, Ifoedit is not for the feint of heart.

DVDRHELP and VCDHELP

[jonconley]

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/ There are the guides, there are also several links to tools that you can use. You can go very expensive (scenarist, dvdmaestro), cheaper trialware (tmpg, spruceup) , or freeware tools (dvdauthor, ifoedit). Granted freeware isn't quite at the level of the others, but definitely a powerful improvement over the software that you have been using. You will probably learn alot more about the DVD format by using these guides/tools also.

dvdauthor

[Anonymous Coward]

http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net

it's lowlevel but you can do virtually anything you want -- custom nav, animated menu, etc. it'll even let you do some things that are illegal according to the spec. It works on many Unices and there's even a Cygwin port.

disclaimer: I wrote it.

dvdauthor

[skippy13]

A few links:
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/
http:// dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net/
http://www.pcxperi ence.org/james/dvd/presentations /20031016/medres/text0.html
http://www.tappin.me. uk/Linux/dvd.html
http://gecius.de/linux/dvd.html
http://www.dahnielson.com/primer.txt
http://pol idori.chapelperilous.net/
http://qdvdauthor.sourc eforge.net/
http://dvdstyler.sourceforge.net/

You're going to hate me...

[dspisak]

Okay a few things to get out of the way.

First, most consumer oriented DVD authoring apps are absolute garbage and not worth your time if your looking to make something unique that is your own and you don't need templates written in stone to guide you.

On the PC side Ulead DVD Workshop was a decent app with some flexibility but it has its limitations. If you need something more powerful then DVD Workshop I would recommend Adobe Encore.

If you need something more advanced then Encore you are now entering the realm of Sonic Scenarist which is what is used by a lot of the pros for Hollywood movie DVDs. It comes with a very high pricetag depends on which version you opt for.

On the Mac side of things you've got iDVD 4 which is very nice for non-technical people. It has some nice features and flexiblity. If you need more then iDVD 4 skip ahead to DVD Studio Pro 2 which is IMHO one of the easiest to use fully featured DVD authoring apps I've had the pleasure to use. There are a very few things that DVDSP2 doesn't do that Sonic Scenarist does support and if you need them your usually in a postion to afford the cost of Scenarist.

Personally, if your going to be making money off DVD authoring I'd have a Mac around just for working in DVDSP2 and then use something like CinemaCraft SP on a very fast PC for MPEG-2 encoding (unless G5 encode speeds are fast enough for you, depends on your projects and turnaround time).

DVD authoring on Linux I have yet to try but this stuff is non-trivial to do even under Windows. DVDSP2 is great because it helps hide some of the underlying complexity, just enough so its not overwhelming but you do need to know a few things about the DVD spec. I suspect part of Linux's problem when it comes to DVD authoring packages is the mutli-application aspect of such a program. Remember an authoring package has to understand multiple media types for assest, be able to composite both 2D images and moving video as well as deal with sound, editing, compositing, not to mention DVD scripting and other things if it intends to allow you to do anything allowed withing the DVD-Video spec.

Keep in mind that some of these higher end authoring packages like Scenarist are so complicated that you have people whose whole job description can be summed up as "Sonic Scenarist Specialist" when it comes to DVD authoring.

In Linux - not too difficult.

[GiMP]

First, please realize that the DVD menus are simply MPEG files. You can create a static menu with the gimp, or if you're into motion, use Cinelerra or another video editing program like MainActor, Final Cut Pro, or Adobe Premier.

Finally, you can add buttons to the menu with dvdauthor. There aren't many frontends for dvdauthor, but it is easy to use manually or you can kludge together your use of a video editor and qdvdauthor.

try this

[snakattak]

Using Linux only...look here

Short Guide Courtesy of shiznix

[Roguelazer]

This guide was posted on the Gentoo Forums by shiznix. Find it here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=117709

I know you Slashdot users hate Gentoo, but this is actually an excellent guide that features animated menus and all!

Place to begin

[the_Skunkworks]

I found doom9.org was a good place to begin in creating DVD's they have a great tutorials and some damn good programs (only windows).

"Build your own" in Linux--my steps in DVD making

[Linuxathome]

Shortest answer I can give you:

1. Use kino to do the video editing, and output/export (i.e. save as) an MPEG-2 (DVD format). To get this to work you will most likely need Mplayer installed because you'll need the mplex commandline tool to "multiplex" your audio and video files. Some like to use transcode, but I like Mplayer much better. Split the MPEG into multiple MPEGs if you want to have different chapters -- the best way to do this is to use a commandline tool called mpgtx. Or just save different MPEGs from kino. BTW, if you need to get video footage to edit in the first place then use dvgrab to get video from your DV camcorder -- it should be a part of the kino suite of tools, but if it's not, get it from one of the pages in kino.
2. Once you've gotten your MPEGs all created, now you can author. I use dvdauthor. What you have to first do is create a XML text file to list the MPEGs you want to burn into the DVD. And example of such a file is found here. The easiest method is to create a new chapter for each MPEG file. Then you run dvdauthor like so:

   dvdauthor -o DVDdir -x xml-filename

   DVDdir is the name of the output you want -- name doesn't really matter; xml-filename is the name of the text file you created.
3. DVDdir will be a directory from which you then need to create a video ISO. You need the commandline tool mkisofs. Example is:

   mkisofs -dvd-video -o fileoutput.img DVDdir

4. Now you just need to burn fileoutput.img with your DVD recorder. I use dvdrecord (yes, it's a commandline tool):

   dvdrecord -v -eject speed=4 dev=0,0,0 -dao fileoutput.img

Yes, I'm a glutton for punishment. There are lots of steps involved to do it in Linux, but it's quite powerful once you've gotten the basics down and have written shell scripts to automate the tasks.

If you find it difficult to install all these tools on your Linux box (as many do), may I recommend installing Debian linux? Best way to do this is to do a hard drive install from the Knoppix Live Linux CD. The scripts to do this are built-in the cd: knx-hdinstall or knoppix-installer. Why do I recommend it? Installing all the tools I have listed above are a simple apt-get away -- i.e. "apt-get install kino" or "apt-get install mpgtx" or "apt-get install dvdauthor" -- I mean how much easier can it get?

Lastly, allow me to plug my blog that has documented this and a number of other linux tips ages ago: linuxathome.com