dvdauthor
A simple set of tools to help you author a DVD. The idea is to be
able to create menus, buttons, chapters, etc, but for now you can just
take an mpeg stream (as created by mplex -f 8 from mjpegtools 1.6.0)
and write it to DVD.
Download
See the download pages for current releases.
Alpha releases can be downloaded via source control, which uses darcs. The repository URL is
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/darcs For those new to
darcs, the quick way to get started is to type:
darcs get --partial --repo-name=dvdauthor http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/darcs
This will pull a partial repository; you will not be able to examine
history before the most recently released version of dvdauthor. If
you want a full repository, omit --partial, but it may affect the
reliability of the download. Sourceforge is not set up for
repositories of this nature.
To keep it up to date, run:
cd dvdauthor
darcs pull
There are currently precompiled win32 binaries on the current
release download page, but you will need unrar to extract it.
Other platforms will have to compile for themselves. There are
various RPMs floating around the net.
Some (optional) patches I have collected:
- libdvdread-0.9.4 patch which shows the mnemonics for the various VM commands in the IFO and VOB files, also includes a VOB dumper.
Documentation
The ever evolving book is located online here.
Links
Useful Programs
- Mjpeg Tools has the best multiplexer around. Others will often throw warnings with dvdauthor. It also has an mpeg2 video encoder.
- FFMpeg has a great AC3 encoder. AC3 and raw PCM are the only two audio formats guaranteed to be supported by every DVD player. North American DVD players may or may not support mpeg 1 layer 2 audio.
- Toolame is a very good mpeg 1 layer 2 audio encoder, useful for generating mpeg audio streams. While mjpegtools also has an audio encoder, they don't recommend using it.
- Kino is a video editor and capturer for Unix.
GUI Frontends
- Polidori promises to be a great GTK based GUI front end to dvdauthor, but is currently extremely pre-alpha.
- Q DVD Author promises to be the same, but for QT.
- DVD Styler promises to be the same, but uses wxWindows, which should port nicely to Windows.
- VideoLink takes HTML pages, with links, and turns them into a DVD menu structure.
- Videotrans is a set of scripts for converting movies into VOBs for dvdauthor. It also has some menu generation abilities.
Tutorials
- Ben Hutchings gave an excellent high level overview of DVD authoring in general on Linux.
- Gentoo has a forum thread regarding dvdauthor.
- James Pattie has some nice menu generation scripts and an online tutorial that he gave to the St. Louis Linux Users Group.
- James Tappin has a tutorial on using dvdauthor.
- Jens Gecius has another tutorial on dvdauthor.
Other
- MPU Coder's DVD Reference has been invaluable in the development of this program.
- DVD Replica hosts the unofficial DVD specifications.
- VStrip is located under the 'code' section. It can remove unwanted audio or subtitle streams from an existing DVD/mpeg stream.