Singing Potatoes
Previous — Main Page — Up to Archive — Next
Wednesday, 10 March 2004
Totally sweet

DVDlab is fantastic. You can do basic DVD authoring without even breaking a sweat, yet it has phenomenal capabilities for doing some pretty advanced stuff. In combination with the free IfoEdit, it looks like I can do just about anything the expensive commercial packages will do, with a savings of several thousand dollars.

I know it sounds weird, but it makes me want to do a DVD of nothing but menus, just to see what sorts of things I can do with it. (And I hear DVD authoring can be a lucrative field...)

On the downside, Karen says she's getting jealous of my DVD burner, since I've been spending so much time with it.

Posted by godfrey (link)
Previous — Main Page — Up to Archive — Next
Comments
It's true!
Posted by Ginevra on 22 Jan 2004 08:45
Real DVD geeks use command-line tools.
Posted by Squelch on 22 Jan 2004 09:26
That would be nice, but at the moment dvdauthor only supports program tracks; menu support is planned but not yet included.

But I've got to admit, I never expected to see a Mac user promoting command-line tools. Hell, I'm a dinosaur in the Windows world for my love of CLI utilities...

Posted by Godfrey on 22 Jan 2004 09:50
Not true--that web page is way out of date. WAY. dvdauthor has included almost all DVD features for almost a year now. Take a look at http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html.

It works rather like the VCD tools with XML, although I've authored several complex DVDs with the earlier versions, where you had to use command-line options. Boy, _that_ was one hell of a shell script!

Of course, if DVDlab works for you, all the better. I went after dvdauthor because iDVD didn't work with external burners, but I've stuck with it because it's actually far more powerful.
Posted by Squelch on 22 Jan 2004 12:44
Clarification: go directly to the man pages in the previous link, do not collect $200.
Posted by Squelch on 22 Jan 2004 12:47
Tsk. If only they spent a fraction of the time updating the site to reflect its expanded capabilities. I'm definitely going to have to give it a look.

Now if only there was a decent open-source AC3 encoder...

Posted by Godfrey on 22 Jan 2004 13:12
Heh! ffmpeg supposedly works for some DVD players. Not mine (a Pioneer) though. "Not me though, I love Krusty." It only does 2-channel AC3 in practice, though.
Posted by Squelch on 22 Jan 2004 19:52
Does your player handle MPEG Audio? I'm not sure what to do, since the ac3enc-based encoders all seem to have problems. MPA is apparently supported by all European players, but only some American ones. Grrr.

And I don't really want to drop $400 on a licensed AC3 encoder.

Posted by Godfrey on 22 Jan 2004 21:07
Hm. I've never had a problem with MPEG, nor have I ever heard of a player that does. I think all modern players support it.
Posted by Squelch on 23 Jan 2004 06:44