Videotrans 1.5.2 review

Videotrans is a set of scripts that convert a movie file in any format that mplayer understands to a DVD-compatible VOB file, doing a

License: BSD License File size: 0K Developer: Sven Berkvens-Matthijsse

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Videotrans is a set of scripts that convert a movie file in any format that mplayer understands to a DVD-compatible VOB file, doing all the necessary conversions automatically. Videotrans provides an automatic DVD menu generator.

Videotrans has the following programs available:

movie-to-dvd

The movie-to-dvd program takes one or more input files and converts them into a separate MPEG2 video stream and a separate MP2 or AC3 audio stream.

This program takes care of all the necessary conversions, such as framerate adjustment, audio adjustment, zooming/shrinking for DVD frame sizes, etcetera. The program can determine which conversions are necessary on its own, no user intervention is required (but of course, it is possible).

When making a DVD, you'll first convert all the movies that you want to put on the DVD into the MPEG2 video and MP2 or AC3 audio streams. Later, you'll combine these with the movie-title program into a complete DVD.

movie-title

The movie-title program takes one or more video files that were converted by the movie-to-dvd program and a special title sequence that was produced by movie-make-title and combines all of these into a menu from which the viewer of the DVD can choose which movie he or she wants to watch.

The menu is created by displaying the title sequence in the background, with animated picture-in-picture versions of all the movies on top of that. The creator has the option of supplying information about the movies. This information can be viewed from the menu as well, on a movie-per-movie basis.

The program also generates an XML file for use with dvdauthor, the program that is used to actually create the DVD image that you will burn onto a DVD disc. The program tells you how to run dvdauthor to do the processing for you.

movie-make-title

The movie-make-title program is used to create a background movie and an audio track for DVD menus.

The movie-make-title program takes a single movie and cuts a specified part of out it. It then converts this piece of the movie into separate frames and saves the audio track in a WAV file for you.

You'll have to manually view all the frames and throw away those that you do not want in the title sequence of your DVD (the first few frames and the last few frames). It's not possible to automatically cut out the piece of the movie that you want exactly. I recommend xv for this purpose, although any image viewer that understands JPEG picture files will do.

Also, you'll have to process the WAV audio file by hand, to cut out exactly that audio track that you want to hear when the menu is displayed. The movie-title program will make sure that the audio track lasts exactly as long as the movie part that you cut out does. This is to compensate for possible changes in the video frame rate and to correct small mistakes. I personally find sweep a very useful graphical audio processor for this purpose. Sweep can be downloaded at http://sweep.sourceforge.net/.

movie-rip-tv.com

The movie-rip-tv.com program is a convenience program that I personally use to gather interesting information about TV series. Given the name of a series (such as Star Trek Enterprise), a season number and an episode number, this program will create an information file in the correct format for use with the movie-title program. The movie-title program will then be able to display the episode's name in the menu and provide an information button which leads to the generated information (such as the director, the guest stars list, the description of the particular episode, etcetera).

movie-compare-dvd

The movie-compare-dvd program can be used after burning a DVD image to a DVD disc to verify whether all the data was written onto the disc intact. The program takes the on-filesytem copy and the on-DVD copy and compares the checksums of the files on both to find any differences.

Usage:

If you want to start quickly with these programs, and you have a couple of movies that you want to put onto a DVD, try this (assuming that your TV standard is PAL, otherwise specify ntsc instead of pal everywhere that it's used):

movie-to-dvd -m pal movie1.avi movie2.avi movie3.avi
movie-make-title -o title -m pal -s 0 -e 60 -m pal movie1.avi
movie-title -o title.vob -t title movie1.m2v movie2.m2v movie3.m2v
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory -x title.vob-dvdauthor.xml
a_command_to_burn_a_dvd_from dvd_directory

In case you don't want a selection menu, you may also try:

movie-to-dvd -m pal -M movie1.avi movie2.avi movie3.avi
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory movie1.vob
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory movie2.vob
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory movie3.vob
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory -T
a_command_to_burn_a_dvd_from dvd_directory

In this case, you'll have to use the DVD player's navigation controls to get to the various movies on the DVD.

What's New in This Release:
A bug was fixed in movie-title where movie-title would call ImageMagick's convert with wrong parameters, producing a defective PNG which would cause spumux (in the dvdauthor package) to crash later on in the building process.
Whether this would happen or not seems fairly random, but it was a big nuisance that affected a lot of users.
movie-rip-tv.com now works again with tv.com's new URL format.