Paladin
Guest
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 Posted:
Wed Nov 24, 2004 2:00 pm Post subject:
Is DVD authoring possible this way? |
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Hi,
I'd like to know whether the following is possible using Linux, no GUI, just
CLI.
I have a number of DVD-compliant MPEG-2 movies on a HD. Now I'd like to
produce a number of different DVDs from these movies. Each DVD should
contain all(!) movies, but show (not all) of those movies, each in a
different order. Say I have
chapter1.mpeg
chapter2.mpeg
chapter3.mpeg
chapter4.mpeg
chapter5.mpeg
chapter6.mpeg
Then I want the first DVD to show chapter 1 and 3 in a loop when inserted in
the DVD player. A second DVD would show chapter 1, 2, and 4 in a loop. Each
DVD would have one button in a menu to start the loop and one button to
select one of chapter 5 or 6 to show.
1. Can this be achieved by usind dvdauthor or similar tools?
2. How would the files on the produced DVDs differ? Would the .VOB files
differ?
TIA,
Thomas
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Rob R
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 24, 2004 10:01 pm Post subject:
Re: Is DVD authoring possible this way? |
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On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 14:16:40 +0100, Paladin wrote:
| Quote: | Hi,
I'd like to know whether the following is possible using Linux, no GUI,
just CLI.
I have a number of DVD-compliant MPEG-2 movies on a HD. Now I'd like to
produce a number of different DVDs from these movies. Each DVD should
contain all(!) movies, but show (not all) of those movies, each in a
different order. Say I have
chapter1.mpeg
chapter2.mpeg
chapter3.mpeg
chapter4.mpeg
chapter5.mpeg
chapter6.mpeg
Then I want the first DVD to show chapter 1 and 3 in a loop when inserted
in the DVD player. A second DVD would show chapter 1, 2, and 4 in a loop.
Each DVD would have one button in a menu to start the loop and one button
to select one of chapter 5 or 6 to show.
1. Can this be achieved by usind dvdauthor or similar tools? 2. How would
the files on the produced DVDs differ? Would the .VOB files differ?
TIA,
Thomas
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The quick and dirty answer is yes, you can do anything you want to do in
Linux without using a GUI. Dvdauthor takes an XML-like description file as
input, which is used to generate the DVD menu structure. This file can be
hand-edited to achieve the effect you want.
First, make sure your source files are VOB-compliant. The mpeg files need
to be structured so that dvdauthor just has to fill in some fields in
index records. Generating your mpeg files with mpeg2enc with type 8 does
this, I believe.
Your menus also have to be constructed as mpeg files. This is where the
non-GUI requirement breaks down. Creating menus is much easier if you can
see what you are doing. Do you already have menu mpeg files?
Once you have all your elements in place and can generate the first DVD
from your source material, it is not difficult to adapt the dvdauthor
control file to the different sequence for the second DVD. Note that your
menus would look identical on both DVDs. To change the menus requires you
to go back and generate new footage for the menu mpeg (again, much easier
with a GUI).
For the second question, the answer is that the VOB files would differ.
First, they would be different if you used different source materials for
each of your menus. Second, they would likely be different if your movies
were incorporated in a different order on each of the DVDs. The VOB files
are 1GB maximum chunks of your video. A single chapter can be contained
within a VOB or it can span multiple VOBs. Think of the VOB files as a set
of concatenated mpeg files.
I'm not quite sure what you are trying to accomplish here. It sounds like
you are trying to generate several identical-looking discs that behave
differently when first inserted into the player. If that is the case, I
believe that you can generate random numbers in a DVD program and use that
to select which sequence of chapters to play. I don't know if dvdauthor
supports that functionality, though.
--
Rob R
mail me at Enigma dash I at charter dot net |
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