weird...i apt-upgraded debian sid which also upgraded xfce to 4.2.1, and now when i launch tovidgui, the borders for the application show up fine. It wasn't the case before, and i had to manually move tovidgui with 'alt+mouse' to be able to see the gui properly....problem is that i don't know if it was a xfce problem or a python problem, since apt upgrades everything that needs upgrading....

Oh well, just letting you know that it works now.

Thanks for the tip. I've been having similar weirdness with Debian-based Kubuntu, and conflicting wxPython libraries. Some minor GTK-related upgrade, and the tovid GUI was suddenly all ugly, using default GTK themes and stuff.

I'd be surprised if what you had were an XFCE problem, though. XFCE, during the coule months I used it, seemed rock-solid, with a minor focus-related issue that made it hard to use the GIMP (presumably fixed in newer versions).

So, here's what I've been doing the past few days. I tried out Ubuntu on an old parts-computer that I'm going to give to a friend of mine. I liked its installer (though it's only marginally easier than Debian, which I found difficult and annoying) but didn't get much farther than that. When I heard that KDE 3.4 was available in the latest Kubuntu, I had to try it.

I had a few initial hiccups with installation, mainly because of the ever-present Debian discouragement of not-totally-free software (nvidia, especially). Had to do some repository configuration, and had annoyances with GTK apps looking really bad (with unreadable fonts), Kubuntu being KDE-based. But now I have it going. I have my SuperKaramba eyecandy, and a few nice GUI effects in KDE.

I highly recommend KDE 3.4. As an integrated desktop experience, it has no equal in the Linux world. My favorite window managers since I started using Linux frequently 4 years ago, included: KDE 2.x, Gnome 1.4, Flux/blackbox (for a very long time) and XFCE 4.2. I have always believed that a window manager or desktop environment should interfere with work as little as possible. Much of my computer work consists of writing code, browsing the web, GIMPping or Blendering. Lots of windows and terminals.

I think KDE delivers that best now; what strikes me most is how integrated all of its diverse and peripheral projects appear to be. Documentation for most of them is kept in one place, and there seems to be a KDE application for just about every desktop need. There are some fantastic applications that I never tried until installing Kubuntu, like http://amarok.kde.org/]amaroK. Easy-to-create playlists, automatic categorization of your collection, and even automatic album cover-image and lyrics downloading. It's a sweet app.

I've also taken a liking to using KDE Wallet. Still kind of an infant project, but it's a simple and intuitive way to keep track of all your different logins and passwords for internet sites. There's a master password for your wallet, so all you have to remember is one password, and web forms will automatically be filled out. I like the feature so much, I've started using Konqueror as my main browser. Its interface looks nicer than Firefox's, and it has a lot of other great features like embedded PDF viewing, embedded image browsing, and of course hard drive browsing. I like the way you can set up your own "profiles" for different kinds of Konqueror use. I like the web shortcuts feature; I can type "gg:KDE" to Google on KDE, or "imdb:Johnny Depp" to search IMDB for Johnny Depp. Konqueror is what Microsoft Internet Explorer always wanted to be, but never quite achieved.

The Kommander Editor lets you quickly create Kommander apps. Just as easy as doing visual basic, with the nice GUI editor.

Another nifty app I discovered is FileLight, which shows concentric rings representing disk usage. You can click on the rings to browse and descend into subdirectories.

Anyhow, enough about KDE. I think it's doing well; I almost wish I had written the tovid GUI as a kommander app!

I'm polishing things up with 0.18; I'm switching to a three-step process with three (exclusive) buttons: "1. Layout", "2. Encode", "3. Burn" or something to that effect. It looks nice! I'm also making progress on a 'makevcd' script for authoring/burning a VCD from the 'makexml' output file. I'll do the same with a 'makedvd' for DVDs. Then, the GUI will call upon those to author and burn the disc. I definitely want to get burning into the 0.18 release, since it will make tovid a much more complete program.

I'm also starting to get big plans for revising the GUI for later releases. Too soon to post details, but I'll post some ideas when they are more definite.

wow, oh so, thats what you been up to...lol.

Thanks for the input on KDE...now, if they could get it into the Sid repository i will give it a shot.

Doesn't it? Dirk's apps are very impressive, to say the least....and they aren't even final yet....

The "1. Layout", "2. Encode", "3. Burn" sounds much better than "Add menu", etc.
It sorta puts one in a "mode" of what one is trying to do.

Revising the gui, eh? How difficult is it to use kommander instead of wxPython? Just wondering....heehee.

A tovid user was kind enough to set up a bulletin board for tovid discussion. I plan to start using it for most tovid-related discussion, to take some strain off LinuxQuestions.org and give us the chance to have more than one thread for discussing tovid. You should be able to post there without a membership, but you'll probably want to sign up for a username if you post regularly.

Hi all,

Just wanted to say thanks to Wapcaplet and all. I have started using Tovid and am surprised how easy command line processing of video can be. I have not used the GUI yet. I'm fairly new to Linux (couple of months) and I'm trying to get a feel for how Tovid does things. I can watch the command line for that (a little insight).

I enjoyed this thread, yeah I read it all :>), and I appreciate your efforts.

That depends....now, if you go use transcode on the command line, you will have nightmares.
But glad that you liked it.

Ah..a tovid dedicated forum. Cool. Hmm, i don't see a link on the site that links back to the main tovid website.....is it there or is it that i just can't find it?

Thanks for the compliment! I have tried since the beginning to make tovid's command-line interface as easy to use. I think part of its ease comes from having easy-to-remember long-named options. So many *NIX command-line utilities were developed Uber-Geek-style with extremely terse, and often exceedingly complex command-line options. Mplayer has nice descriptive command-line options, but suffers from having an extremely large number of them. Doing any kind of video conversion with mencoder requires giving a carefully-crafted command that may take you 10 minutes just to construct the command and type it in.

I may be wrong, but I think tovid is possibly the first really high-level command-line video disc suite. It would be fairly simple to connect all of tovid's functionality together in an even higher-level command-line script. You have, say, a bunch of random media files in /home/eric/stuff. Some videos, some images, some mp3s, or whatever - you want to back it all up in a portable format. tovid could provide this kind of command:

Go to sleep. When you wake up the next morning, you have a freshly-burned DVD, with a menu hierarchy (default backgrounds and colors in a configuration template, so you will get nice menus with each disc). All the videos that were in /home/eric/videos are linked from the menus; the images are turned into a DVD slideshow (again, using default slideshow settings, but you could create your own slideshow template with nice transitions, background music, etc.). Maybe you could set it up so your mp3 collection would be background music for your photo collection (you could listen to the tunes through your stereo, with the TV off, or you could view the slides with the mp3s muted).

Think of the possibilities! It's almost there now. I think one of my first goals with post-0.18 releases will be to begin putting in this high-level stuff. A simple script that can handle everything automatically. Then, later, a GUI interface for it. You can manually author your disc's content from scratch (current interface), or you could "import" a directory of miscellaneous stuff (videos, pics, mp3s). You can then stick with the automatically-generated disc structure, or you could modify it to your liking before authoring and burning.

Boy, I love it when I get off on a tangent and have some really great ideas! It makes me want to go work on the GUI right now, so I can get it released. But first I need to go get some breakfast...

The tovid forum has a couple new posts regarding some of my plans. If you are subscribed to this thread, and are still interested in tovid, please sign up on the new forums so you will receive announcements about tovid. Make all new posts there.

It'll be fun to see how many people end up joining the tovid forums; I have a rough guess about how large tovid's user-base is, but this will be the first real indicator of how many interested users are out there. I'd estimate there are about 100 people using tovid on a regular basis, with a significant percentage of them interested in developing (there have been about a dozen people contributing to the code, in small or large ways). I'm excited at the possibility that it might be even more than that!

i dunno what happened, but i never got the verify email sent to me. Is it blocking certain free email providers? Right now, i am posting as sk544.

Strange. My account, being the admin, was the first to be created so I never dealt with a verification e-mail.

I've just discovered another problem - when I get a topic reply notification through email (just like we get with LinuxQuestions), the link in the email goes to an error page. Looking at the URL that is sent through email, it doesn't appear to be including the ID numbers of the forum or the topic. I'm not sure how to fix it, or whether it's a bug in phpBB.

I've started a thread for discussing bulletin-board-related problems.

I am having an issue that, with a cursory look over this thread, I didn't see addressed. I am running 0.18b and it works as advertised on RHEL3. I have a machine with Windows virus on it and I compared the Tovid suite to a Windows program called Avi to MPEG Converter. As an additional point of interest, the Windows box is a single P4 2.8/800 with 1gb of memory and the linux box is a dual P3 800 with 2gb or memory. The linux box is marginally faster when doing these conversions.

My goal is to burn some fansub anime series to dvd and share them with my non-geek friends so they can play them on their DVD/TV systems. The shows that I tested were all TV rips, presumably from Japan TV broadcast, encoded with DiVX. They were definitely not DVD rips. With Tovid using `tovid -normalize -priority high -dvd -full -ntsc <source> <destination>` all episodes were displayed larger than what the TV can display. Essentially, you can't see the subtitles because so much of the bottom of the screen is cut off. I have a Phillips DVP642 DVD player (that plays DiVX natively) and it does the same thing. With "Avi to MPEG Converter" on Windows, the MPEG's that it generates do not have this same problem when ripped to DVD.

I have a basic understanding of how video encoding works, but I don't really understand what would be causing this issue or what solution is required. Any suggestions are appreciated.

My guess is the subtitles are getting cut off because they are not within the television safe area. Any text that is close to the borders of the picture is likely to be cut off when played back on your TV; older TVs tend to cut off more picture than newer or high-def TVs.

If your anime subtitles are encoded into the video (that is, they can't be turned off), then the only solution I can think of is to scale down the picture size so it fits in the safe area, padding the non-safe area with a black background. At least this way, you'll be able to see the subtitles.

Unfortunately, tovid doesn't support this directly, and it's non-trivial to implement. You could do the scaling/padding yourself using another conversion program, but it'll result in some quality degradation. I'll add this to my to-do list for future releases, though, so thanks for bringing it to attention!

There's a new tovid discussion forum; please post any new topics there.

Hi everyone
I thought y'all might like to check out my first try at c++ programming, magicvid.
It is a gui for tovid,cdrtools,mkisofs,mpgtx etc.. It uses tovid to convert files and postproc to shrink them. Check it out at https://sourceforge.net/projects/magicvid/
or the magicvid homepage at http://magicvid.sourceforge.net/default.html
Rpms and source file are available. So far it has been tested in mdk 10.1 and is still beta but is totally functional.

cool. However, i think you need a configure script....All the paths on debian are different than what you have in the Makefile. I changed some of them, but i still can't seem to get it to work. Right now i have this:

make
( cd /src/moc && make )
/bin/sh: line 0: cd: /src/moc: No such file or directory
make: *** [/bin/moc] Error 1

I mean, my moc is in /usr/bin.

However, the screenshots look nifty, albeit the color is a little dull (grey) and that weird color at the bottom for the log is yucky. Otherwise, i like how you have it setup, quite easy to follow.

Good job! Now if i could only get it to compile...

Also, how long have you been working on it? You didn't give a hint to us at all....

Funny you should write--just a few days ago, I happened across magicvid when I noticed that tovid actually had another Freshmeat.net project depending on it! It looks like your plans for magicvid are similar to my plans for tovid; I don't know what your long-term goals for magicvid are, but it seems that we might be better off combining our efforts, to produce the best possible open-source, GUI-enabled video disc authoring software.

Unfortunately, I too was unable to compile magicvid at first. Upon running 'make', I receive:

That particular file (qmake.conf) is probably in a distribution-specific location. I am using Gentoo; mine appears to be located at /usr/qt/3/mkspecs/linux-g++/qmake.conf. An unusual location, it seems; this may be due to my having an unstable ("masked" in Gentoo) version of KDE 3.4 installed from source. My makefile skills are pretty rusty, so I'm not sure how you could locate and use the correct path, but I'm sure there's a more robust way to handle the problem in a more distribution-independent way.

Strangely, removing both of the qt3 references and leaving only:

on line 98 of 'Makefile' works perfectly. magicvid compiles and runs now!

If I may offer a suggestion, both as a graphic designer and a user of graphical interfaces: try to minimize the use of graphical backgrounds, colored buttons and other interface effects. On my screen, with my available fonts, some of the buttons' text is cut off or hard to read because of its color. I think if you just let the user's theme control the appearance of the interface, you'll be better off.

Doing this will help your program integrate better (visually, anyway) with other software, and might even make your program more pleasant to use. Linux users like to customize their desktops and themes, and when they have chosen a theme they like, they usually expect most of their software to use that theme. Overriding theme defaults can make your program jarring or distracting, and can even make it look less professional. As a user, I think I'm more likely to use your software if it looks nice in my desktop theme.

Glancing through the source code, I see that this is fairly QT-based. Did you use any graphical tools to create the user interface? It's pretty cool that your user interface is written in XML; I never thought about trying to write a UI as if it were a webpage!

How might we join our efforts? Can you think of ways we can use teamwork to make both our programs better? Please hop on over to the developer's section of the tovid forum and post your thoughts!