hello every on at LQ.org,

I am playing with the idea of making some VCDs or SVCDs. However, I have never worked with video on my linux box. I figured this would provide some fun for me. To start of with, I thought I would probe the LQ community to see how others where doing this. Below is a simple idea of what I would like to accomplish...

Video capture from my ATI-TVWonder Tuner card...
JPG Slide show with menus and background music...
Mixture of video and JPG stills...
Convert wmv to VCD...

I think these should all be possible. I have done some googling and found several programs and combinations out there. Right now I was hoping to simply get some feed back as to what you have found works and what doesn't.

Anyone want to share your setup and experiences?

Thanks for any and all information...

PhilD

I've only made videos in Windows so far using my Hauppauge WinTV USB tuner card, so I don't know much about making movies in Linux. What I do know is that I would definately recommend downloading divx from http://www.divx.com My friend used to make VCDs using divx and they were very high quality but didn't take up much space. He said it is a bit difficult to make divx movies though, but the results certainly look worth it.

I dont know anything about slide shows but ive done a bit of basic video capture in linux with a hauppage wintv thingy and a pinnacle pctv pro, both with streamer(comes in the xawtv package) i then use avidemux2 to cut out adverts and tidy up, then i use mencoder to deinterlace, resize and compress to divx/mp3. i am very impressed with the results. my version of mencoder doesnt cope with much more than an hours worth of capture because of the filesize, but my version is quite old, im gonna install the new stable when its finished and see if that fixes it(before someone says compile with the --large-file option ive done that already).

i think most of what you want could be done with mencoder but i am no expert with it, there are a few on this board who are though.

Thanks for the replies!!!

I will have to check into divx and mencoder. If anyone has experience making JPG slideshows with background music please share your experiences. This is most likely the first project attempted. I have a lot of pictures and the vcd slide show sound like the perfect way to share them with family.

Thanks so far and I am off to do some light reading.

PhilD