No problem, will do.

Thx for explaning how idvid works.

Been trying out the different scripts, so the next one i did is 'makemenu'. Although i haven't done too much with it, it works good. Question though: why do i get a *.hi.png and a *.png file? the 'hi.png' is like a checkerboard. Whats that used for?

Also, i am not making the connection with 'makemenu' and 'makexml'. So say i have like 3 svcd mpg's lying around and i want to put them all on one cd (lets just say the videos fit on the cd) with a 'top or the menu that appears when the cd is first inserted.' How is that accomplished? Do i make a a 'top' menu first with 'makemenu', then make a xml file with 'makexml' and then feed it to vcdxbuild? Or does makexml take care of the 'makemenu' step? Somewhat confusing, and i think it would be nice to have this explained a bit better on the website with a example or two. I do think this will be a VERY common thing people would want to do with their vcd's. i.e. having multiple files on one cd with a menu. In other words, you will get this asked sooner or later.

Also, i see that we also have 'makempg' which *looks* like its doing the same thing as 'makemenu'.

Those components are confusing, I know

As is mentioned on the website, the integration between them is almost nonexistent right now. Let me attempt to answer your questions to start with:

It's intended for highlighting selections on DVD menus. If you added text using 'makemenu', the .hi file should have that text in an orange color on a transparent background (the checkerboard). If not, well, it's a bug. Anyway, the way it works is this: whenever you use a DVD menu, you know how when you press up/down/left/right on your DVD remote control, different parts of the screen get highlighted? Those parts are contained in the .hi image. (here's where it gets technical...) During authoring, you can use a program called 'spumux' that comes with dvdauthor, which uses (yet another) XML file format telling it where different parts of the highlight appear, and what happens when you press up/down/left/right. The highlighted parts are actually contained in a subtitle that is combined (multiplexed) with the video file of the menu. It's all really complicated, and a pain in the ass, and is something I really need to make easier with the tovid utilities. I'm not quite sure how to approach it yet.

makemenu is for creating a single image. It's sort of like a quick-and-dirty GIMP from the command-line. My intention was to make it easier to create menus; the still-image that 'makemenu' spits out can have a bunch of video titles on it. Currently, that's all it does (aside from creating that .hi image).

makempg was designed to help you get that still-image into a form that can be used as an actual menu on a (S)VCD or DVD. It turns it into an mpeg video, with background music. That's currently all it does, really.

makexml is designed only to write the XML for authoring your disc. As noted on the webpage, there's no utility (yet) for getting from 'makempg' to 'makexml' - you still have to do some intermediate steps by hand, namely: (1) Determine where the buttons on the menu should be and write a spumux XML file, and (2) Take the .hi image from 'makemenu' and multiplex it with the video created by 'makempg', by using spumux with the XML file.

So a sort of general answer to most of your questions is, "you can't do it with the tovid suite yet."

The really hard part of this equation is building the menu. When you set out to author a video disc, you have to make some aesthetic decisions, such as what kind of image you want in the background of the menu, what font/color/size you want the "links" to each video to be in, etc. If you have, say, 50 videos, you might need to design sub-menus, and decide how to navigate to each one. Think about how complex the menu system of most commercial DVDs is! And I'm just talking about using still-images for menus. DVD allows tons of other features, such as moving-video menus, video transitions between menus, and (as far as I know) no hard limits on how many menus and sub-menus you can have.

Sticking only to still-image menus, it's still a difficult task. The best, although slowest and hardest-to-learn, is to create your menu in GIMP - that way, you can completely control how it will look. Since I like to have lots of control over how my menu looks, I'm making an effort to put that flexibility in the tovid suite.

Now, I could add functionality to the suite for automatic menu generation. Say, for example, you have 20 video files you want to put on DVD. It'd be nice if you could just say:

makedvd All_my_videos

In theory, tovid could do everything - convert the video, automatically build menus to navigate them, generate the XML, author and burn the DVD. But you wouldn't have as much control that way.

So, to make a long story not as long, I haven't quite figured out what my plan for this is. We are getting there, though. Until then, if you are completely baffled about what to do with 'makexml' and whatnot, I'd suggest just authoring your DVDs with another fine program like QDVDauthor. Or, if you're not afraid to get your hands dirty, refer to James Tappin's howto to better understand the whole process.

wow. Well i understand most of the explanation...Thx for that.

I'm doing an overhaul of the 'makemenu' component. After much consideration, it seems to me that this component should do everything that needs to be done to create a menu. It will sort of be a merging of the 'makemenu' and 'makempg' components; I haven't decided whether to keep makempg or not. It won't be very useful anymore - the only purpose I can think of for it is if you want to put music on a VCD or DVD (say, some of your mp3 collection) and just want to show an image while the music plays.

Anyway, here is what the new 'makemenu' will do: You give it a background image (optional), background music (also optional), and a bunch of text that you want to add to the menu. You can also tell it what format your disc will be in (VCD/SVCD or DVD, PAL or NTSC). The script will generate a finished .mpg file, ready to burn. For DVD menus, the highlighted subtitle-stream will already be muxed in, with one "button" for each text string. For VCD/SVCD menus, the text strings will have numbers next to them, so you can press "1", "2", etc. on your remote control to get to them (that's just the way (S)VCDs work, unfortunately - it also means you can't have more than 9 menu options). All this extra functionality requires a bunch more command-line options, so this component will be fairly complicated to use, but I think it should be pretty easy once you get the hang of it. It'll definitely be easier than doing all of it by hand!

This should make the whole authoring process much more complete. You can convert your videos with 'tovid', make menus using 'makemenu', and go straight from there to 'makexml', where you provide the names of your videos and menus. After those three steps, all you gotta do is run dvdauthor or vcdxbuild on the XML file, and you're ready to burn the finished product.

Another little script I'm adding to 0.17 is called 'tovid-batch' - just what it sounds like, this lets you convert a bunch of videos at once. I thought about adding that capability to 'tovid' itself, but it would have been very complicated. 'tovid-batch' will work just like 'tovid', except you don't provide an output filename - files are just named the same as the input files, but with an .mpg extension. You could convert a whole directory full of .avi files like this:

Pretty cool, eh?

All this unfortunately means 0.17 will be delayed slightly, but there are still some unexplained bugs to work out anyway. It should be worth the wait.

I would have really liked it if it could make a slideshow of bunch of images with background music and being able to set a interval in seconds. Sort of what 'dvdslideshow' does, but 'dvdslideshow' is not *that* easy to use. Tons of people make slideshows, so there is no way 'makempg' would be a waste.
Tell me about it....
Just came across that scenario like a few days ago. But how's this gonna work? Will they all encode at the same time or one-at-a-time? Not sure how they can be done all together, i mean wouldn't the cpu catch fire or the system slow down to a halt?
No biggie. 0.16 works pretty darn good. So take your time.

Maybe "at once" was a poor choice of words It encodes them one at a time; it just lets you do it all with one command.

alright, coo.

Hey guys haven't posted in a while. Anywho, I have some good news, I just purchased a dvd player for my Mom for Christmas, it was on sale for 37 dollars Canadian. I tested it to make sure it works and tried one of the svcd's that I made with the old tovid script. It works flawlessly. BTW the reason I only got a chance now to test it on a DVD is because I don't own one. Why can I buy one for my mom and not for myself, you ask? lack of organization maybe LOL!.

I found this site too, it seems to carry alot of scripts for dvd, etc to kvd, ksvcd, svcd. I wondering if maybe you should let them know about your tovid script, and maybe you could borrow some of there work to get kvcd working in Tovid. I don't mean to beg on this, but I am so deal with it .

heres the link http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de/fo...wforum.php?f=2

hey stinkyfish, welcome back.

Yeah, that website you linked to has really old scripts. Try em, and let me know if even a single one works. I think it would just be useful for looking at their code, lol.

You know what would be really cool with tovid: Having it in such a way that when a download completes, it starts up and encodes the video. In other words, say you're downloading via bittorrent, but dunno how long it will take for it to finish. When it finishes, one has to manually invoke tovid to start the encoding. I was wondering if tovid would start up after the download is completed (well, one would have to tell it what to do with the downloaded file first, ofcourse).

Anyhow, not really a priority, more like something to do much later on. Most likely depends on how hard it would be to implement (if its even possible), i suppose...

I dont know if it has this already, but what about taking the mpg and automatically making an iso, so all someone has to do is burn image to disk, but that wouldn't be standard I guess if someone still wants to watch the movie after its been rencoded.
Im helping out with College Linux and the upcoming release, maybe we could have tovid included with the release. It would be nice if we could test and get the gui ready. I have some spare time to test, so if you need a beta tester.

vcdimager makes a bin/cue file, instead of a iso. I doubt it could make a iso...but i think thats what you meant.

Even if someone wanted to watch the movie, they could extract the mpg file from the bin file with 'vcdrip' or they could even watch the bin file with mplayer directly without mounting it in a "loop" (mplayer cue://file ), so thats not much of an issue.
Thats cool. I dunno what his plans are with the gui, but he did take it out from the release since it was quite buggy. All i know it looked really simple to use and was based on python.

Saw something interesting with 'top':

It appears that even though 'mpeg2enc' is showing up around 0.3%, at the top portion of 'top', the cpu usage is at 85-90% througout:

Cpu(s): 86.8% us, 13.2% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si

Well, something is eating the cpu if its not mplayer since mplayer percentage fluctuates a lot, but the 'top' cpu percentage is pretty much constant.

Are we getting closer to solving this "mystery"?

That was one of the sites I referred to when I was first making tovid. In fact, it's partly because those scripts didn't work for me that I wanted to develop a new one. I haven't had much time to consider the addition of kvcd, since I've been busy improving other things. Maybe once the whole suite gets to what I'd consider a more stable position; I don't think I'd consider adding kvcd until after at least a couple more releases, to get the more important issues and bugs worked out. Fixing mistakes should always come before adding new features, even if it doesn't always work out that way in practice

I don't know much about vcdimager, but I'm fairly sure it doesn't make ISOs. The cue/bin files can be burned directly to CD with cdrdao or cdrecord. I haven't tried it, but k3b also supports burning cue/bin files. Someday, the tovid suite may have a CD/DVD-burning component that could take the XML output from makexml, dvdauthor or vcdxbuild it, and burn the disc. Then, the path from video-file to disc would be:

tovid -> makemenu -> makexml -> makedisc

(with makemenu being optional). Dunno yet. Again, I think I'd like to get things more stable before adding any major components.

That makes two of us GUI planning is just on-hold, I guess you'd say. Maybe a few releases down the road, I'll try to clean up the GUI and put it back in. I'll have to brush up on my Python.

Yeah, I've noticed that too sometimes... when CPU is at ~100% total, but the percentages don't add up to nearly that much. I looked through the manual for 'top' to see if there's some distinction between kinds of CPU usage (some programs distinguish between real CPU time and user CPU time, whatever that means), but I couldn't find anything. As long as it's still encoding fine, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's just an interesting mystery.

You're right, I agree, im just interested in seeing a kvcd in action for myself.