Wow, so many words and things! Let's take 'em one by one:

To be honest, I'd never even heard of ksvcd or kvcd until now. After a bit of searching, though, it looks like it's definitely something worth thinking about. From what I can tell, they are more or less "agreed-upon" formats rather than anything standard, such as VCD and SVCD are. If a lot of players support it, though, it could be worthwhile. I'll look into it, but don't expect it to become a high priority

Again, I'd consider it. I don't know of a good way to do that off the top of my head; with VCD, it wouldn't be an option, since VCD has a fixed bitrate (and thus a fixed amount of video per CD). There's only one pass of encoding right now (despite the misleadingly-named "-twopass" encoding option, which merely introduces another program into the pipeline). Mplayer does support some kind of two-pass and three-pass thing, but I don't know what it's for. Presumably it would be possible to get better bitrates, motion estimation, or other optimizations that way, but I haven't researched it.

I would definitely recommend running the script from the console/terminal for now. I haven't even so much as looked at the GUI since I released it. Someday it will be useful; right now, it's probably just eye candy. And yes, the message about "no sound" is normal. Most of those nonsensical messages will be suppressed in the next release.

Well, there is one on my wife's box... but it's presently Windows-only. So for now, I'll have to rely on you guys for testing that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, I've been writing up something resembling real documentation. It'll go up on the site when the new version rolls out. To put a halt to the suspense, and to give myself a deadline, I'm officially announcing that this Wednesday, November 3, will be the release date. Unless I am too depressed by the U.S. election results (or election fiasco, whichever comes first), and end up getting stoned. But seriously, though: Wednesday!

Haha, nice.

Just so you know, I did the command line only script, and it went off with out a hitch.

That is to say i converted divx to svcd while I slept!

Glad to hear it! Isn't it nice to be able to get work done while you're sleeping? Maybe someday this suite will be powerful enough that you'll be able to drag-and-drop a bunch of videos onto a DVD icon, and have a freshly-brewed cup of DVD (in your computer's cup holder) when you wake up the next morning.

I'm touching up the 'idvid' script today; I found out that ffmpeg usually reports more accurate running times than mplayer, so it'll use ffmpeg if it's available. The tovid script will also use this approach, to help give better estimates of encoding time. Some other touch-ups and a few more tests, and it'll be ready to release tomorrow.

That would put me out of a job! Ha ha! My friends would like that, as would the GNU community1

Are you using ffmpeg just for the timing part or encoding as well?

Just for the timing part, right now (and then, only if it's installed). If it's not installed, it'll just use the duration reported by mplayer (which may be less accurate). The only thing really affected is the progress indicator.

sounds good. I like the way you're approaching this (if its there use it, if not then fall back to something else).

Just a quick status report: I've done some last-minute debugging, cleanup and other stuff. tovid's output looks much more reasonable now; all unnecessary output is redirected to a log file, which is deleted when the script is done (unless something goes wrong, in which case most of the time it's caught and the log file is saved for viewing). New features:

• much prettier output
• ffmpeg, if available, for running-time estimation
• multiprocessor support, if available
• progress indicator - fairly accurate. Takes a few minutes to level out, but it's self-correcting and should get more accurate as encoding continues
• stats and encoding time printed after completion
• stats saved to ~/.tovid/stats
• always use the denoiser (unless there turns out to be a good reason not to)
• estimate space required for encoding, and prompt if there does not appear to be enough
• hopefully-better sub-shell execution for running several piped encoding processes at once (may make -twopass more stable, but this is unverified right now)
• probably some other stuff that I forgot...

The other components are pretty much the same, though 'idvid' has been slightly improved. I may tweak the others before release tomorrow.

I found a *nix site for kvcd , seems he has a script made, I dont program, so I dont know if its any good. Anywho, here's the link. http://members.chello.nl/dkoppenaal/kvcd.html

I will check it out.

Meanwhile, there's a nice article on NewsForge about SVCD authoring. Might be handy for some of you who have needs that tovid doesn't meet yet (though I plan to study the article and see if I can glean some good features from it for next time).

Sounds very nice.
I'll try it out and see how it goes. Hopefully its not a 'dead' script.
Good article, and a perfect example of how much pain in the ass the process could be without scripting, etc. I mean, cmon, i don't want to learn the entire structure of a xml file to be able to make a menu. It should 'just work.'

/edit: Tried the divx2kvcd script, and it didn't work for me. It hangs, and i have to kill it with 'Ctrl-C', which gives the following output:

EOF encountered in a comment.
(standard_in) 1: parse error
(standard_in) 1: parse error
EOF encountered in a comment.
(standard_in) 1: parse error
(standard_in) 1: parse error
EOF encountered in a comment.
MEncoder 1.0pre5-3.3.5 (C) 2000-2004 MPlayer Team

I mean is it supposed to give some kind of output so that we know its working or is it working in the background silently?

It might work with an older mplayer/mencoder, but doesn't work with the one i have above. Plus i don't think we should be using mencoder since mjpegtools are considered far better for that (like the docs say). One more thing about the script is that it has too many options in it that could be turned off and on. I don't like that personally at all, but thats just me.

Like I said Im not a programmer, maybe you'll find something better for kvcd later.

Amen to that. There are several other such guides out there (which helped me a lot getting started with tovid), but they're each varying degrees of age, relying on older software versions with a different syntax, and each using different approaches. I think it's good (it shows there's always more than one way to sed a cat in Linux) but each approach has a weakness: the weakness of using transcode to convert the video (as this guide does) is that transcode supports fewer formats than mplayer does. With any luck, tovid will help draw together the best of each approach and make the whole process a lot less painful, even if it still does require some command-line familiarity.

I'm still doing some debugging; for the most part, everything seems to be working, but I've had a couple strange partially-aborted encodings, and am not sure why. So it'll probably be sometime later this evening that the new version is up.

Yes, i will look around too to find something that works. But kvcd is definetly cool.
Hope thats how tovid stays, and it is already quite unique in that aspect.