Changes in next version of DVDs
The changes that I've made in 0.6 are:
- incorporated additional credits and corrections from Holger
- included credits on single-layer disc 2
- improved menu navigatio
- when you press "menu" during a video, you will see the menu
from which you selected it, and it will be highlighted
- after watching a video to the end, you will see the menu from
which you selected it, and the next item will be highlighted
- when you go up a level from a sub-menu, the menu item that took
you to that sub-menu will be highlighted
- improved build process
- the temporary directory defaults to "tmp" and the variable is now
called more helpfully TEMP_DIR
- DVD image files incorporate a version number
- you can do a mini-build using just 1 minute of each video by setting
MINI=1; this is useful for testing changes to menus quickly
- make-menu-vob now creates temporary files in a unique directory, so
it is safe to do a parallel make on a multiprocessor system
- assumes that file extensions of .mpg have been changed to .mpeg
I've given out some DVDs built from version 0.5 (single-layer PAL disc
1) to some beta testers, and Holger has tried them too. So far we've
found Xine displays the video from the sessions (which is encoded as
MPEG-1, non-interlaced) with odd corruption, although it can play the
exact same streams before they are combined onto a DVD. I've also heard
that audio for the session videos is totally mangled when played back on
a Playstation 2. It's possible this is due to the low bit-rate; these
use 96 kbps for audio whereas the DebCamp videos use 128 kbps. I have
not been able to find a clear answer as to what, if any, minimum
bit-rate is specified for audio streams on DVD video.
So, for version 0.7 I am intending to specify a higher audio bitrate for
the sessions on the next version of the scripts. I am loathe to reduce
the video bitrate for the sessions further, so I am thinking it would be
better to raise it to about 450 kbps and spread the videos across 3
single-layer or 2 dual-layer DVDs. These would be divided up as
follows:
SL1: Sessions from 10th-12th
SL2: Sessions from 14th-16th (depending on final size for 16th)
SL3: Sessions from 17th, Debian Day, extras
DL1: Sessions from 10th-15th
DL2: Sessions from 16th-17th, Debian Day, extras
The menu navigation improvements are regrettably quite laborious to
implement. (I think in preparation for next year I would like to
develop a higher-level DVD authoring tool that would make it easier to
adjust logical layout of a disc or disc set.) Therefore I would like to
hear people's opinions on whether this is a sensible layout before
spending time to make it work.
Another change that I think needs to be made is to change colouring of
the menus. Highlighted items just aren't visible enough, and bright red
can bleed horribly when the DVD output is encoded as a composite signal.
Could anyone suggest good colours? I could change the menu builder
script to fill the text background if that would make it more readable.
--
Ben Hutchings
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