DVD authoring software tested, DVDStyler wins
For anyone who may have reason to deal with this
antiquated, anticloud technology, I needed to
author a couple disks.
I tried videotrans, tovid. Maybe I didn't understand enough
to use videotrans, and would get better result if I tried
again. Tovid was was disappointment, after laying out a DVD,
the codec doubled the file size, so now it wouldn't fit on
the disc.
Bombono looks good in the youtube tutorial, but is
unmaintained. I had problems, again disappointment after
getting DVD menus and clips created, and crashing later in
the process.
Cross-platform DVDStyler didn't install on my debian system,
because some probably upgraded-related sid package
conflicts, what I tested was on our iMac. (This was with an
older OSX, 10.6.8, which wouldn't accommodate the newest
version 2.9, but 2.4.1 did install.)
Debian has much newer available, so should be all this and
more. I found it helpful that there was an auto setting for
video transcoding compression that ensures the material will
fit on disc. Also, it caches the transcoded files, so that
the process of updating the menus and creating a new disc
image goes quickly.
I wanted to use 720x480 m2v and separate mpa files supplied
to me, I was told in DVD-ready form, however tovid had
complained the m2v wasn't DVD compatible. Must be some
further transformation to VOB. So instead of multiplexing
them to import, ended up transcoding from .mov files I had
for the same job.
It took me a long time to figure out
that clicking on a highlight color (replacing it with a fine
black "X") was needed for the palette to update the color.
Otherwise, the WxWidget GUI was okay. There were a few
bugs. A few times I had to exit and restart the app. Once
the OS needed to reboot in order for DVDStyler to startup
properly. Once I needed to remove and re-install the app to
get it to continue. I did managed to coax it through authoring
the two discs.
I like the look of WxWidget, perhaps will use it one day
in one of my projects...
Cheers,
Joel
--
Joel Roth
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