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Making DVD Movies With Linux

Back in July of 2004, my son, Sebastian, was born. Aside from the obvious major changes this implied and the numerous purchases we never imagined before that day, there was one additional piece of technology that was absolutely essential. Yes, I'm talking about a digital video camera. Months pass and Sebastian's days and weeks get recorded to digital tape. As Christmas rolls around, it becomes evident that we'll need one more piece of hardware, a CD burner. We already had a star. Now we had to share his exploits with others.

I'm a Linux guy. I love working with the operating system. I also love trying things out, checking out some of the thousands of excellent applications. Generally speaking, I often find that in terms of the availability of applications, running Linux is an embarrassment of riches. There's just so much excellent and mature software out there, much of it free. Unfortunately, when it came to finding a way to make DVDs of those home movies, I didn't feel quite so rich. Undaunted, I decided to find the tools that I knew had to be out there.

As it turns out, there are a small handful of tools that do the job, although most are still at the beta stage and in some cases, alpha. At the heart of all these applications is a program by Scott Smith called dvdauthor. This program puts together the menus, buttons, chapter breaks, video clips, and all those other elements that go into making a DVD. An XML script gets generated with all the necessary commands and subcommands to get the job done. It's the classic hammer and chisel way of doing things, and while those are definitely my roots, I was determined to find some power tools.

One of the programs I discovered is Alex Thuering's DVDStyler, a graphical front end to the dvdauthor program. It lets you drag and drop movie files into a project area, create buttons, add backgrounds, set chapter breaks, and more. You can even burn the finished product right from the graphical interface. I am, however, getting ahead of myself.

To run DVDStyler, you are going to have to build it from source. Luckily, that isn't too complicated. Just head to the DVDStyler Website at http://dvdstyler.sourceforge.net and pick up your copy. For the more adventurous, CVS snapshots are also available. Building the package involves what I call the extract and build five-step. In effect, extracting the source, running configure, compiling, and installing as shown below. Open a shell (or terminal window) and type the following.

Start the program by running dvdstyler. The first time you start DVDStyler, you'll be asked for a language of choice (several are supported). I chose English.

When DVDStyler starts up (figure 1), you will be looking at a three pane display with a timeline window along the bottom, a tabbed menu and selector to the left, and a large preview window on the right. We'll explore those tabs in a moment, but for now, let's start a new DVD. Click File on the menu bar and select New. You can also just click the New icon at the top left.

Figure 1 : The DVDStyler main window at startup.

A dialog will appear asking for your video format, whether PAL or NTSC. Being in North America, I chose NTSC and clicked OK. Now, back to those tabs. Clicking the Directories tab lets you navigate the disk so you can choose video or graphic files. The Backgrounds tab displays a few default backgrounds included with DVDStyler, while the Buttons tab provides you with a means to drag menu creation buttons to the work area.

You might want to take one of the backgrounds that are included with DVDStyler, but you can also use one of your own. Just click on the Directories tab on the left, navigate your disk, and find the image you want. When you have what you want, double-click on it and it will become your background. I decided to use a picture of my baby boy a five months old.

Notice that your background has just appeared in the Menu 1 icon at the bottom of the DVDStyler window. Now let's add some video since that's the whole point. Once more, from the Directories tab, navigate to the location of your movies on disk. Drag them one by one into the timeline window at the bottom, next to your Menu 1 icon. Each movie clip will be identified along the top of an icon (containing a preview frame) as Title 1, Title 2, Title 3, and so on (figure 2). The file name will be listed along the bottom of the preview icon.

Figure 2 : The interface easy to use. Just drag and drop movie clips into the timeline window, then rearrange to suit your needs.

It may well be as you look in the timeline window that things aren't in the order that you would like. Right-clicking on a movie clip will bring up a small menu that lets you move the clip left or right in the timeline.

If you have more than one clip on this DVD, you'll want some menu buttons to pick and choose which to watch or what chapter to jump to. That's where the Buttons tab comes into play. You'll notice when you click there that the cupboard looks a little bare. There is, after all, only one button to choose from. That's okay. You'll have an opportunity to modify it. To create a button, drag it onto the work area and position it where you want it to be (it can be moved later).

Right-click on the button to bring up the Properties dialog (figure 3). From the Action submenu, click the down arrow to choose which clip you wish to jump to. Below that field, enter the text you want to appear on the screen. Directly below the Text field, another button lets you choose a font style and style. By default, buttons are transparent but this is something you can change along with the default color of the text. When you are happy with your button, click OK.

Figure 3 : The button dialog allows you to assign buttons to video clips. You can also change the look of the buttons here.

We have video clips, we have buttons to select chapters, and we have a nice background. When you are satisfied that you have finished assembling your masterpiece, click File and select Burn. While you can go straight from your creation and burn a DVD, I don't recommend that you do that. Start by clicking the check box that says Preview as well as the one that says Create ISO Image. Leave the Burn check box unchecked. Now click Start.

Depending on the length of the movies you chose, the speed of your processor, disk, and so on, you may be waiting a little while after the Generate DVD window appears (figure 4).

Figure 4 : And we're off! DVDStyler is generating the DVD image.

Menus will be generated and each MPEG-2 stream will be demultiplexed into its audio and video components (that's the really slow part). When this whole process is completed, the Xine video player will be launched to test your new movie. If you are happy with the results, click OK when asked whether you want to go ahead and create the ISO image.

Let's pause for a moment and take inventory. Our movie has been assembled, complete with menu and chapter breaks, and it tests fine in the Xine movie player. The ISO image has been created and now it's time to burn it. Odds are that if you've gone to all this trouble, you probably might want to burn more than one copy of the DVD and this is where a tool like DVDStyler is probably not your best choice, despite the fact that you could just click File, select Burn and skip all the steps except for the burn stage.

My suggestion is to use a tool more suited to this process. I happen to be very fond of using Sebastian Trueg's K3B, the CD/DVD burning tool that comes with KDE (you'll find it in the multimedia submenu). Using K3B for burning a DVD is easy. Click Tools on the menu bar, then move to the DVD submenu, and select Burn ISO image. Check out figure 5 for a screenshot of K3B in action.

Figure 5 : K3B is an excellent, easy to use CD and DVD burning application.

With your shiny new, freshly burned DVD, you are ready to share the joy with friends and family.

DVDStyler is just one of the DVD authoring packages being developed by the open source community. Others that you may wish to consider include Petri Damstén's KMediaFactory, Varol Okan's Q DVD-Author, and Ram Mallappa's Varsha. The maturity of each varies according to the level of development, but it's good to know that people are actively developing these tools. With time, I may be adding that "embarrassment of riches" label to Linux DVD authoring tools as well.

Lights . . . Camera . . . and Action!

dvdauthor
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

DVDStyler
http://dvdstyler.sourceforge.net/

K3B CD/DVD Burner
http://www.k3b.org

KMediaFactory
http://susku.pyhaselka.fi/damu/software/kmediafactory/index.html

Q DVD-Author
http://qdvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

Varsha
http://varsha.sourceforge.net/

Last update: 2005-03-24 05:02
Author: Erkan Kaplan

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