April 8, 2011

DVD Creation in Linux

I recently had cause to create a DVD of some camera footage in Linux. Thankfully things have moved on from he situation a few years ago where the only tools available were command line only (albeit very powerful).

The first task I had was to add some titles to my videos (which were in .MOV format 720p@60Hz) and do some basic editing, such as adding a musical soundtrack. For this I initially tried Cinelerra, but found it too awkward, cumbersome and difficult to use. Next I tried Kino, which suited my needs much better, although its features are not as advanced as Cinelerra’s.

Kino works only in .dv format, so all video clips are automatically transcoded when imported. This left me with a problem, which was that the .dv clips were jerky and appeared to drop frames. To get around this I converted the videos to .dv format myself using Winff - a frontend to the excellent ffmpeg tools.

This pre-encoding gave me much better results in Kino. I then set about adding my titles using Kino’s “FX” tools “Titler” function. I also added a musical soundtrack. One note here: Kino will just truncate the track if it is longer than the video clip it’s associated with. To get around this I used Audacity to fade my music out nicely.

Next came exporting the finished video into a format suitable for a DVD. Fortunately, Kino’s Export section has an “Other” tab that allows me to select Dual Pass DVD export to VOB, which is ideal for passing into the next tool in the chain: DVDStyler.

Initially I tried using Bombono for DVD creation, but it seemed to struggle with my 16:9 aspect ratio video. After some research I came across DVDStyler which coped much better. Using DVDStyler I was able to add a root menu which linked to both my video and a submenu. The submenu was used to access chapters of my video which could be easily specified by using the start time of each chapter, for example if I wanted three chapters 10 minutes apart I could specify:

0,10:00,20:00

as the chapters.

One of the advantages of exporting to VOB from Kino was that the videos needed no further transcoding in DVDStyler, which could have resulted in a loss of quality.

DVDStyler also allowed me to preview the video in Xine before being burnt to DVD, which is very convenient for seeing if all the menus link up correctly and that the aspect ratio is correct before potentially creating a coaster from the DVD!

Finally, I burnt the DVD and was very pleased with the result.

This is not the only, or even the best, way to create a DVD in Linux, it was just the toolchain that worked best for me. All the tools used, apart from cinelerra, were available in both the Linux Mint and Ubuntu repositories.

komakino @ 9:19 pm

March 4, 2009

Yesterday’s Tomorrow’s World, #1 – LaserDiscs

Ahh, the technology that, yesterday, we had so much hope for.

Laserdiscs were large metallic discs, much like large CDs, used for playback of video.

Laserdiscs can kind of be considered the precursor to DVDs, with just a few exceptions:

  • They were HUGE. 12″ (30cm) in diameter. The same size as a vinyl LP.

  • The video was recorded entirely in analogue; audio was sometimes analogue, sometimes digital. DVD’s are all digital.

  • Competing formats: Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) and Constant Angular Velocity (CAV)

  • CAV discs could only hold around 30 minutes of footage per side.

  • CLV discs could hold about 60 minutes per side, but even so you’d have to change sides manually half way through (though some 2 sided players existed). Also, CLV discs generally didn’t support freeze frame!

  • No extra features

  • Some problems with bleeding frames – if the disc was warped you could often see parts of the next or previous frames (only on CLV discs though)

  • Players were quite noisy as it takes a bit of oomph to spin a large metal disc!

  • If the motor jammed it could send a flying disc of metal out of the player at a hundred miles per hour. Several decapitations were reported

OK, so I made the last one up :)
LaserDiscs, amazingly, were only completely discontinued last year, mainly because they still had quite a following in Japan. They had less of a follow in the US and were virtually unknown in Europe (though I have seen one or two).

LaserDiscs actually held a couple of advantages over VHS cassettes, the competing technology of the time:

  • It’s cheaper to stamp discs than to make multi-part cassettes which hold the tape and spoolers

  • Picture quality was greater (420 vs 250 horizontal lines) on a LaserDisc than VHS

  • LaserDiscs don’t snap in the player, don’t require physical contact with the playing surface which gradually wears it down, and don’t stretch like tapes

Originally marketed as DiscoVision in 1978, the name was changed to LaserDisc in the mid to late 80s. By the time they were discontinued in January 2009 over 360 million units had been produced.

komakino @ 7:53 pm

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