dvdauthor is a simple set of tools to help you author a DVD. The idea is to be able to create menus, buttons, chapters, etc, but for now you can just take an mpeg stream (as created by mplex -f 8 from mjpegtools 1.6.0) and write it to DVD.

dvdauthor is a program that will generate a DVD movie from a valid mpeg2 stream that should play when you put it in a DVD player.

To start you need mpeg files that contain the necessary DVD VOB packets. These can be generated by passing '-f 8' to mplex. See the included utility makevob.

There are 3 steps to building the DVD directory structure on your HDD.

1. Delete a previously authored dvd

dvddirdel [-o dir]

WARNING! This will delete without discrimination the contents of the directory that you specify!

2. Create your titlesets

dvdauthor [-o dir] [audio/video/subpicture options] [chapters]

To create 1 chapter per mpeg, simply do

dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] chap1.mpg chap2.mpg chap3.mpg...

To manually specify chapters, use the '--chapters' option

dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] -c chap1a.mpg chap1b.mpg -c chap2a.mpg chap2b.mpg ....

To add chapters every fifteen minutes, do

dvdauthor [-o dir] [a/v/s options] -c 0,15:00,30:00,45:00,1:00:00,1:15:00... longvideo.mpg

Call dvdauthor for each titleset you want to create. Note that due to the DVD standard, all audio, video, and subpicture options must be set once for the entire titleset; i.e. you cannot mix pal and ntsc video in the same titleset. For that you must generate separate titlesets.

Run dvdauthor -h to see the audio, video, and subpicture options. Note that dvdauthor can autodetect most parameters except the language.

3. Create the table of contents

dvdauthor -T [-o dir]

Viola! You now have a DVD directory structure that will probably work! You can now write this out to your DVD, mini-DVD (CD), or just play it from your HDD. To generate the UDF image to burn to DVD, use mkisofs from cdrtools-1.11a27 or later. Simply pass it the -dvd-video option.

BTW, if you have an old HDD that you use for generating dvd images, you can create /usr/local/etc/dvdauthor.conf or ~/.dvdauthorrc and add the line:

WORKDIR=foo

Then you won't need to specify -o to dvddirgen or dvdauthor. Alternatively, you could just set

WORKDIR=mydvd

to always have it create a DVD in the current working directory.

What's New in This Release:

· Support of VOBUs without audio or video has been added.
· Reading from file descriptors for VOBs, palette, and XML has been implemented.
· Support for really long subtitles and for full sized PTS/SCR has been added.
· Audio type detection logic has been improved.
· Runtime memory requirement has been substantially reduced.
· YUV handling in spuunmux and subgen has been fixed.
· SVCD subtitling has been fixed.
· NTSC 3:2 pulldown handling has been fixed.
· Handling of audio packets that have no PTS has been fixed.
· Many more minor bugs have been fixed and features have been added. Documentation has been improved.