Satya's blog - 2006/07/

Ashes to ashes, /dev/zero to /dev/null

I wrote a crazy perl program that spits out a shellscript that runs imagemagick and various DVD authoring programs to create a menu for the DVD I'm building.

The idea of this script is one-clickiness. Put the titles of the videos in a file, and on the next line (and following lines) put the names of the raw file or files (before conversion with tovid) -- one filename per line. Then run this script (give it pal or ntsc as a parameter). It should spit out a shell script for building a menu complete with "Play all" and "Back" buttons. Convert the raw or whatever videos to your dvd format with:
for r in *.dv;do tovid -in $i -out $i -pal -dvd;done
Running the shell script should add subtitles to all the video files based on the titles, and produce XML file fragments appropriate for putting in a makedvd XML file. It should also produce a subdirectory called 'menu' which should contain one or more MPEG menu files suitable for use with makedvd.

It is a symptom of NIH (not invented here). makemenu does much of what this does, but I didn't like the style of menu makemenu produces So I wrote me own when I *should* have been hacking makemenu.

Update Nov 1 2008: See my Home DVD Howto for detailed explanation and updated scripts.

Last updated: Nov 01 2008 14:58