[HN Gopher] DVDStyler is a cross-platform free DVD authoring app...
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DVDStyler is a cross-platform free DVD authoring application (2021)
Author : brudgers
Score : 102 points
Date : 2023-03-25 14:00 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dvdstyler.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dvdstyler.org)
| anthk wrote:
| I'l read it later, after setting up KDE3 to the theme I like and
| finishing up some Slashdot threads.
| kypro wrote:
| Man, I used to burn random DVDs for friends and family all the
| time back in the 00s. I don't remember if this is the software I
| used to make the menus, but it looked a lot like this.
|
| I also brought some DVD labels too so I could make and print my
| own labels and stick them on the back of the DVDs I made.
|
| Never did this for illegal stuff as far as I remember, but for
| videos I made for friends and family it was a fun way to share
| stuff back before we had super fast internet and simple file
| sharing tools.
|
| I think the last DVD I burnt was in 2013. I sent it with a letter
| to my girlfriend while she was traveling. That may have been the
| last time I used a disc.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| DVDStyler is from 2004. See changelog for details:
| https://sourceforge.net/p/dvdstyler/DVDStyler/ci/master/tree...
| jszymborski wrote:
| I remember using DVDFlick[0] to author DVDs for ages before I
| found DVDStyler. DVDFlick was written in vb6 if I recall and was
| glacially slow. But it was totally free and that was hard to come
| by at the time (or at least for pre-teen me)
|
| [0] https://dvdflick.net/
| dylan604 wrote:
| We used to program DVD like QT movie experiences. You used to be
| able to program Flash buttons and switch between QT
| streams/tracks within the file. We were building multi-angle
| videos that would switch with buttons overlaid onto the screen.
| Switching audio streams, subtitles, etc were all possible. We'd
| compress down to MP4s for online distribution. This was well
| before streaming as we know it now. I think the term of art back
| then was progressive downloading. If you can find the old BMW
| series with Clive Owen, they were pretty good. You can probably
| find the videos on YT or whatever, but finding the actual QT MOV
| files would be the better example of showing how these were
| similar to a DVD experience
|
| With download speeds of today, that still seems like a viable
| format and I was always saddened that it didn't take off.
| Obviously, Flash being involved would be an issue today. However,
| there was another package that came out in the early 2000s that
| was its own interactive authoring package that did the same thing
| only without Flash. We worked with the developer generating some
| content for them to use and it worked well enough. It was all
| within the MP4 spec, but again, it just never took off. Our test
| content had 3 separate videos that if watched individually all
| told a story. There were 3 characters that appeared in each video
| at various times. However, the interactivity of the format would
| allow you to switch which stream you were watching to follow one
| character between videos which would tell a different story than
| just watching them all.
|
| All of that old guy shares unrelated story to say that I think
| this kind of format would still be cool vs DVDs. But seeing it's
| the older generation that finds the ease of a physical DVD vs
| using a computer makes it understandable why a cheap authoring
| package like this might still find use
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Netlify has something similar, interactive episodes of a show
| where the viewer selects what should happen next.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's interesting as that is not what my understanding of
| what Netlify did/does. Do they have their own content arm as
| well?
| throwanem wrote:
| I think they meant Netflix, which built the described
| functionality for (iirc) the Black Mirror episode
| "Bandersnatch". It was interesting thematically and
| narratively, but seemed like more of a clever one-off than
| the kind of capability anyone would be anxious to produce
| for; I don't know that it _didn 't_ go anywhere since that
| was also around when I quit bothering to renew a
| subscription I barely used, but my sense is that it sank
| more or less without a trace.
| wingerlang wrote:
| Interesting how consistently active the forum seems, going from
| 2004 until today.
| illwrks wrote:
| To add a positive spin on this ancient software, over COVID
| several elderly relatives passed away either due to age or I'll
| health.
|
| Due to COVID you couldn't attend but there were live streams of
| the services, I used ffmpeg, or YouTube-dl or plain old screen
| recording with an audio patch to record their funeral services.
|
| I then used the dvdstyler to turn those recordings into DVD's
| which I posted to relatives who were not tech savvy.
|
| It took time but provided closure and in a weird way a
| therapeutic.
|
| +1 for dvdstyler.
| spookie wrote:
| My condolences. These have not been kind years.
| nirav72 wrote:
| I remember when I first bought a DVD burner back in 1997. Did lot
| of looking around for a affordable consumer level DVD authoring
| tool that would let me create custom menus and chapter points. At
| the time, there wasn't anything free or cheap. Other than getting
| it from a warez scene at the time. Even those were professional
| grade tools that had a huge learning curve.
| paradox460 wrote:
| This reopened an old wound, what Apple did to DVD Studio Pro. It
| withered and died with the rest of Apple's pro software suite,
| and has nothing to replace it. I heard that FCPX can author DVDs,
| but they're pretty bare-bones and ugly. DVD Studio Pro was
| powerful enough you could author professional content pretty
| easily. Had pretty comprehensive programming tools, and was a lot
| easier to use than Adobe Encore
| dylan604 wrote:
| I remember when DVD Studio Pro came out, and the industry was
| supposed to go through a paradigm shift. I took a call at the
| DVD shop I worked at, and provided the requested quote to the
| person on the phone. They laughed out loud at the price and
| said that DVDSP was going to put my company out of business
| within a year. Multiple years later and several awards later,
| the company was still rocking and never once used DVDSP.
|
| What we did do though is specialize in taking over jobs from
| people that could not complete a job in DVDSP and would come to
| us to save them. More than once, it would be from someone that
| called for a quote, didn't like the price, went some where
| else, and then came crawling back. The original quote was no
| longer valid as it was now considered a rush job.
|
| It was a great tool for wedding videos /s
|
| Any abstraction layer authoring tool removed half of the
| working space to hold the abstraction. This meant that projects
| that needed it were just impossible to do, and a lot of the
| people that only ever used DVSP didn't really know there were
| limitations until they ran head first into them.
| pastorhudson wrote:
| This software is great. During Covid we would pre-record our
| church service and then live stream it Sunday. We would use dvd
| styler to burn dvd's and deliver them to our members who weren't
| able to livestream.
| notorandit wrote:
| DVD? In 2023? Is this an archaeology-related piece?
| cryptonector wrote:
| "what's a DVD?"
| DanTheManPR wrote:
| It's old tech, for sure, but it's what my parents still use. I
| occasionally will burn a DVD of some video I've shot for them
| to watch.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| I watch an old-ish tv series. I buy used DVDs and rip them to
| watch on my computer. Now I physically own them, and no clown
| company can suddenly decide I no longer can watch them.
|
| I don't think there is an easy/legal/cheap alternative to that,
| in 2000 as well as in 2023.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I'm slowly but surely beginning to buy DVDs of my favorite
| movies...Because I'm so tired of having streaming services
| remove them!
| wildzzz wrote:
| Oh good, the perfect software for making DVDs of my aXXo XviD-
| encoded movies I got off of demonoid so I can watch them on my
| bedroom PS2. Wait, what year is it?
| RajT88 wrote:
| It's also hosted on SourceForge
| kazinator wrote:
| That doesn't narrow it down very well, but if you mention
| MySpace, we're in January 2001, +- 13 m (confidence interval
| 90%).
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| Who report over 10,000 downloads last week. I used this years
| ago but can't see much use for it now.
| babypuncher wrote:
| What shocks me is that many TV shows will still get released on
| DVD but not Blu-Ray.
|
| I understand there is still a market for DVDs, but any
| collector in a first world country probably wants nothing to do
| with a DVD of a show that aired in 2022.
| [deleted]
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| I tried to recreate some DVD menus as a website a few years ago
| (shameless link, it's quite rough: https://dvd-
| rom.netlify.app/info https://github.com/padraigfl/dvd-menu ).
|
| Was sorta disappointing to see how hard it was to get a lot of
| the older software for making DVD menus working (especially ones
| that interpreted existing DVDs). Wound up having to manually
| figure out a lot of configurations. I guess as a format it was
| fairly loose and a lot of the more ambitious DVD menus were doing
| lots of crazy stuff they weren't really meant to do.
|
| Even with almost everything I looked up online leading to threads
| from 15+ years ago, that was still a lot better than what I could
| find about how Blu Rays worked the time my PS3's blu ray player
| stopped working because I put in a new BluRay (from what I
| gathered the new BluRay made the drive install some new DRM stuff
| or something??)
| toast0 wrote:
| > from what I gathered the new BluRay made the drive install
| some new DRM stuff or something??
|
| IIUC, the drives authenticate the player applications by keys,
| and the discs include a list of blacklisted keys to update in
| the drive rom. But I'm surprised the PS3 player would have
| gotten blacklisted? Did it work again after a ps3 system
| update?
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| Update didn't fix it but I figured out some workaround
| eventually; think it was basically the same process used for
| installing a new BluRay drive.
|
| I seriously doubt it would've happened with an unmodded PS3
| to be fair
|
| This was a 2019 BluRay going into a PS3 Slim with modded
| firmware from 2016 that probably hadn't a BluRay video newer
| than about 2012 in it before.
| fock wrote:
| yes, a relative made recordings of a communal band in the past
| (before mobilephones were widespread for quick memories). I
| remember how the DVDs menus were cumbersome and so in a short
| stint pre-youtube-popularity I prepped a themed player with
| HTML5 to go alongside the video file.
|
| Worked pretty nice (in chrome) and reminds me what we've
| lost...
| dylan604 wrote:
| DVD menus was a bit of a misnomer. Menus were just stylized
| videos or still images. DVD programming took place in
| Pre/Post/Cell flags, and you could only have a limited number
| of commands per flag (I'm thinking 16 per, but it's been a
| really long time). The actual movie content could be a menu as
| well, and was actually a common technique for special/hidden
| features
|
| The buttons were just hot spots. Each hot spot had to be linked
| (sometimes it was even done intelligently) to each other so
| that the up/down/left/right buttons on the remote worked. lots
| of fun there too. hidden features were often found through
| pressing a button sequence. We once did a Contra homage with an
| up/up/down/down/left/right/enter sequence to get to an easter
| egg video to a gag reel.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| Thanks for the info! Yep, they seemed fairly basic from what
| I could see. I think I tried to create a data model that
| roughly reflected how they worked before reading up on
| anything and it was close enough to correct.
|
| Never heard about button sequences being a possibility! does
| that mean the menus were tracking the sequence of keys
| inputted or you structured menus in a way that allowed
| sequences to work (e.g. tons of spots at the end of a menu
| that all just overlap so the user doesn't notice)?
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Never heard about button sequences being a possibility!
| does that mean the menus were tracking the sequence of keys
| inputted or you structured menus in a way that allowed
| sequences to work (e.g. tons of spots at the end of a menu
| that all just overlap so the user doesn't notice)?
|
| this is exactly how it worked. a bunch of buttons stacked
| on top of each other so that if you didn't get the sequence
| correct, the enter button would do the default (for each of
| the buttons in the sequence).
| codetrotter wrote:
| This is super interesting. Do you have a longer write up
| about it anywhere? Specifically about your DVD easter egg
| I mean.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, I was never into writing blogs or anything like that.
| For years, I was a solo developer, so the last thing I
| wanted to do was spend time writing about work after
| work. This was also the dark days of the internet before
| there were forums like this. It was all on a mailing
| list. I was active there answering questions like this as
| I felt that was the least I could do because I learned so
| much from other people's responses on the same mailing
| list.
|
| So, having said that, what is it you'd like to know? My
| problem is that things that seem obvious to me gets
| skipped in my explanation of things, and the things I
| sometimes find myself talking about is nothing what
| someone else actually cares about. So turn this into an
| AMA, and we'll probably go farther faster
| codetrotter wrote:
| I see :)
|
| Well, things I wonder about include:
|
| 1. What platform did you do the development itself on,
| when you worked on these DVD things?
|
| 2. Did you use any proprietary software to do it? And any
| open source?
|
| 3. What year did you start doing these DVD things? And
| what year did you end?
|
| 4. How did you get into it?
|
| 5. Did you need any specialised hardware?
|
| 6. Did you work for a company directly as an employee? Or
| hired as contractor? What kind of company or companies
| did you work for? I.e. were they movie studios, or film
| distributors, or DVD tech companies such as whichever
| divisions of Sony used to make DVD players?
|
| 7. What do you do these days?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Wow, those are questions that make you seem very
| interested, which makes me want to answer.
|
| 1) The company I started working for already had the
| software that was the de facto industry standard for DVD
| authoring, Scenarist. When I started, the software was
| running on Windows NT. It wasn't until a bit later before
| I learned that it was the first version to run on
| Windows. It was dog slow. Things improved dramatically
| with the release of Windows 2000. Apparently, the
| previous version was being run on some form of *nix, and
| required a lot of text file manipulation. It wasn't until
| I got much more advanced before I went back to
| manipulating the text file versions as well myself. But
| for day-to-day stuff, the UI was what I used.
|
| 2) I used lots of stuff that was ancillary, but nothing
| proprietary or open source other than awk/sed/grep and
| shell scripts written using those on the aforementioned
| text files.
|
| 3) I started programming DVDs in 1999, and continued
| working shiny round discs until 2006. By the time I left,
| the company had garnered a few awards, had grown to 10
| full time employees with multiple DVD authors, and an
| award winning graphics team, and was quite an interesting
| place. Haven't found a company since that compares.
|
| 4) I got into it by luck really. I was working in the
| editing department of a film post production facility. I
| was the youngest person there that was too eager to do
| things that nobody else wanted to do. That meant most of
| that "computer shit". This was the time when dinosaurs
| roamed the earth. 1" tape machines, reel-to-reel Nagra
| tape decks, and all of the other analog/digital cassette
| tape decks were within arms reach in the machine room
| that was my workspace. Clients eventually started wanting
| these new fangled Video-CDs which required computers
| (gasp!). So I started capturing MPEG-1 videos. There was
| another small company that specialized in interactive CDs
| using the old Macromedia Director software that we would
| contract jobs out to. This company eventually moved into
| a small bit of workspace within our company's space as
| co-op agreement. We'd get discounts on their services as
| well as advertise being able to do those services to our
| existing client base, and they would get use of our video
| equipment which expanded their input capabilities. I then
| became the liaison between the two companies. When my
| time at the post house came to an end, this company
| contacted my a week later asking me to have lunch. I
| started working with them a week later.
|
| 5) specialized hardware is a tricky question. To the
| industry, most of the hardware was typical, to someone
| unfamiliar, it's all very specialized. By that, I mean
| that the SD master tape format was Digibeta and was not
| uncommon to have multiple racks with multiple decks in
| each rack. Each digitbeta recorder original MSRP was
| close to $80k. When HD equipment came out, the HD-SR was
| the top machine, and it was $120-150k. We'd receive SR
| tapes and take a downconvert out of it for DVD use. So,
| that kind of stuff probably sounds specialized, but was
| typical (for well funded outfits). This is why the co-op
| agreement for this company was such a good deal for this
| smaller company. After the video equipment, there were
| full length PCI cards for encoding to MPEG2. Software
| encoding was years away still, and playback from tape to
| an expansion card was the way it was done. Just like with
| software encoding, there were "quick" one pass encoding,
| and then there was the slower 2-pass encoding. Both
| passes were done with real time playback from a master
| format tape machine. This made things very expensive as
| you were paying for the deck by the hour. Once the first
| DVD recorder came out at $15k, it could only record
| 3.5GB. Oh, Scenarist went for about $20k at the time as
| well. For motion graphics for menus, we were using some
| version of a Targa card to capture uncompressed 10bit
| data (ugh, the files were so large for the time). There
| were other pieces of equipment that were again normal for
| a post facility, but kind of specialized other wise.
| There were boxes from Teranex and (I'm blanking on the
| name of the other boxes) that did things like standards
| conversion from NTSC<=>PAL, noise reduction, etc. The
| toughest part was to take film original content with a
| 3:2 pull down pattern into it and feed it as a 24
| (23.976) frame rate to the encoder for a progressive
| encode. This got much easier when software encoding came
| about and we could process data that way. This became
| very viable for us when Apple released the first Mac Pro
| Intels. We used Final Cut Studio to capture the footage,
| and would then reboot into Windows to use the MPEG-2
| encoding software. We tried using Adobe Premiere to
| capture while in Windows, but their software refused to
| capture multichannel audio sources as discrete audio
| tracks. It would only create multichannel interleaved
| sources. It also had some other pain points for us like
| only capturing as AVI (shudder). I wrote a ranting review
| of the decision process of switching to Final Cut on the
| DVD mailing list that got a lot of attention. Including a
| rep from Adobe that contacted me through the HR
| department to get permission to chat to me (which was
| interesting of being a "correct" political move to be
| made). After going complaint by complaint through the
| rant, the rep said, you have some good points. "Would you
| consider switching back to Premier if these issues were
| resolved". They were ultimately resolved by Apple folding
| that space with the release of Final Cut X.
|
| 6) I was hired as employee #3 in a full time position.
| The owner was from England, and ran it in a very English
| manner. Fridays, we would all go out to lunch together,
| and was only expected to be in the office long enough to
| sober up before heading home. We did all sorts of work,
| but never for feature content from studios directly. We
| weren't on their radar since we were not located in the
| "cool" part of the country. We did a lot of corporate
| work. We did land a couple of film distributors to get
| back catalog feature titles or imported titles. We did a
| lot of DVD games. One of these was a massive 18 month
| long project. We knew from the beginning that the project
| ultimately wanted to be released as NTSC and PAL, so we
| designed all of the graphics in HD. Early on, the
| decision to solely focus on the NTSC release was made.
| This was a complex disc with animated graphics and a list
| of 300 questions that were meant to not repeat unless the
| disc was restarted. The programming was quite a
| challenge, and there were no graphics ready to being
| testing. So a series of place holders were created with
| the code for each question as big block white text in
| Impact font on black background. Then the reveal, then
| the answer all in similar style. Once the programming was
| completed like this, the disc was sent out to a 3rd party
| testing facility that had every single DVD player that
| was available to the public. Not every DVD player was the
| same features/capabilities. The cheap Apex players didn't
| actually have a random number generator. It had a
| randomized list that would give a random appearance, but
| the random was the same each time. This made for poor
| game experience as you'd just remember the patterns. Once
| the programming was approved by 3rd party, the disc was
| ready for graphics. The UI for the system had a way to
| point assets to a new folder, but it was very very very
| very slow. Instead, we exported the programming to a text
| file, created a shell script using awk/sed/grep and
| processed the very large text file in <15 seconds. That
| new file was re-imported back into the system in less
| time than the UI would even be a fraction of the way of
| updating to the new asset location. The final week before
| the project was due to be delivered, the call came in
| asking if we could go ahead and deliver the PAL version
| (who didn't see that coming?). Graphics team already had
| been prepped for this. These guys (it was one guy and one
| gal) that had programmed the crap out of Adobe After
| Effects with the javascripting built in. They fired off
| one script, and it queued up renders of the HD->PAL
| exports. When those were done, we reran the awk/sed/grep
| script tweaked for the NTSC->PAL conversion and in <30s
| (it took longer as there were many more things to
| change), we had the PAL version of the programming. We
| delivered 2 days after the ask which was 2 days before
| deadline.
|
| 7) Now, I specialize in prepping old content that's "in
| the can" which is basically back catalog content that
| people are trying to monetize on the various streaming
| platforms. What I'm doing is way more in depth than that,
| and actually pretty cool stuff (if your a video
| engineering nerd). Otherwise, I'm just helping make the
| infinite scroll of content on your streaming platform of
| choice get that much longer.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Awesome! Thank you very much for the thorough answers to
| my questions :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| It made me smile a little realizing I'm now the old guy
| with stories. You should definitely follow up with more
| old greybeards (beard not required) to find out their
| stories. Shortly after leaving that DVD shop, I wound up
| moving to LA for another post house. My engineering team
| worked in a cubicle farm, but there was this one senior
| engineer that had his own office with a door! Who was
| this guy? He only worked on "special projects". One day,
| we had an offsite meeting with the full engineering team.
| I got the chance to chat to this mysterious engineer, and
| whoa did he have some stories. This guy was LEGEND! The
| conversation started with our common experience with film
| telecines (the equipment used to transfer film to video).
| He was surprised that I knew what a flying spot
| scanner[0] was, and proceeded to tell me his story that
| showed me how LEGEND he was. He and his brother had
| received a Rank telecine and over the course of a summer,
| converted it to a method of continuous scanning of the
| film by storing frames into a custom made memory bank to
| allow for the creation of the 2:3 telecine cadence.
| Because they had this bit of memory buffer, they also
| introduced a bit of noise reduction. Apparently, this was
| one of the first live capable noise reductions. So much
| so, that in July 1969, a certain image of a certain
| person taking his first steps found its way through his
| equipment for a little bit of clean up before hitting the
| air waves. After picking my jaw up from the floor, I
| proceed to buy this man another round from the open bar,
| but still. I now always try to get the senior coworkers
| talking.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying-spot_scanner
| Nition wrote:
| It's great to have this kind of personal history written
| down, otherwise some of this stuff just gets lost
| forever.
|
| Our first DVD player came with a copy of the first Harry
| Potter film on DVD, and it's still by far the fanciest
| DVD menu I've ever seen, with all sorts of features and
| hidden extras. It's clear that some serious effort went
| into showing off the new medium in those early days.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You should find a copy of Contact for how important they
| thought extras on a DVD release were going to be. Menu
| designs were still quite simple, but the production of
| making of content was longer than the feature.
|
| That trend definitely lessened, but yes, the graphics
| design for menus went through the roof. There's also a
| few things a lot of people don't realize, but parents
| with small kids probably do. For certain DVDs, the
| looping menus have a bit of extra programming where after
| looping for so many times, it will switch to a menu
| without audio. The menus with animated transitions from
| one screen to the next became popular too. I'm not
| familiar with the specific disc of Harry Potter, but I'd
| be amazed if it didn't have transitions
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(page generated 2023-03-27 23:01 UTC)