I’ve created a DVD which has nothing but one menu with a “play” button and a single title. I’ve set a fade-in/out in the title’s “Video properties” of 5 seconds, yet it’s ignored and no fades occur.
Is this a known problem, or is there another setting that needs to be made along with this one?
I also found that adding a few blank frames at the end makes for a smoother fade out. Otherwise, it sometimes doesn't fade out totally before stopping, and you're left with a ghost image.
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That’s a great idea, since as I was saying it’s a bit tricky to get the video/audio fades timed just right. The fades didn’t come out perfectly, but close enough for government work.
The problem that would have presented in this case is that I was working with a huge .mp4 file (about three hours long), and wouldn’t have wanted to process it with another program just to add trailing blank frames. Is there a simple way to accomplish that while leaving the rest of the source video completely untouched?
What I wound up doing first was to automatically split it into 3 roughly equal segments using FFmpeg directly in Windows PowerShell with “segment” arguments. Each output file was then small enough to fit on three single-layered DVDs (luckily for me, just barely).
The actual command line I used wound up being quite long due to nested directory paths, so here’s a simplified example:
This example assumes the “sample.mp4” input file is 3 hours long. FFmpeg would then produce 3 output files: sample_000.mp4, sample_001.mp4, and sample_002.mp4, each one hour long (3600 seconds).
Note the “-c” option, which means copy without re-encoding. Not only is this orders of magnitude faster since encoding isn’t required, but it also ensures there is no degradation of the video since it’s simply copied into the output files as-is.
So, maybe that’s something you can add to your bag of video editing tricks!
DVDStyler really needs adjustable audio and video fade fields in its “global” project settings similar to the old version of Windows Movie Maker, or the “Adjustable Fade” effect in Audacity. I wouldn’t think that would be very hard to implement, since it would just be a matter of adding a couple of entry fields to the global settings dialog, then translating that data to form the appropriate FFmpeg command line arguments when it does its encoding.
DVDStyler hasn’t been updated in a long time, so I’m not sure if contacting the developer to suggest these options is even possible, but perhaps I’ll look into it anyway. I sincerely hope they continue to support it, as it’s a wonderful program that I really wouldn’t want to live without anymore.
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DVDStyler hasn’t been updated in a long time, so I’m not sure if contacting the developer to suggest these options is even possible, but perhaps I’ll look into it anyway. I sincerely hope they continue to support it, as it’s a wonderful program that I really wouldn’t want to live without anymore.
Look at the top of this page where it says Tickets.
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I was winging it back and forth a few seconds until I got the video and audio fades where I wanted them for three of these discs, which was a bit of a pain since I had to render the DVD files each time to see where I was at.
I don’t see anything in the log window referencing fades though, were you perhaps referring to another log file somewhere? I’m sure that would make life easier.
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It is in the FFMpeg command line parameters which you can find right at the top of the log window, just scroll up. You should see a video filter param like this one: -vf fade=in:st=43:d=10,fade=out:st=78:d=5
Paste the command (without the -vf) into the audio filter field and replace fade with afade.
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Hmm… I did a “select all” in the log window, copy/pasted it into Notepad, and did a search on “fade” but came up empty. Perhaps we’re using different versions of DVDStyler? I’m currently running what I believe is the latest (3.1).
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Weird...
You need to tick Show Details to see the commands issued by DVDStylerin the log window. I use the latest version 3.2 Beta7, but this should not make a difference for the log window. In any case you should have the file DVDStyler.log in your output folder, and this file should also show the FFMpeg command.
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Yep, the details window in the Generate DVD dialog was open (that’s the default). I should have said “details window” instead of “log window”, sorry if that was confusing. Anyway, that’s where I did a “select all/copy/paste” from.
For the heck of it, I just uninstalled 3.1 and installed 3.2 beta 7. Guess what? I can now see the FFmpeg fade arguments within the details window. I've attached the complete contents to this post, if you'd like to have a look (side note: The log starts out with "DVDStyler v3.2 beta 5", update needed there).
However, I couldn’t find a “DVDStyler.log” file anywhere on my PC performing a search with either Windows File Explorer or the task bar. It’s probably of no concern, since I assume it would contain the same contents as the details window.
Forgot to mention, I was using “just generate” in the Burn dialog, so I could test the DVD files before burning. This was true while running both 3.1 as well as the beta version, so it probably doesn’t have any bearing on the situation.
If nothing else, I wasn’t aware there were newer beta versions available, which is a good thing! Thanks for making me aware of that, I appreciate it.
Yes, the latest 3.2 Beta7 is very stable, but it also is quite old. I have no idea if Alex Thuering is still interested in maintaining his baby, generally it seems like DVD creation is no longer sexy...
Hi again Manolito! I certainly appreciate all of the information you’ve provided me.
Glad to hear about the stability of the beta. I haven’t run into any issues with it (yet, knock on wood). It may be a bit old, but at least it still got updated twice this year!
It’s a bummer that everything seems to be going digital, but there’s still a lot of us around that like to be able to hold physical CD and DVD media in our hands. I surely hope Alex continues to develop DVDStyler, as it’s such a slick and smooth running program that easily rivals similar applications that cost big bucks. I received the full version of Pinnacle in exchange for a review on Amazon and it’s an absolute nightmare to use, as well as being buggier than a picnic.
When I think of several features just off the top of my head that could be added to DVDStyler, there’s still so much potential for improvement. Hey, maybe you’d like to pick up development? ;^)
FYI, I’m now a full-time musician (retired programmer, 32 years with Big Blue) about to release my second album, and I’ll likely go with digital distribution for that as well, so there you have it. In the end, it’s just a matter of convenience for all parties involved, not to mention everyone wants everything instantly nowadays.
Yes, I am in NTSC region 1 land, and I’ll definitely check out your plugins. That may well put me in over my head since I have minimal knowledge of video encoding, but what the hell, jumping in with both feet is the best way to learn anything, right?
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Hi again Manolito! I certainly appreciate all of the information you’ve provided me.
Glad to hear about the stability of the beta. I haven’t run into any issues with it (yet, knock on wood). It may be a bit old, but at least it still got updated twice this year!
It’s a bummer that everything seems to be going digital, but there’s still a lot of us around that like to be able to hold physical CD and DVD media in our hands. I surely hope Alex continues to develop DVDStyler, as it’s such a slick and smooth running program that easily rivals similar applications that cost big bucks. I received the full version of Pinnacle in exchange for a review on Amazon and it’s an absolute nightmare to use, as well as being buggier than a picnic.
When I think of several features just off the top of my head that could be added to DVDStyler, there’s still so much potential for improvement. Hey, maybe you’d like to pick up development? ;^)
FYI, I’m now a full-time musician (retired programmer, 32 years with Big Blue) about to release my second album, and I’ll likely go with digital distribution for that as well, so there you have it. In the end, it’s just a matter of convenience for all parties involved, not to mention everyone wants everything instantly nowadays.
Yes, I am in NTSC region 1 land, and I’ll definitely check out your plugins. That may well put me in over my head since I have minimal knowledge of video encoding, but what the hell, jumping in with both feet is the best way to learn anything, right?
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looks like we have a few things in common, and it is not just age. Besides my straight job (being a dentist for 34 years, the last 30 years working only part time in a prison in Berlin, Germany) I was a semi-pro Bass player for many years, and I owned a small recording studio where I was the recording engineer and sometimes the producer. I mostly dealt with Soul, R&B, Funk and a little electric Jazz. Everything which has a groove. I also was addicted to the US, for 30 years I spent 6 to 8 weeks every year in the US for my vacation. Santa Cruz, CA was like my second home town.
With computers I started in the late 80s, MS-DOS, dBase, Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar and Framework. Turbo Pascal and a little of MASM/TASM was my turf, I never liked Basic and C. I never made the switch to Windows programming, so all I do today is hack small utilities to improve existing software.
Like you I still do convert stuff to DVD for several reaons. DVDStyler started as a pure Menu creation and DVD authoring software, it did not do any encoding like today. When FFmpeg transcoding was added I hated it so much that I stopped using DVDStyler for some time. Later I wrote this FFMpeg-VBR plugin which soon became popular in this forum, and upon a user request Alex agreed to integrate the plugin transparently into his software. That's the whole story...
If you want to check out more applications for DVD creation I recommend that you also check out AVStoDVD. It is much less powerful for menu creation than DVDStyler, but in all other aspects it is way more sophisticated. Alright, I am biased because I also was a little bit involved in its development.
Cheers
manolito
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Yep, sure sounds like there’s a lot of common ground between us...
Like you, I’ve played in many bands over the years, with my main instrument being drums which I started out with at 13 years old. Nowadays, I work out of a home studio and am basically a “one man band”, playing all instruments and performing all vocals, with the occasional guest sitting in with me. I also collaborate with artists in a professional recording studio over in Finland.
I maintain a supporting blog for the studio, and there’s all sorts of free stuff there including my articles, music productions, videos, podcasts, artwork, and lots more. Without getting into a lot of detail here, if interested you can check that all out at:
As far as computers go, pretty much the same deal. I actually hired on initially as an electronics technician in a lab environment, then taught myself to program in BASIC and Turbo Pascal over the first few years. Management took notice, and permanently moved me down that career path.
It’s funny, I can remember buying my first home computer in the early 80’s, which was a Commodore 64 that stored programs on cassette tape! It cost $199 and I can clearly recall my wife balking at the price, which was actually quite a chunk of money for us at the time. But, I told her it was the way to go to get into a higher paying job, and indeed it was.
I’ve written applications and also worked in system support on everything from PC’s to mainframes. My favorite programming language of all-time was REXX since it was the one most commonly used in VM/SP, the operating system that I installed and supported on my mainframes. I absolutely loved the big boxes, basically because if there was an issue you knew it was right in there somewhere. The biggest mistake I ever made was switching to C/S support, since who knows where the hell a given problem may lie between a client and server.
BTW, I have AVStoDVD installed and use it occasionally, but as you mentioned it just doesn’t stand up to DVDStyler for many reasons. I also use many other programs and utilities to process video, some of which are unfortunately no longer under development:
REAPER (also my main DAW for recording, mixing, and mastering music)
Pinnacle Studio
Windows Movie Maker (old version, the new one sucks)
4K Video Downloader (excellent capture tool for both audio and video)
VSDC Free Video Converter
DVD Shrink
ImgBurn
BurnAware
XBOX game bar! (it’s actually great for captures from a web browser in full-screen mode)
Anyway, it was great “meeting” you! I’ve enjoyed this discussion very much.
Last edit: Craig G. 2020-11-11
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Sorry about that, I was thinking of VSDC, not AVStoDVD.
To be honest, I haven’t used the latter much. This is probably a good opportunity to get some experience with it by re-creating the project I just completed using DVDStyler, which I’ve been discussing throughout this thread.
Thanks for the correction!
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I realize we’ve already floated way off-topic here, might as well keep going...
Re-authored the project with AVStoDVD… I’ll do some searching in the help resources you suggested, but just wanted to let you know about my experiences so far.
I agree with you on both your points:
Much more powerful, since there are so many fine-tuning options available.
However, since I simply want to author DVDs easily, educating myself about what all those options provide isn’t really of much interest to me personally. But, I can certainly see how they’d interest advanced users.
One thing I couldn’t get working was preview. In preferences, I set the path to VLC as follows: C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe
When I attempt a preview, VLC launches but will not play.
Menu creation functions are weak, and definitely could use a lot of improvement.
Here are a few things I encountered... I could easily be wrong about one or more of these since I’m obviously new to the program, so feel free to correct me if so:
Static background images do not retain their aspect ratio, and I can find no option to force that. I didn’t try adding a motion menu (video background), but I would hope that wouldn’t happen if I did or it would look pretty bad.
Although audio can be added, there’s no way to set it to loop.
Fade-outs don’t finish “cleanly”, with a complete fade to black and silence. I tried several fade lengths, but it happens regardless.
There’s no way to suppress the menu title. When I delete the text set by the program, it always returns. In this case I was able to work around that by setting text color to black, since my background image was also black in that area. You may wonder why I’d want to delete it… It’s because the background image already contains the title I want displayed.
I couldn’t find a way to add additional title labels, and I wanted two in different font sizes. I assumed this could be done since the menu item is “Title Label #1”, which suggests to me that you could also have a 2, 3, etc. (although perhaps this is template-specific).
Anyway, those were the major things I noticed. As I mentioned, as a novice user I could well be overlooking options that control these items.
Last edit: Craig G. 2020-11-12
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For menu creation AVStoDVD uses MuxMan with the help of BatchMux (a wrapper to allow commandline parameters to call MuxMan). It's scope is very limited and this will not change, but MuxMan is a much more reliable muxing/authoring tool than mplex/DVDAuthor.
The AVStoDVD preview has been a problem for a while. It uses the very oldfashioned Quartz.dll, and a lot of Win10 users have reported that it does not work under Win10. As an alternative preview software VLC as well as MPC-HC do not work. What does work is Tiny Player and VirtualDub. GraphEdit is another option.
I do not have much experience in creating elaborate menus, but in the AVStoDVD menu wizard you can specify the aspect ratio for static menu backgrounds, and this option has always worked for me.
Background audio cannot be looped, that's correct.
Fades are done via AviSynth, and there is not much AVStoDVD can do about it. You can try to modify the AviSynth command in the View/Edit title tab (see the AviSynth documentation), but that's about it. Generally I found that when it comes to fades AviSynth does a better job than FFMpeg.
To suppress the menu title all you have to do is delete the present title and add a space character as the new menu title. This sure is a bug, but it is very easy to circumvent.
Adding additional title labels is not supported
Cheers
manolito
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Thanks for the reply Manolito, all good information to know.
Just to clear a few things up:
Aspect ratio
When I speak of “aspect ratio” for static background menu images, I’m not talking about the ability to select standard (4:3) or widescreen (16:9) for the overall menu, only the image itself.
I did a bit of exploring in the AVStoDVD templates directory, and found there are actually two images for each template:
1024x576px (16:9)
768x576px (4:3)
I assume the correct one is grabbed automatically according to the aspect ratio selected for the menu, since these dimensions will then fit perfectly. However, my background image is 1920x900px. AVStoDVD “stretches” it to fill the entire menu, which is what makes it look out of whack.
In the DVDStyler menu properties dialog, there’s a tick box that reads “Keep Aspect Ratio”. When selected, the dimensions of the image are preserved to prevent this. It can then be moved around and/or resized.
Fades:
I like that FFmpeg allows video/audio fade-outs to be adjusted independently of each other in all sorts of ways, especially the “curve” type for audio fades. This allows for fine tuning between the two, as I often find V/A fades don’t line up if both are handled using the same start time and length.
In addition to that stuff, other things like multiple title labels, looping menu audio etc, is what I was referring to as “needs improvement”. You had mentioned you were involved in AVStoDVD development, so I hope you didn’t take offense. Certainly, none was intended. ;^)
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I’ve created a DVD which has nothing but one menu with a “play” button and a single title. I’ve set a fade-in/out in the title’s “Video properties” of 5 seconds, yet it’s ignored and no fades occur.
Is this a known problem, or is there another setting that needs to be made along with this one?
Thanks in advance!
Well, all I did was shutdown and restart DVDStyler loading the same “.dvds“ file, and it’s now working. This wasn’t in there before, but is now:
Unfortunately, this does not cause the audio to fade out. Any hacks (perhaps a filter) I can use to accomplish that?
Last edit: Craig G. 2020-11-09
Hmm… Seems like I’m getting good at answering my own questions today.
Adding the following as an audio filter obtained the exact results I was looking for:
Hope this helps someone out!
I also found that adding a few blank frames at the end makes for a smoother fade out. Otherwise, it sometimes doesn't fade out totally before stopping, and you're left with a ghost image.
@peate9:
That’s a great idea, since as I was saying it’s a bit tricky to get the video/audio fades timed just right. The fades didn’t come out perfectly, but close enough for government work.
The problem that would have presented in this case is that I was working with a huge .mp4 file (about three hours long), and wouldn’t have wanted to process it with another program just to add trailing blank frames. Is there a simple way to accomplish that while leaving the rest of the source video completely untouched?
What I wound up doing first was to automatically split it into 3 roughly equal segments using FFmpeg directly in Windows PowerShell with “segment” arguments. Each output file was then small enough to fit on three single-layered DVDs (luckily for me, just barely).
The actual command line I used wound up being quite long due to nested directory paths, so here’s a simplified example:
This example assumes the “sample.mp4” input file is 3 hours long. FFmpeg would then produce 3 output files: sample_000.mp4, sample_001.mp4, and sample_002.mp4, each one hour long (3600 seconds).
Note the “-c” option, which means copy without re-encoding. Not only is this orders of magnitude faster since encoding isn’t required, but it also ensures there is no degradation of the video since it’s simply copied into the output files as-is.
So, maybe that’s something you can add to your bag of video editing tricks!
DVDStyler really needs adjustable audio and video fade fields in its “global” project settings similar to the old version of Windows Movie Maker, or the “Adjustable Fade” effect in Audacity. I wouldn’t think that would be very hard to implement, since it would just be a matter of adding a couple of entry fields to the global settings dialog, then translating that data to form the appropriate FFmpeg command line arguments when it does its encoding.
DVDStyler hasn’t been updated in a long time, so I’m not sure if contacting the developer to suggest these options is even possible, but perhaps I’ll look into it anyway. I sincerely hope they continue to support it, as it’s a wonderful program that I really wouldn’t want to live without anymore.
@Craig G
DVDStyler hasn’t been updated in a long time, so I’m not sure if contacting the developer to suggest these options is even possible, but perhaps I’ll look into it anyway. I sincerely hope they continue to support it, as it’s a wonderful program that I really wouldn’t want to live without anymore.
Look at the top of this page where it says Tickets.
Gotcha, I just added this one. I'm a bit new to all of Sourceforge, thanks!
Last edit: Craig G. 2020-11-11
Yes, you figured it out yourself just fine...
Maybe have a look at this old post:
https://sourceforge.net/p/dvdstyler/discussion/318795/thread/d819645f/#7902
Cheers
manolito
@Manolito: Thank you, sir!
I was winging it back and forth a few seconds until I got the video and audio fades where I wanted them for three of these discs, which was a bit of a pain since I had to render the DVD files each time to see where I was at.
I don’t see anything in the log window referencing fades though, were you perhaps referring to another log file somewhere? I’m sure that would make life easier.
It is in the FFMpeg command line parameters which you can find right at the top of the log window, just scroll up. You should see a video filter param like this one:
-vf fade=in:st=43:d=10,fade=out:st=78:d=5
Paste the command (without the -vf) into the audio filter field and replace fade with afade.
Hmm… I did a “select all” in the log window, copy/pasted it into Notepad, and did a search on “fade” but came up empty. Perhaps we’re using different versions of DVDStyler? I’m currently running what I believe is the latest (3.1).
Weird...
You need to tick Show Details to see the commands issued by DVDStylerin the log window. I use the latest version 3.2 Beta7, but this should not make a difference for the log window. In any case you should have the file DVDStyler.log in your output folder, and this file should also show the FFMpeg command.
Yep, the details window in the Generate DVD dialog was open (that’s the default). I should have said “details window” instead of “log window”, sorry if that was confusing. Anyway, that’s where I did a “select all/copy/paste” from.
For the heck of it, I just uninstalled 3.1 and installed 3.2 beta 7. Guess what? I can now see the FFmpeg fade arguments within the details window. I've attached the complete contents to this post, if you'd like to have a look (side note: The log starts out with "DVDStyler v3.2 beta 5", update needed there).
However, I couldn’t find a “DVDStyler.log” file anywhere on my PC performing a search with either Windows File Explorer or the task bar. It’s probably of no concern, since I assume it would contain the same contents as the details window.
Forgot to mention, I was using “just generate” in the Burn dialog, so I could test the DVD files before burning. This was true while running both 3.1 as well as the beta version, so it probably doesn’t have any bearing on the situation.
If nothing else, I wasn’t aware there were newer beta versions available, which is a good thing! Thanks for making me aware of that, I appreciate it.
Yes, the latest 3.2 Beta7 is very stable, but it also is quite old. I have no idea if Alex Thuering is still interested in maintaining his baby, generally it seems like DVD creation is no longer sexy...
Since Alex has not updated my FFMpeg-VBR plugin for a while I recommend to download the current version and overinstall it, it does have a couple of fixes and improvements. Download links are here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/dvdstyler/discussion/318795/thread/4a559ea3/#ab9e
If you live in NTSC land you might also want to take a look at my Soft Telecine plugin.
Hi again Manolito! I certainly appreciate all of the information you’ve provided me.
Glad to hear about the stability of the beta. I haven’t run into any issues with it (yet, knock on wood). It may be a bit old, but at least it still got updated twice this year!
It’s a bummer that everything seems to be going digital, but there’s still a lot of us around that like to be able to hold physical CD and DVD media in our hands. I surely hope Alex continues to develop DVDStyler, as it’s such a slick and smooth running program that easily rivals similar applications that cost big bucks. I received the full version of Pinnacle in exchange for a review on Amazon and it’s an absolute nightmare to use, as well as being buggier than a picnic.
When I think of several features just off the top of my head that could be added to DVDStyler, there’s still so much potential for improvement. Hey, maybe you’d like to pick up development? ;^)
FYI, I’m now a full-time musician (retired programmer, 32 years with Big Blue) about to release my second album, and I’ll likely go with digital distribution for that as well, so there you have it. In the end, it’s just a matter of convenience for all parties involved, not to mention everyone wants everything instantly nowadays.
Yes, I am in NTSC region 1 land, and I’ll definitely check out your plugins. That may well put me in over my head since I have minimal knowledge of video encoding, but what the hell, jumping in with both feet is the best way to learn anything, right?
Hi again Manolito! I certainly appreciate all of the information you’ve provided me.
Glad to hear about the stability of the beta. I haven’t run into any issues with it (yet, knock on wood). It may be a bit old, but at least it still got updated twice this year!
It’s a bummer that everything seems to be going digital, but there’s still a lot of us around that like to be able to hold physical CD and DVD media in our hands. I surely hope Alex continues to develop DVDStyler, as it’s such a slick and smooth running program that easily rivals similar applications that cost big bucks. I received the full version of Pinnacle in exchange for a review on Amazon and it’s an absolute nightmare to use, as well as being buggier than a picnic.
When I think of several features just off the top of my head that could be added to DVDStyler, there’s still so much potential for improvement. Hey, maybe you’d like to pick up development? ;^)
FYI, I’m now a full-time musician (retired programmer, 32 years with Big Blue) about to release my second album, and I’ll likely go with digital distribution for that as well, so there you have it. In the end, it’s just a matter of convenience for all parties involved, not to mention everyone wants everything instantly nowadays.
Yes, I am in NTSC region 1 land, and I’ll definitely check out your plugins. That may well put me in over my head since I have minimal knowledge of video encoding, but what the hell, jumping in with both feet is the best way to learn anything, right?
Hey Craig,
looks like we have a few things in common, and it is not just age. Besides my straight job (being a dentist for 34 years, the last 30 years working only part time in a prison in Berlin, Germany) I was a semi-pro Bass player for many years, and I owned a small recording studio where I was the recording engineer and sometimes the producer. I mostly dealt with Soul, R&B, Funk and a little electric Jazz. Everything which has a groove. I also was addicted to the US, for 30 years I spent 6 to 8 weeks every year in the US for my vacation. Santa Cruz, CA was like my second home town.
With computers I started in the late 80s, MS-DOS, dBase, Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar and Framework. Turbo Pascal and a little of MASM/TASM was my turf, I never liked Basic and C. I never made the switch to Windows programming, so all I do today is hack small utilities to improve existing software.
Like you I still do convert stuff to DVD for several reaons. DVDStyler started as a pure Menu creation and DVD authoring software, it did not do any encoding like today. When FFmpeg transcoding was added I hated it so much that I stopped using DVDStyler for some time. Later I wrote this FFMpeg-VBR plugin which soon became popular in this forum, and upon a user request Alex agreed to integrate the plugin transparently into his software. That's the whole story...
If you want to check out more applications for DVD creation I recommend that you also check out AVStoDVD. It is much less powerful for menu creation than DVDStyler, but in all other aspects it is way more sophisticated. Alright, I am biased because I also was a little bit involved in its development.
Cheers
manolito
Yep, sure sounds like there’s a lot of common ground between us...
Like you, I’ve played in many bands over the years, with my main instrument being drums which I started out with at 13 years old. Nowadays, I work out of a home studio and am basically a “one man band”, playing all instruments and performing all vocals, with the occasional guest sitting in with me. I also collaborate with artists in a professional recording studio over in Finland.
I maintain a supporting blog for the studio, and there’s all sorts of free stuff there including my articles, music productions, videos, podcasts, artwork, and lots more. Without getting into a lot of detail here, if interested you can check that all out at:
https://cygnusstudios.blog/
As far as computers go, pretty much the same deal. I actually hired on initially as an electronics technician in a lab environment, then taught myself to program in BASIC and Turbo Pascal over the first few years. Management took notice, and permanently moved me down that career path.
It’s funny, I can remember buying my first home computer in the early 80’s, which was a Commodore 64 that stored programs on cassette tape! It cost $199 and I can clearly recall my wife balking at the price, which was actually quite a chunk of money for us at the time. But, I told her it was the way to go to get into a higher paying job, and indeed it was.
I’ve written applications and also worked in system support on everything from PC’s to mainframes. My favorite programming language of all-time was REXX since it was the one most commonly used in VM/SP, the operating system that I installed and supported on my mainframes. I absolutely loved the big boxes, basically because if there was an issue you knew it was right in there somewhere. The biggest mistake I ever made was switching to C/S support, since who knows where the hell a given problem may lie between a client and server.
BTW, I have AVStoDVD installed and use it occasionally, but as you mentioned it just doesn’t stand up to DVDStyler for many reasons. I also use many other programs and utilities to process video, some of which are unfortunately no longer under development:
Anyway, it was great “meeting” you! I’ve enjoyed this discussion very much.
Last edit: Craig G. 2020-11-11
Would you care to elaborate? Because with the exception of menu creation I do not see any area where AVStoDVD doesn't stand up to DVDStyler...
Whoops, embarrassing brain fart there… face palm
Sorry about that, I was thinking of VSDC, not AVStoDVD.
To be honest, I haven’t used the latter much. This is probably a good opportunity to get some experience with it by re-creating the project I just completed using DVDStyler, which I’ve been discussing throughout this thread.
Thanks for the correction!
If you need any help with AVStoDVD, there are support threads for it at Doom9 and at VideoHelp...
Cool, thanks again Bro. Going to give it a try using this current project soon.
Last edit: Craig G. 2020-11-12
I realize we’ve already floated way off-topic here, might as well keep going...
Re-authored the project with AVStoDVD… I’ll do some searching in the help resources you suggested, but just wanted to let you know about my experiences so far.
I agree with you on both your points:
However, since I simply want to author DVDs easily, educating myself about what all those options provide isn’t really of much interest to me personally. But, I can certainly see how they’d interest advanced users.
One thing I couldn’t get working was preview. In preferences, I set the path to VLC as follows:
C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exeWhen I attempt a preview, VLC launches but will not play.
Here are a few things I encountered... I could easily be wrong about one or more of these since I’m obviously new to the program, so feel free to correct me if so:
Static background images do not retain their aspect ratio, and I can find no option to force that. I didn’t try adding a motion menu (video background), but I would hope that wouldn’t happen if I did or it would look pretty bad.
Although audio can be added, there’s no way to set it to loop.
Fade-outs don’t finish “cleanly”, with a complete fade to black and silence. I tried several fade lengths, but it happens regardless.
There’s no way to suppress the menu title. When I delete the text set by the program, it always returns. In this case I was able to work around that by setting text color to black, since my background image was also black in that area. You may wonder why I’d want to delete it… It’s because the background image already contains the title I want displayed.
I couldn’t find a way to add additional title labels, and I wanted two in different font sizes. I assumed this could be done since the menu item is “Title Label #1”, which suggests to me that you could also have a 2, 3, etc. (although perhaps this is template-specific).
Anyway, those were the major things I noticed. As I mentioned, as a novice user I could well be overlooking options that control these items.
Last edit: Craig G. 2020-11-12
For menu creation AVStoDVD uses MuxMan with the help of BatchMux (a wrapper to allow commandline parameters to call MuxMan). It's scope is very limited and this will not change, but MuxMan is a much more reliable muxing/authoring tool than mplex/DVDAuthor.
The AVStoDVD preview has been a problem for a while. It uses the very oldfashioned Quartz.dll, and a lot of Win10 users have reported that it does not work under Win10. As an alternative preview software VLC as well as MPC-HC do not work. What does work is Tiny Player and VirtualDub. GraphEdit is another option.
I do not have much experience in creating elaborate menus, but in the AVStoDVD menu wizard you can specify the aspect ratio for static menu backgrounds, and this option has always worked for me.
Background audio cannot be looped, that's correct.
Fades are done via AviSynth, and there is not much AVStoDVD can do about it. You can try to modify the AviSynth command in the View/Edit title tab (see the AviSynth documentation), but that's about it. Generally I found that when it comes to fades AviSynth does a better job than FFMpeg.
To suppress the menu title all you have to do is delete the present title and add a space character as the new menu title. This sure is a bug, but it is very easy to circumvent.
Adding additional title labels is not supported
Cheers
manolito
Thanks for the reply Manolito, all good information to know.
Just to clear a few things up:
When I speak of “aspect ratio” for static background menu images, I’m not talking about the ability to select standard (4:3) or widescreen (16:9) for the overall menu, only the image itself.
I did a bit of exploring in the AVStoDVD templates directory, and found there are actually two images for each template:
I assume the correct one is grabbed automatically according to the aspect ratio selected for the menu, since these dimensions will then fit perfectly. However, my background image is 1920x900px. AVStoDVD “stretches” it to fill the entire menu, which is what makes it look out of whack.
In the DVDStyler menu properties dialog, there’s a tick box that reads “Keep Aspect Ratio”. When selected, the dimensions of the image are preserved to prevent this. It can then be moved around and/or resized.
I like that FFmpeg allows video/audio fade-outs to be adjusted independently of each other in all sorts of ways, especially the “curve” type for audio fades. This allows for fine tuning between the two, as I often find V/A fades don’t line up if both are handled using the same start time and length.
In addition to that stuff, other things like multiple title labels, looping menu audio etc, is what I was referring to as “needs improvement”. You had mentioned you were involved in AVStoDVD development, so I hope you didn’t take offense. Certainly, none was intended. ;^)