movie-title(1)

✨ movie-title(1) ✨

okay so bestie, this is from the videotrans manual — and it's literally the glow-up your home videos deserve 💖

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🎀 NAME 🎀

movie-title — creates a menu for a set of movies on a DVD 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

movie-title [-C] -o output -t title_seq [-T XxY] [-s start]
       [-c interval] source_video [...]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So basically, this program takes one or more video streams (which are the .m2v or .vob files that movie-to-dvd produces) plus exactly one title sequence (as produced by movie-make-title or movie-make-title-simple) and smashes them all together into a navigational menu. And then the viewer of the DVD can just, like, pick which movie they wanna see. Main character energy for real 👑

The program produces a VOB file that you can use as a menu if you wanna do your own DVD authoring — but it <em>also</em> produces an XML file that can be used directly as an input file for dvdauthor, which is the program you'll most likely be using to create the DVD images you can burn on a real DVD. Periodt. 🔥

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💅 THE MENU 💅

Here's the vibe check on how the menu looks: the background that fills the entire screen is the supplied title sequence (the one from movie-make-title or movie-make-title-simple). The sound from the title sequence (if there is any) will be audible while the viewer is choosing which movie to watch. ✨

• If the animated type of menu was chosen in movie-make-title or movie-make-title-simple, each movie in the menu gets presented with a rectangle in the menu, and inside that rectangle there's a picture-in-picture version of that movie being displayed (exactly as long as the title sequence is itself). 💖
• If the static type of menu was chosen in movie-make-title or movie-make-title-simple, each movie in the menu gets presented with a rectangle in the menu where one frame of that movie is displayed, and it stays unchanged the whole time the menu is being displayed. 🖼️
• If the none type of menu was chosen in movie-make-title or movie-make-title-simple, then none of the movies in the menu get a preview image at all. Nada. 🚫

Below the rectangle (or below the navigation button(s) if there's no preview image), the name of the movie is displayed. If no further information is supplied (more on that in a sec), the movie's file name gets used as the title — which is most likely <em>not</em> what you want, ngl — otherwise the supplied title is used. Above the rectangle (or above the title if no preview images are present), a "play" icon is displayed, and the viewer can choose it with the DVD player's remote to play the movie. And if more information is supplied (more than just a title), an extra "information" icon shows up too, which can be selected to view that extra supplied information. 🎀

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🔥 EXTRA INFORMATION 🔥

If you supply it, you can also add information about the movies to the DVD: an extra information icon will appear with the movie's title, and when it's chosen, the information appears for the viewer to read. And if there's more information than fits on the screen, a scrollbar gets created, and the viewer can scroll using the up and down keys on their DVD player's remote control. Slay. 📜

The way the extra information works is as follows: create a file with the same name as the video stream's name, except using .info as the extension instead of .m2v or .vob. So if you have a video stream called my_home_video.m2v, then you should create a text file called my_home_video.info. 🍓

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🌈 EXTRA INFORMATION FORMAT 🌈

The file has a certain format: the first line should be the title of the movie as it should be displayed in the menu. You may use the special character ^ (carrot, usually shift-6) to split up the title into multiple lines. This is super useful when the title is quite long and is too wide to fit in the grid. 📐

The remainder of the file may be used to supply information about the movie. If the file contains only one line, only the title will be used and <em>no</em> "information" icon will be displayed for this movie. And heads up: lines should normally not be any wider than about 60 characters, so you don't end up with lines wider than the screen can display. 🙈

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💜 EXTRA INFORMATION COLORS 💜

To introduce some extra clarity, you may specify in which color a line should be displayed. Usually the text is white (and the background is <em>always</em> black). You may type a hash mark (#) followed by a six-character hexadecimal color code (the same as those used on the web) followed by a space followed by the line itself, to display a line in a certain color. 🌈

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🧚 EXTRA INFORMATION EXAMPLE 🧚

An example of a .info file could be:

My first words
#ffff00 Title:
    My first words

#ff00ff Date:
    September 8th, 1975

#ff0000 Synopsis:
    A home video that captures my first words as a child!

In this case, the title is "My first words", which will be displayed in the DVD menu. Further more, extra information is supplied, which can be viewed using the "information" icon on the DVD. The "Title:" line will be in yellow, the "Date:" line in magenta, and the "Synopsis:" line will be presented in red. The other text will be in plain white. 💖

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

The following options are available:

• -o output — Specifies the name of the menu VOB file that should be produced by this program. 🎬

Not only this file is created, but a whole lot of other files as well. These files can be automatically cleaned up by using the -C option (see the information there).

The most notable files are output itself (which is a VOB file that can be used as a menu, if you want to do your own DVD authoring) and output-dvdauthor.xml, which is an XML file that can be given to dvdauthor's -x option to create the DVD image for you.

There's also output-overlay.gif, which will contain the titles and the rectangles used in the menu. This file can be viewed to see whether the titles all fit nicely in the menu before you decide to burn it to a real DVD. 👀

Personally, I usually use the name title.vob (short and to-the-point).

• -C — When this option is supplied (and the rest the of arguments remain as they were when the program is first run), the program will clean up all the temporary files that were created for producing the DVD image. When the program is run without this option, it will suggest a command line to run including this option when it finishes, to clean up. 🧹
• -t title_sequence — This option tells the program which title sequence directory to use, which must have been created my movie-make-title or movie-make-title-simple beforehand. Please look in the manual pages for movie-make-title and movie-make-title-simple for more information on how to use those programs. 📖
• -T XxY — Normally, the program will determine by itself what the optimal grid size is in which to present all the movies at once. For example, if there are five movies, it will set the grid size to three by two (leaving one space blank). Using this option, you may override the program's default grid size and set it to X by Y (note the letter x in between the two numbers). If you specify a grid size that has more spaces than there are movies, the last few spaces will be left blank. If you specify a grid size that has fewer spaces than there are movies, the program will tell you so and will refuse to run. 🚫
• -s start — Normally, the program will start capturing frames for the picture-in-picture versions of the movies to put in the menu from the beginning (first frame) of those movies. This is often just fine, but sometimes you'll want to start capturing frames somewhere beyond the start. You could want this if all the movies start the same way, for example. You'll also want to use this if you are displaying static preview images in your menu: if you don't, you will probably just see a black image because the first image of a movie is rarely anything useful. Using this option, you can specify a number seconds, which will be used as a seek position in the movie before any frames are captured. ⏱️
• -c interval — Sets how long a chapter lasts in the movies. Chapters are created every interval minutes in the movies. This makes the movie easy to navigate with a DVD player's remote control. The default is 2 minutes. If you do not want chapters to be created, specify none. 📺

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😭 DIAGNOSTICS 😭

If this program is called with a incorrect set of parameters, it will print a diagnostic message telling the user what went wrong. Also, it will then print its usage information, listing all the options and their meanings. 📋

The program tells you what it is doing while it is running. 🗣️

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⭐ EXAMPLE ⭐

The command line that I use most often is:

movie-title -o title.vob -t title input1.m2v input2.m2v

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🫶 AFTER RUNNING THE PROGRAM 🫶

Once the program has been run, you should run dvdauthor to create a DVD image that you can burn to a real DVD. The program will tell you how to run dvdauthor once it has finished. Also, it will suggest what to run after dvdauthor has done its job to clean up all the temporary files that are no longer necessary at that point. ✨

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💀 BURNING THE IMAGE TO A REAL DVD 💀

Once you have created a DVD image with dvdauthor, you may burn it onto a real DVD. How this is done depends on which program you use for that. Personally, I use growisofs. The command line that I use for that program is:

growisofs -dvd-video -Z /dev/dvd directory_with_image

The directory_with_image is the directory that you specified in dvdauthor's -o option. 🔥

🎬 MOVIES WITH MORE THAN ONE PART 🎬

Okay bestie, listen up, because some movies are not one single file and the way that works is so important. Some movies are split up into more than one part. Like, you literally have more than one .m2v or .vob file, and those files together make up the entire movie. For example? You could have a movie that has been split up into separate sections, each one lasting a half hour at the most. iconic little chunking situation, no cap 🍓

In this case, you do not want all the sections to appear in the menu. You only want the section from which you want to rip the picture-in-picture view for use in the menu. That's it, that's the one. 💅

So here's the move: you should supply just the .m2v or .vob as an argument to this program from which you want to rip the frames for use in the menu, along with any other .m2v or .vob files that you want to appear in the menu. Once the program is done — and this is the part where you gotta pay attention, fr fr — just before you run dvdauthor, you should edit the file called output-dvdauthor.xml. 🫶

Then:

1. Look for the line that contains the file name of the section of the movie that you specified on the command line.
2. Copy this line and paste it below the existing line until you have as many lines as that there are parts of the movie.
3. Now edit the file names in each of the lines so that you end up naming all of the sections of the movie.

Now, when you run dvdauthor, it will join all of the sections together into one complete movie. slay ✨ And it will do this for all the movies that had been split up. Every single one. main character energy across the whole DVD 👑

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• videotrans(1)
• movie-make-title(1)
• movie-make-title-simple(1)
• movie-to-dvd(1)
• movie-compare-dvd(1)
• movie-rip-epg.data(1)

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💖 AUTHOR 💖

The author is Sven Berkvens-Matthijsse (sven@berkvens.net). Please send any project related e-mail to videotrans@berkvens.net. He's the whole reason this exists, show some love 🫶

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💀 BUGS 💀

None known. not a single one, bestie, we're clean Please report any bugs to videotrans@berkvens.net! If you find one, tell him immediately, do not gatekeep 🙈

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And that's a wrap on movie-title(1) from the videotrans crew 🎀 This page is part of the videotrans collection, and yeah, it's got a date on it like every good manpage does — so if the date looks old, that just means the knowledge is timeless. Go make something cute. Byeee 💜🦋