videotrans(1)

✨ NAME ✨

videotrans — it's a whole little package that converts movies into DVD format and also builds the DVDs for you 💿💖 (it's a manual page for the videotrans command, iykyk)

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

Okay so bestie, videotrans is literally a set of scripts that lets you reformat movies you already have into the VOB format — yep, that's the format DVDs use. Periodt.

And that's not even all of it: videotrans also hands you programs that let you build a complete DVD, including selection menus so the viewer can pick which movie they wanna watch when more than one movie fits on the disc. Main character energy fr fr.

If you wanna just get going ASAP, skip down to the "quick start" section. No cap.

videotrans has these programs available — and each one has its own separate manual page that explains it in detail:

• movie-to-dvd — This one takes one or more input files and converts them into a separate MPEG2 video stream and a separate MP2 or AC3 audio stream. If you want, it'll combine the video and audio into a DVD-compatible .vob file — although that's usually not necessary, because movie-title will do that for you if it hasn't been done yet while you're generating a DVD image to burn to a real DVD, which saves disk I/O. Slay.

This program takes care of all the necessary conversions, like framerate adjustment, audio adjustment, zooming/shrinking for DVD frame sizes, etcetera. And the best part? It can figure out which conversions are necessary all on its own — no user intervention required (but of course, it is possible). Lowkey iconic.

When you're making a DVD, you'll first convert all the movies you wanna put on the DVD into the MPEG2 video and MP2 or AC3 audio streams. Later, you'll combine these with the movie-title program into a complete DVD. 💅

• movie-title — This one takes one or more video files that were converted by the movie-to-dvd program, plus a special title sequence produced by movie-make-title or movie-make-title-simple, and combines all of it into a menu from which the viewer of the DVD can choose which movie he or she wants to watch. ✨

The menu is created by displaying the title image or movie in the background, with no images or static or animated picture-in-picture versions of all the movies on top of that. The creator has the option of supplying information about the movies, and that information can be viewed from the menu too, on a movie-per-movie basis. So organized.

The program also generates an XML file for use with dvdauthor — that's the program used to actually create the DVD image you'll burn onto a DVD disc. And it tells you how to run dvdauthor to do the processing for you. So thoughtful 🫶

• movie-make-title — Used to create a background movie and an audio track for DVD menus.

It takes a single movie and cuts a specified part out of it. Then it converts that piece of the movie into separate frames and saves the audio track in a WAV file for you.

Now here's the part where you have to do some work yourself: you'll have to manually view all the frames and throw away the ones you don't want in your DVD's title sequence (the first few frames and the last few frames). It's not possible to automatically cut out exactly the piece of the movie that you want. For this, the author recommends xv — although honestly any image viewer that understands JPEG picture files will do. 🙈

Also, you'll have to process the WAV audio file by hand, to cut out exactly that audio track you wanna hear when the menu is displayed. The author personally finds sweep a very useful graphical audio processor for this purpose. And movie-title will make sure the audio track lasts exactly as long as the movie clip that you cut out does — this is to compensate for possible changes in the video frame rate and to correct small mistakes. Sweep can be downloaded at http://sweep.sourceforge.net/. 🌸

• movie-make-title-simple — Used to create an optional background image and an optional audio track for DVD menus.

You get the choice of using an empty background of a specific color (black being the default) or an image that you supply.

You also get the choice of including an audio track or having no sound with the menu. Options, options, we love options 🎀

• movie-rip-epg.data — A convenience program that can convert an EPG data file generated by VDR into a .info file that can be used together with movie-title. Then movie-title will be able to display the movie's name in the menu and provide an information button which leads to the generated information. So handy 🔥
• movie-compare-dvd — Use this after burning a DVD image to a DVD disc to verify whether all the data was written onto the disc intact. It takes the on-filesystem copy and the on-DVD copy and compares the checksums of the files on both to find any differences. Vibe check for your disc 💀

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🌈 QUICK START 🌈

Wanna start quickly with these programs, and you've got a couple of movies you wanna put onto a DVD? Try this — assuming your TV standard is PAL, otherwise specify ntsc instead of pal everywhere that it's used:

movie-to-dvd -m pal movie1.avi movie2.avi movie3.avi
movie-make-title-simple -o title -m pal \
      -i background.jpg -s -a music.mp3
movie-title -o title.vob -t title \
      movie1.m2v movie2.m2v movie3.m2v
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory -x title.vob-dvdauthor.xml
a_command_to_burn_a_dvd_from dvd_directory

And in case you don't want a selection menu, you may also try:

movie-to-dvd -m pal -M movie1.avi movie2.avi movie3.avi
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory movie1.vob
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory movie2.vob
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory movie3.vob
dvdauthor -o dvd_directory -T
a_command_to_burn_a_dvd_from dvd_directory

Heads up bestie: in this case, you'll have to use the DVD player's navigation controls to get to the various movies on the DVD. No menu, no shortcuts 😭

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

movie-to-dvd(1), movie-title(1), movie-make-title(1), movie-make-title-simple(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. 💜

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🦋 BUGS 🦋

None known. Please report any bugs to videotrans@berkvens.net! Fr fr, tell them everything 💖

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And that's a wrap on the videotrans page from the videotrans manual, bestie — go convert some movies and slay 💅✨