Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Video is everywhere these days. Our phones, tablets, digital cameras and notebooks all have video capable cameras in them. Whether you’re taking a family video or producing a documentary, it’s nice to put some polish on the video. There are a lot of video editing tools for Linux: Lives, Cinelerra, OpenShot, Pitivi, and Kdenlive to name a few. These editing tools will help you put the polish on your actual video, but what do you do about creating a polished looking DVD menu?
In FCM#73, I mentioned DeVeDe and KMediafactory. DeVeDe is great for creating simple menus if you’re in a hurry, but menus look text heavy. KMediafactory was great at one time, but it hasn’t been developed in several years and the templates are limited. Enter DVDStyler. DVDStyler is a cross-platform free DVD authoring application for the creation of professional-looking DVDs.
DVDStyler is available in the universe repository of Ubuntu and can be downloaded with a simple
apt-get install dvdstyler
DVDStyler has a number of xine video-related dependencies.
When DVDStyler starts, it prompts you to create a new project or open an existing project. If you create a new project, you’ll want to adjust some of the project title, DVD size, video quality, video format, aspect ratio, and audio format for your region. In North America we use NTSC. I chose the 16:9 rectangular aspect ratio and stuck with the default AC3 audio.
Next you’re shown a number of templates and asked to select a template. You can choose a template or simple click the no-template button. There are a selection of backgrounds on the left hand side to choose from, but, by right clicking in the blank space and selecting properties, you can choose your own image and audio track for the menu. If you select an audio track, be sure to click the loop check-box to have it play more than once (you, too, can have that eventually annoying repeating music track that seems so cool when you first hear it).
Once you have your background and audio track, it’s time to add some content. In this instance, I kept it simple and added two videos by clicking on the File Browser tab on the left side and dragging two videos to the menu page. To add text beside the videos, right-click near the videos, select add, then select text, and type in the text (Sintel for example). Once the text is on the page, you can select it and change the text properties including font size, style, fill, outline color, outline size, background color and location.
I wanted an option to play both videos back-to-back, so I added a button from the buttons tab on the left. I changed its properties by right-clicking on the button, selecting properties, then clicking on the Play all titles check-box.
Buttons need not be tied to videos. You can also add sub-menus by clicking on the DVD menu option then clicking add and menu. This creates a second menu which you can link a button to by choosing menu 2 (in the image above I just have one menu called Menu 1) from the Jump to drop-down dialog (instead of title 1 in the example illustrated). Sub-menus can be used to create a menu for chapters, subtitles or audio.
A good example of how you might use a second menu is if you want to provide a menu for specific chapters of a video. Don’t worry if your video is one long video, you can create chapters by right clicking on the video (title 1 for example), selecting properties, and entering the time for the second, third, fourth, etc. chapters in the chapters field.
In the buttons along the left hand side, there is a square blank button above an elliptical blank button. The square button displays an image once dragged to the menu space. On the second menu, drag out enough square buttons to match the chapters you’ve created (remember chapter 1 usually starts at position 0 in the video, so, although our screenshot shows 5 times, we have 6 chapters). Add text below or beside each chapter. By default, all the square buttons will be linked to chapter 1. To change this, right-click on each square button, choose properties, and from the Jump to drop-down, select the correct chapter for each button. Don’t forget to add a menu button and link it back to menu 1 (our top/main menu). With a little work you can get some neat results.
DVD Styler is a great program, but, during the making of several menus, I bumped into a few problems. First, text appears to be limited to 10 characters. Second, although I was able to resize the video buttons, the ‘keep aspect ratio’ button didn’t work as expected and seemed to squish the video buttons so they didn’t look correct. Although it’s not a problem, it would be nice to have guidelines in addition to the grid option.
When you’ve imported all your videos and created all your menus, click the File, then click Burn DVD and OK to make an ISO image of your DVD. Use Brasero, XFBurn or K3b to burn the ISO to DVD.
If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, and are not afraid of a little XML, you can even create your own buttons for DVD Styler. A guy named Mike created a detailed blogger post about how to add your own buttons to DVD Styler here: http://mikesgeneralblog.blogspot.ca/2006/08/creating-new-buttons-for-dvdstyler_04.html
You can find the DVD Styler documentation and other links on the DVD Styler web site at: http://www.dvdstyler.org/en/
Happy DVD menuing!