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Design your DVD menus as a series of HTML pages linking to each other
-and to MPEG-1/2 videos that are suitable for use on a DVD. Currently
-the videos must be local files with filenames ending in ".vob", but no
-such restrictions apply to the HTML pages. You must be careful not to
-link to pages that you do not want to appear on the disc, such as
-normal web sites. Also note the limitations listed below.
+and to MPEG-1/2 videos that are suitable for use on a DVD. You must
+be careful not to link to pages that you do not want to appear on the
+disc, such as normal web sites. Also note the limitations listed
+below.
+
+Linking to video
+
+You can link directly to local MPEG video files whose names end in
+".vob". If you wish to combine multiple files into a single video
+sequence ("title" in DVD terminology) or to add chapter marks to a
+video sequence, create a text file whose name ends in ".voblist" and
+containg <vob> elements as described in the dvdauthor manual page, and
+link to that. Note that these list files are currently included
+directly in the control file that WebDVD passes to dvdauthor, which
+means that file names in them will be resolved relative to the current
+directory rather than the directory containing the list file. This is
+probably a bug.
+
+Video standards
By default, webdvd generates PAL/SECAM video. If you wish to produce
NTSC DVDs you can override this by adding the option "--video-std ntsc"
to the following commands.
+Preview
+
To get a rough preview of the menus, run "webdvd --preview menu-url"
where menu-url is the URL or filename of the first page to show.
Currently videos cannot be displayed in this preview mode.
+Processing
+
To create a DVD filesystem, run "webdvd menu-url output-dir" where
menu-url is the URL or filename of the top menu page and output-dir is
the directory in which to create the filesystem (which should be
directly to a writable DVD with growisofs or with mkisofs piped to a
suitable version of cdrecord.
+Example
+-------
+
+A live example set of menus can currently be found at
+<http://womble.decadentplace.org.uk/software/debconf5-dvd/menus/main.html>.
+Note that this has large background images that will take some time to
+load.
+
Limitations
-----------
scrolling menus and WebDVD currently is not able to split them into
multiple menus. Note also that the video frame is somewhat larger
than the visible area of a normal TV. For this reason WebDVD applies
-a stylesheet to all pages that adds 50-60 pixels of padding on all
-sides of the body.
+a stylesheet to all pages that adds 60 pixels of padding on all sides
+of the body.
+
+Prior to Mozilla version 1.8, which I have not yet tested, Mozilla may
+signal that a page is completely loaded before any background images
+are loaded and displayed. This results in snapshots that do not
+include background images. You can work around this by using
+absolutely-positioned "inline" images, or attempt to build WebDVD
+against Mozilla 1.8.
DVD players do not have "back" buttons, so you should generally
provide links to "higher" menu pages. However, they do have a button
highlighting of buttons to using no more than 4 colours. WebDVD will
reduce link highlighting to 1 transparent and 3 opaque colours using
Floyd-Steinberg dithering, which is certainly good enough for
-anti-alised text but may not be so good for complex highlighting.
+anti-aliased text but may not be so good for complex highlighting.
+
+There is a limit of 99 "titlesets" (groups of video sequences) on a
+DVD. Currently WebDVD does not attempt to group video sequences
+together, so there is a limit of 99 video sequences altogether.
Author and copyright
--------------------
-Add keyboard command for "top menu" in preview mode.
+Provide a means to specify video aspect and menu & audio language.
+Search whole of history rather than just previous page when deciding whether a link goes back or forward.
Set Mozilla's idea of the pixel aspect ratio to match video pixels. (For extra credit, scale preview mode to correct for the differing aspect ratio.)
+Add keyboard command for "top menu" in preview mode.
Add support for videos in preview mode.
-Disable scrollbars (not sure how how to do this).
+Support more than 99 videos by grouping them into titlesets.
+Avoid exceeding the maximum 128 instructions per PGC.
+Allow explicit ordering of videos.
May need to override default menu navigation actions because dvdauthor seems to cause rather undesirable behaviour when buttons are not arranged in a grid.
-Search whole of history rather than just previous page when deciding whether a link goes back or forward.
For any page with no links, add a "back" link (this raises the issue of localisation, of course).
If a page is too large, split it and add "next" and "previous" links (seems very difficult).
projects / videolink.git / commitdiff