WebDVD depends on the following software:
- dvdauthor
+- expat 1.x
- Gtkmm 2.0
- mjpegtools
- Mozilla 1.7.x (later versions may work but are untested)
-----
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 and link to a VOB-list file (explained below)
+whose name ends in ".voblist".
+
+VOB-lists
+
+A VOB-list file is an XML file with the document element <vob-list>
+and containing <vob> elements as described in the dvdauthor manual
+page. The file names in a VOB-list file are resolved relative to the
+directory containing the list file. For example:
+
+ <vob-list>
+ <vob file="main.vob" chapters="0:00,4:55,12:13,17:45"/>
+ <vob file="credits.vob"/>
+ </vob-list>
+
+This will result in a title with the following chapters:
+
+ 1: main.vob 0:00- 4:55
+ 2: main.vob 4:55-12:13
+ 3: main.vob 12:13-17:45
+ 4: main.vob 17:45- end
+ 5: credits.vob
+
+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
either nonexistent or empty). WebDVD will automatically follow links
to the other pages and to the video files.
+If you use mjpegtools 1.6.2 or earlier you must add the option
+"--encoder mjpegtools-old". This is due to an incompatible change in
+the syntax of the ppmtoy4m command between versions 1.6.2 and 1.8.
+
If this is successful you can then use mkisofs to create a DVD image
from the output directory. Alternately you can write this directory
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
-----------
Each page must fit within the frame - DVD players do not support
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.
+multiple menus. The standard frame size for PAL and SECAM is 720x576
+pixels; for NTSC it is 720x480 pixels. The exact visible area varies
+between TVs so the background should cover all or very nearly all the
+frame whereas the important content such as text must not be placed
+near the edge. For this reason WebDVD applies a stylesheet to all
+pages that adds 60 pixels of padding on all sides of the body; this
+doesn't apply to the background.
+
+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 "titles" on a DVD. If you need to include more
+than this number of video sequences, you could arrange them as
+chapters of a title, so long as they use the same codecs, resolution,
+aspect ratio and sample rate. However, each chapter will run into the
+next. If this is a real problem, let me know, and I may be able to
+provide a better solution in a later version of WebDVD.
Author and copyright
--------------------
WebDVD was written by Ben Hutchings <ben@decadentplace.org.uk>.
-Copyright 2005 Ben Hutchings.
+Copyright 2005-2006 Ben Hutchings.
This software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
Copyright 1991-1998 Thomas G. Lane. (This applies to the file jquant2.c.)
projects / videolink.git / blobdiff