The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Hi there. For a very long time, I've been searching for a simple tool to do the following:

Author a DVD that is made of for example 15 XVID-ripped episodes of a series, and put a simple auto-starting menu in the beginnen that lets you choose one episode to play (and that maybe handles subtitle selection as well). Play on a standalone DVD player of course.

Any suggestions??? Thank you very much!

Must it be portable? Free?

Simple? hard to find simple when you're dealing with menus. Especially if you are working with existing dvd files.

Payware Video Editing suites like Sony Vegas or Pinnacle Studio are easy to use with source avi and mpeg video tracks, they have templates that you can just hook up the buttons to your chapters. (Pinnacle Studio 10 and newer says it can import dvd VOB files, but I've never done that)


Some folks swear by free opensource DvdFlick, and maybe that would be a good one for you to try first.
download link

I don't work much with menus, but my tool-of-choice to author dvds is freeware DvdAuthorGui. I wrote a guide under the name of CountryMouse that includes a section on using that app (starting page 14), and making a simple menu is included. It is simple to make one, but rather time-consuming. You should be able to add your existing dvd chapters as individual "titles", and create a menu with buttons to activate them.
LINK to pdf guide

Hi granny Geek. Thank you for your help !!!

The application needn't be portable, no (but portable is nice, obviously . Free, well yea, free is always good hey.

The DvdAuthorGui you talk about, the link to the guide you wrote doesn't seem to work. Maybe they moved it?

I also took a look at DVD-Flick and at first sight looks good. I didn't do any testing yet. I'll let you know.

Thanx again for the help!

PeterV wrote:Hi granny Geek. Thank you for your help !!!

The DvdAuthorGui you talk about, the link to the guide you wrote doesn't seem to work. Maybe they moved it?

UPDATE: I eventually did find the document. Seems to be an excellent guide, thank you for your effort!

I'll first carefully read your guide and then I may come back with some questions.

In any case, I'll give you a progress update.

CountryMouse, I quickly read your tutorial, excellent, excellent, very well done, I salute you.

I haven't installed the application yet and done some experiments... but would like to ask one crucial question.

Now, I've ripped some series to XVID. Original DVD's contained 24 episodes on 6 DVDs. I've ripped them to an average 300-400 MB so 12 XVID episodes will easily fit on one DVD.

Obviously I don't want to re-convert them back to DVD format (as DVD Flick seems to do), thus obtaining larger file sizes again.

What I want to do is author a DVD that will show menus (as DAG seems to do) and then play the episodes in XVID format.

Most DVD players these days will play XVID anyway and I'm not terribly worried about older DVD players that won't recognise this format.

Is this possible?

Thank you again for your excellent guide.

oh my, I've never worked with xvid on disk, just used it to make clips for computer playback.

I think the best thing for you might be to take a trip over to one of the video user forums. I very highly recommend www.VideoHelp.com
, and DigitalDigest http://forum.digital-digest.com/

Lots of very friendly helpful folks at both sites, and tons of posted tutorials and guides. Search around for threads about "divx menu" and "xvid menu" and you'll find a mountain of information.

Be warned, some of the guys might lecture you about low quality when you try to put so much time on a single disk. (I stick with DVD format, and almost never exceed 2-hours per 4 gb disk.)

Doom9 has a good forum, but discussions tend to get rather technical and dense, they aren't really geared for beginners.

I'll poke around the archives tomorrow and see if I come across some guides that might help you out.

Later ....

Just had a VERY fast snoop around, and found a few references that said only players that support Divx ULTRA can use menus that are encoded on the disk. Otherwise you have to use the generic "browser" on your player's menu.

I know Divx is not free, and I don't think Xvid supports that feature.

I did find one guide that will get you menus and subtitles, and TMPGEnc is also not free, but they do have trial versions available. (there are probably other softwares, and other guides, but I must go sleep now.)

http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/ ... page1.html

grannyGeek wrote:I know Divx is not free, and I don't think Xvid supports that feature.

Are you talking about a specific DivX editing application, or the DivX Ultra you mentioned (with which I'm not familiar)? Because the DivX codec is free, as well as tons of converter/encoder programs found on the internet...

(Edit: Just "learned" myself on DivX Ultra...found two threads for free (but somewhat complex- and technical-looking) DivX Ultra menu solutions (DivXMediaBuilder)...but you'll still need a DivX Ultra certified device...)

http://forum.videohelp.com/topic348326.html

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=109622

grannyGeek wrote:
I know Divx is not free

,


Well, sometimes granny has a "senior" moment. One of my payware video suites that supports Divx charges a price to get the Pro codec, and I just was kind of sort of <duh!> not aware that there is a free version.

@PeterV, I hope I didn't cloud the waters too much with that statement.

PeterV did you try "DVDStyler v1.5.1"?

(v1.6 may not be stable)

just point DVDStyler to the mpeg2 video files folder.

any 576x480 .jpeg can be used as background.

http://www.dvdstyler.de/

@ Island Boy --- doesn't DvdStyler encode to dvd mpeg / vob files?
I think PeterV wants to NOT re-encode his existing xvid avi files.

PeterV, it kind of looks like if you do want to keep your files in their existing xvid format, you won't be able to have a menu.

Thank you all for your help!

GrannyGeek, indeed, looks like it'll be impossible to use DVD-menus AND keep the material in XVID.

I'll have to look into investing in a decent computer2tv solution and play the stuff directly from my PC, then all menu problems are solved.

DVDStyler has added support 4 avi files (Version 1.7.0 beta)

Version history:
Version 1.7.0 beta 1
----------------------------------

* added support of avi files
* transcoding using ffmpeg
* added Greek translation (thanks to Aristotelis Pitaridis)
* all translations conform to UTF-8 as locale now
* adapted manpage

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVDStyler

Happy, happy, joy, joy!!

DVDStyler Portable 1.7.0 Released (Thanks Zach)

with support of avi files

http://portableapps.com/apps/music_vide ... r_portable

hi, you can try Free DVD Creator. It can convert and burn video to dvd with dvd menu. And you can set the video resolution to get more video to convert and burn on one blank DVD.

You can get it from: http://www.minidvdsoft.com/dvdcreator/