DVD Authoring with DVDStyler (Page 1 of 3)
Written by
Doug Bonnell
Posted on: Apr 06, 2007 at 03:38pm
Section:
Tutorials
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Fig. 1 DVDStyler's Startup Screen
Free software for mastering DVDs is starting to catch up with some of the commercial
software in this genre. Command line tools have been available for some time, but GUI
based tools have just started to become usable. One such GUI is DVDStyler.
DVDStyler provides for simple DVD menus based on static JPEG images. Currently, there
is no support for animated menus, you might wish to look at QDVDauthor instead. However, DVDStyler
provides a complete package for DVD authoring, creating an ISO image and burning to blank
media. DVDStyler is available for both Linux and Windows.
Just click on the 'New' button to get a dialog box to start your project:
Fig. 2 Create new Project Dialog
DVDStyler supports both the North American NTSC and European/Japan PAL standards.
Next, click DVD->Add->vmMenu to add a Menu to the "Video
Manager" layer of the DVD. This is typically the top menu that has options like
"Play", "Chapters", "Audio Setup", etc.
Now click DVD->Add->Menu to add 'Menu 2'. DVDStyler includes a
set of default background JPEGS. You can also add your custom backgrounds, just use the
"Directories" tab on the left side to navigate to your own files.
Fig. 3 Project with a Video Manager Menu and two Titleset Menus
In this screen shot, I have selected "Main-Menu.jpg" as the background for
the vmMenu and "Chapters-Menu.jpg" for Menu 1 and Menu 2. Just single click on
the desired Menu and then double click on the desired background image:
Fig. 4 Project menus with backgrounds
The background images supplied with DVDStyler are all 720x576 to conform to PAL. If you
make custom images, you can use 720x480 for NTSC only. These are for 16x9 aspect images.
You might need to experiment with the image properties for 4x3. Just right click on the
menu and click: Properties->Audio/Video->Aspect Ratio
Finally, bring in your MPEG2 file (or files). These will be used to create the Title
Sets of the DVD as 'Title 1', 'Title2', etc.
Fig. 5 Project with all menus and one Title Set
All Title Sets must be MPEG2 files with the proper size for NTSC (720x480) or PAL
(720x576). The audio must also be compatible with DVD, typically AC3 or MP2. Some
DVD players also support PCM audio. Tools to convert various multimedia file formats
(AVI, WMV, etc.) to MPEG2 DVD format exist for both Windows and Linux. Here some useful
links:
User Guides
at Doom9
Video and Audio Tools Guide for Linux
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