Hi,
I have a friend that wants to make some dvds of her 3d animations, having menus and all. Does anyone know of any good opensource programs like Adobe encore DVD? She is using windows, but for my personal use, I could use linux ones as well.
Thanks,
MicWit
No.
Long answer: There are none for Windows. There are cheap ones, there are trial ones bundled with every drive and video card and there are pirate keys everywhere, but there’s no actual freeware ones that are nice, complete, menu-creating DVD authoring programs.
Linux, on the other hand… until just a couple years ago the idea was ludicrous, DVDs were for data, if you wanted a stupid movie you just ripped it to your drive and played it; we got no time for TELEVISION man. But today, there’s a couple. DVD author has come a long way, but it’s XML and if you’re not fluent it’ll drive you insane. There are a few front-ends for it, though. The video itself, hey that’s nothing, ffmpeg or mencoder or whatever you’d like to make your multiplexed DVD-compliant MPEG2s.
If you gotta go the open source route, get on freshmeat and sourceforge and let the searching begin.
In her case, tell her to d/l a copy of ULead’s DVD Factory 5 Trial (I think it’s 30 day ware) and snapshot the registry before so you see what changes it makes. 
not piracy, technically, circumventing a timeout… unethical as hell, but hey, if it bothers her, it’s fairly cheap. $49.99 for a HD DVD authoring and burning package? (Or buy a new burner, many modern DVD±RWs come with authoring software.)
and snapshot the registry before so you see what changes it makes.
Are you saying to snapshot the regs to see what it puts on the computer? Like spyware? Just read the licening agreement, it’ll say right in it that it has spyware or not.
hmm, thats anoying. The main thing that I wanted it for is to do cool menus etc, the video is no problem, its just the interface. Im sure there has to be a project out there somewhere thats opensource. When I get a chance, I’ll have a more in depth look into freashmeat and sourceforge.
MicWit
Well K3B is being worked on all the time and have both DVD and CDROM
support:
Take a look at it here:
http://www.k3b.org/
Some features:
Creating data cds:
Add files and folders to your data cd project via drag’n’drop.
Remove files from your project, move files within your project.
Create empty direcories within your project.
Write data cds on-the-fly directly without an image file or with image file. It’s also possible to just create the image file and write it to cd later.
Rockridge and Joliet support.
Rename files in your project.
Let K3b rename all the mp3/ogg files you add to your project to a common format like “artist - title.mp3”.
For advanced users: support for nearly all the mkisofs options.
Verifying the burned data.
Support for multible El-Torito boot images.
Multisession support
Creating audio cds:
Pluggable audio decoding. Plugins for WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis are included.
CD-TEXT support. Will automagically be filled in from tags in audio files.
Write audio cds on-the-fly without decoding audio files to wav before.
Normalize volume levels before writing.
Cut audio tracks at the beginning and the end.
Creating Video CDs:
VCD 1.1, 2.0, SVCD
CD-i support (Version 4)
Creating mixed-mode CDs:
CD-Extra (CD-Plus, Enhanced Audio CD) support.
All data and audio project features.
Creating eMovix CDs
CD Copy
Copy single and multi session data CDs
Copy Audio CDs
Copy Enhanced Audio CDs (CD-Extra)
Copy CD-Text
Add CD-Text from cddb
CD Cloning mode for perfect single session CD copies
DVD burning:
Support for DVD-R(W) and DVD+R(W)
Creating data DVD projects
Creating eMovix DVDs
Formatting DVD-RWs and DVD+RWs
CD Ripping:
CDDB support via http, cddbp and local cddb directory.
Sophisticated pattern system to automatically organize the ripped tracks in directories and name them according to album, title, artist, and track number.
CD-TEXT reading. May be used instead of CDDB info.
K3b stores CDDB info of the ripped tracks which will automatically be used as CD-TEXT when adding the ripped files to an audio project.
Plugin system to allow encoding to virtually every audio format. Plugins to encode to Ogg Vorbis, Mp3, FLAC, and all formats supported by SoX included.
DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding
Save/load projects.
Blanking of CDR-Ws.
Retrieving Table of contents and cdr information.
Writing existing iso images to CD or DVD with optional verification of the written data.
Writing cue/bin files created for CDRWIN
DVD copy (no video transcoding yet)
Enhanced CD device handling:
Detection of max. writing and reading speed.
Detection of Burnfree and Justlink support.
Good media detection and optional automatic CD-RW and DVD-RW blanking
KParts-Plugin ready.
It’s actually pretty good, I use it all the time.
MiGa:
DVDstyler looks cool - didn’t know about that one,
thanks for the tip!
Sweet, thanks for the link, I’ll check it out.
As far as k3b goes, Im using Suse, and havn’t gotten it to work 100%, I couldnt get it to burn mp3s to an audio cd. We should add that into genesis as well.
Thanks for that,
MicWit
Well, K3B is nice but it’s definitely not a tool for DVD Video creation. It’s data oriented… although this might change, it’s going to be awhile…
DVDstyler does have some promise, but try it before you say cool it is. 
It ain’t the most stable piece of coding out there. Doesn’t do audio either. Still, if you don’t mind a little pre-planning and multiplexing in the first place, it does generate menus for you. IF it doesn’t crash.
LOL I hate to say it but those bundled programs like DVD Factory are it for ease and speed. And if you haven’t seen Pinnacle’s Studio 10.5, you’ll agree that $50 goes a lot farther here than any other authoring program you’ve seen. (It’s one of those apps that makes linux guys want to reboot into XP.)
No I was referring to a certain tactic tracking registry changes that trialware embed for timing out their demos… someone not willing to spend the money might decide to reset their trial period, as it were. And it’s a better tactic than just using a pirated key, because getting tired of having to do this, maybe they’ll remember they should pay for it now.
You’ll find what you need here:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools?listuser=&orderby=Type&s=2#2
This one is my fav:
http://www.videohelp.com/~gfd/index.html
You’re looking for qdvdauthor. (Linux only, if you’re on windows then good luck)
Was somewhat surprised to read someone actually recommending a Pinnacle product, esp. Studio. All I gotta say is: “buyer beware”. (Its an app with promise: great features and an awesome interface, 'cept it just won’t run. “Promises” is about all you get for your $. Stick with Adobe or Sony.)
I worked with Pinacle studios 10.5, except numerous crash, project lost, bad capture quality, enormous system requirement and almost no choice of encoding this piece of software can cut video and audio… :rolleyes:
In the end The CVS version of Blender with FFMPEG was more stable, easier and faster to work with. I was doing capture with Virtualdub.
The stock K3b in SUSE is purposely broken for legal reasons. Use the one from here http://packman.links2linux.org/