This is the official FAQ for tovid. You are encouraged to read this before posting any questions in the tovid forum. For troubleshooting, please see common tovid problems.
You can edit this FAQ right now by selecting the "Edit this page" link at the top of your screen. Have a question? Edit this page, and add it in the appropriate location (no duplicates, please). Know an answer? Please add it, and feel free to modify or improve the existing answers!
Encoding speed[]
Q. How long does it take to encode a video, and why is it so slow?
A. The default encoding method (using mplayer/mpeg2enc for video) is a fairly slow process. For DVD quality video, on an Athlon 1600 XP, encoding takes 4-5 times the length of the video (8-10 hours to encode a 2-hour movie).
Took 01:15:06 to encode a 01:44:56 video on Intel Celeron CPU 2.53GHz using ffmpeg.
(Table of encoding times needed for VCD/SVCD/DVD, for different CPU speeds--please help write one!)
tovid also supports ffmpeg encoding (see the '-ffmpeg' option in the tovid manual), which is much faster (only 1-2 hours per hour of video), but you may have trouble authoring the resulting MPEG, due to ffmpeg and/or dvdauthor limitations.
Available fonts[]
Q. What fonts can I use in tovid? (or, why do I have so few fonts to choose from when making menus from the GUI)
A. The argument given to '-font' must be one of the fonts listed by the command 'convert -list font'. Many of your installed fonts may not be available; if you want to maximize the number of fonts available to makemenu, download and run Anthony Thyssen's imagick_type_gen.pl script and run it like this:
$ imagick_type_gen.pl > ~/.magick/type.xml
If that doesn't work, try:
$ imagick_type_gen.pl > ~/.magick/type.mgk