Using the tovid GUI :simple ( tovidgui -s )

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The tovid GUI:simple (tovidgui -s , or makemenugui) is one of the 2 user-friendly faces of tovid. (the other is tovid GUI:fancy (tovidgui -f , or todiscgui). From this GUI, you can layout, encode, and burn a VCD, SVCD, or DVD with menus and videos. The GUI is primarily a front-end for the command-line interface components of makexml, makemenu and makedvd/makesvcd; aside from minor interactive features, the GUI cannot do anything the command-line tools cannot do. If you prefer to use a command-line interface, you may wish to skip to Using the tovid command-line.

[edit] Features and capabilities

Simple three-step process to video disc authoring
Discs may have a single menu linking to several videos, or a two-level hierarchy of menus (top-level menu linking to several other menus, each linking to several videos)
Disc layout tree allows easy editing of the disc navigation structure
Menu background, audio clip, text colors, font, and alignment are configurable (see the makemenu documentation for a tip on how to maximize the number of available fonts)
Video resolution, aspect, bitrate, and other options are configurable

[edit] Usage

Assuming you have installed the tovid suite to your path (see the installation instructions above), all you need to do is execute tovidgui -s. This GUI will not work properly unless you have installed the suite to your path. The tovid GUI:simple has no command-line options at this time.

[edit] How it works

The tovid GUI:simple, as currently designed, operates on a simple notion: You provide video files, and optionally provide a background image or audio clip for each menu. The GUI performs all the necessary conversion, and creates an (S)VCD or DVD:

If you are interested in knowing more behind-the-scenes details, see Using the tovid command-line.

[edit] Graphical tour

Following is a brief tour of the tovid GUI:simple and how to use it. At present, this GUI is designed with a relatively simple task in mind: Create a video disc, using a bunch of videos that you provide. The GUI handles all the necessary conversion (using tovid), menu creation (using makemenu), and disc authoring (using makexml).

The documentation and screenshots that follow have not been updated since the release of tovid version 0.18a in December 2004. Sorry for the obsolescence! These screenshots were taken using tovidgui.py version 0.18a, running under XFCE 4.2 with the XFCE-light theme and default window manager style. If you'd like to help update these screenshots, please contact wapcaplet.

[edit] Startup screen

When you first start the tovid GUI:simple, you will see a screen something like this:

The Disc layout tree on the left-hand side represents the layout of your disc. It will grow as you begin to add menus and videos. In the Disc options panel to the right, you can choose what sort of disc you want to make. If you have a DVD-recordable drive, you can create DVDs; if you have a CD-recordable drive, you can create VCDs and SVCDs.

Also in the Disc options panel, you can choose a working directory to use for temporary files needed during encoding. This directory should have enough space to encode all the videos, so be sure to pick a directory with several gigabytes available, especially if you are creating a large DVD disc.

In the Disc layout tree, you can edit the title of an item by clicking on it. Click on the title next to the disc icon if you want to change the title of the disc.

When you are satisfied with the options you have chosen here, select the Add menu button to begin adding content to the disc. A menu is necessary in order to navigate the disc, so you must add a menu before going any further. You can always come back to this screen by selecting the disc icon in the tree.

[edit] Adding a menu

Proceed with disc creation by selecting the Add menu button. When you add a menu, you will see a new screen something like this:

When a menu is selected in the Disc layout tree, the encoding options relevant to that menu are shown in the Menu options panel to the right. Once again, you can click on the title of the menu in the tree (next to the menu icon) to edit the menu's title.

In the Menu options panel, you can choose an image to be shown in the background of the menu, and an audio clip to be played while the menu is displayed. If you do not choose a background image or audio clip, a default background will be used, and no sound will be played while the menu is shown. Here, you can also configure the font, alignment, and color of items listed in the menu.

Now that you have a menu, you can add some videos to the disc by selecting the Add video(s) button.

The Add slide(s) button will be used in the future for adding slideshows to a disc. This feature is (still) disabled in current releases.

[edit] Adding videos

When you select Add video(s), a file chooser will be displayed that you can use to select one or more videos to add under the selected menu. After adding some videos, the screen looks something like this:

File:Gui videos added.png

Videos are listed in the tree with a film-strip icon next to them. Once again, you can click their titles to edit them; initially, the title of each video is the same as its filename. You'll notice the Menu options panel now displays a list of titles shown on that menu; the selected font, alignment, and color will apply to these titles when they are displayed on the final menu.

[edit] Multiple menus

If you have a lot of videos, you may want to divide your disc up into several sub-menus. To do this, just select Add menu again. If you do, the layout tree will change to look like the following:

Notice that a "Main menu" has appeared above the two untitled menus. This main menu is used to navigate to the other menus. You can put as many videos as you like under each menu. You can change the font, color, and background of the main menu just like you can for other menus; the difference is that the main menu links to other menus, rather than videos. If you want to use the same font, alignment, background, and colors for all the menus on your disc, choose Use these settings for all menus.

This button will copy the current settings to all the menus on the disc. The main menu links to each of the sub-menus below it, and each sub-menu will automatically include a "Back" link that returns to the main menu. Regardless of how many menus you add, the first menu that is listed in the Disc layout tree will be the first one you see when you play the disc.

[edit] Video options

Now that some videos have been added, you can decide how you want to encode them. When you select a video in the tree, the Video options panel is displayed, showing all the configuration options that apply to that video:

The output resolution for each video depends on the disc format you have chosen; certain resolutions are not available with certain formats. If you don't like the available video resolutions, you can go back and change the disc format by clicking on the disc icon in the tree. You can also choose an aspect ratio to use for the video; widescreen formats will be letterboxed if necessary, to display correctly on your TV.

If you want to, you can also adjust the video and audio bitrates. The default values are usually reasonable, so you can leave these alone if you aren't sure what bitrate to use. Finally, you can enable additional options such as audio normalization (useful if the audio is too loud or too quiet), low-quality video (if you want faster encoding at the expense of quality), or video deinterlacing (if the source video was recorded from interlaced broadcast or VHS).

To use the same settings for all the videos on the disc, select the Use these settings for all videos button. The currently-selected resolution, aspect ratio, bitrates and other options will be applied to all videos in the disc layout tree.

You can use the Move up, Move down, and Remove buttons in the layout tree to position elements where you want them or remove them from the disc. When you are satisfied with the layout of your disc, select the Next: Encoding setup button to proceed with encoding and authoring the disc:

You will probably want to make sure all your menu and video titles are the way you want them before proceeding, so double-check to be sure there are no more "Untitled" items in the tree. But don't worry--you can come back to this screen if you click the button by accident.

[edit] Encoding everything

When you select Next: Encoding setup, you will be taken to a new panel showing a log window of command output:

Select Next: Begin encoding to start everything running. If you have selected many videos, this step may take several hours. The log output will be updated regularly to keep you informed about the encoding progress. When it is done, the next step is to create the disc image by authoring the final disc structure.

[edit] Creating the disc image

In the 0.18a preview release of the tovid GUI, you must do this step by hand. The GUI will inform you when the XML file is ready to be authored; if you are making a VCD or SVCD, you need to use vcdxbuild to author the disc, using a command like vcdxbuild /path/to/output.xml. If you're using any of the DVD formats, you must use dvdauthor to author it, using a command like:

$ dvdauthor -x /path/to/output.xml

The GUI will tell you the full path name of the XML file.

The final release of 0.18 will at least have authoring capability, but it may still be necessary to burn the disc by hand using cdrecord, K3B, etc.

[edit] Development screenshots

GUI development is progressing steadily, and the above screenshots may not exactly resemble what you see in your GUI. This tour will be updated periodically as the functionality of the GUI grows, but due to the time-consuming nature of putting together updated screenshots, this tour may not be updated for every new GUI release.

This section shows several screenshots from the development version of the tovid GUI:simple (currently version 0.18), with a short description of what is shown on the screen.

File:Gui devel guide panel thumb.png

Guide panel. This is a new help system that has been implemented to aid the user in getting from one step to the next. The guide panel is a long skinny box of text that describes what the current task in the GUI is, and what you might want to do next. This panel makes the GUI take up significantly more screen space, so a new View menu has been added, which includes the option to hide/show the guide panel. This approach was chosen because it offers great possibilities for a very convenient complete help system. In future versions, this panel could be functionally enhanced, interactive (with hypertext links to related topics) and searchable. It will more closely resemble the navigation panel of a standard Windows help dialog, and will consist of formatted text, images, etc. written in HTML.

The advantage this has over a traditional help system, with its own separate dialogs, is reduced window maintenance. Whenever I'm browsing help, I'm usually trying to do something with the program at the same time. This way, I don't have to manually size the help and main GUI windows, arrange them side-by-side, etc. It's already right there, and designed for optimal presentation of help and GUI side-by-side.

Doing this would almost certainly require splitting the GUI up into many dependent files; the HTML used for such a help system needs to be formatted specifically so wxWidgets can use it, and would consist of several separate files. These would most sensibly need to be installed in your /usr/local/share/doc or a similar location, which would mean the tovid installer would need updating, and almost certainly a user-level configuration file would need to be saved (so the GUI knows where to find the documentation files).

So, for now, the guide panel is simply a few paragraphs of text, hard-coded into the GUI code. But it's a good start, and it has many possibilities!

[edit] Future plans

A number of additional features are planned for the tovid GUI. Among the things I have in mind (more or less in order of priority):

A built-in help system.
Slide-show capability. This would require a makexml implementation, if DVD slideshows are to be allowed.
Front-ends to postproc and idvid
"Estimated disk space left" meter on the disc layout panel. This would be a horizontal bar that fills up as you add videos to the disc; the required size for each video would be estimated to give the user an idea of when there is no more space. User will be warned if maximum space is exceeded.
Previewing items on the disc, including menus, videos, and slideshows.
When browsing for images, an image browser that shows thumbnails of each image, to make finding desired slides or background images easier
Capability to add extra audio/video tracks to a video. This would allow producing discs with multiple camera angles, or multiple audio tracks including translations, commentary, etc. This would have to be implemented in tovid itself, also.
Capability to add subtitles (as a subtitle stream) to videos. This would also require a tovid implementation first.
Capability to add chapter breaks to videos, perhaps in conjunction with the video previewing capability. This would require a makexml implementation.
Drag-n-drop for adding/rearranging videos/slides to the disc layout tree.
Capability to save/load disc layouts in progress; possibly in conjunction with this, a capability to interrupt/resume the disc encoding process.