What's wrong with tovid
From Tovid Wiki
In an effort to invite hard criticism, this page has been created for listing gripes and annoyances, or constructive nitpicking, of anything in the tovid suite.
On the other hand, if you've found a problem or error in tovid, please report a bug instead.
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[edit] Disk Usage
When you launch tovidgui from the main menu in Gnome, it dumps huge output files into your home directory, and not even into a ~/.tovid/ dir, but right into ~/. It also appears to dump some files into /tmp. For many apps this wouldn't be a big deal, but when you're dealing with huge video files, the app must allow the user to specify the working directory. It's not safe to just assume that every user will have say ~5 GB free in their home and/or tmp directories.
[edit] Interface
What's wrong with the interface, command-line options, or GUI design?
Just started using Tovid via the gui (version 0.28 with Ubuntu Dapper) and it is brilliant, but a handful of minor niggles:
Also, I wanted to place a launcher on my desktop to launch tovidgui. However, when I tried the application attempts to use my home directory (which doesn't have that much space) to store the temporary files needed when creating the mpgs for the DVD. I have to cd into a directory that has lots of available space and then launching tovid from the command line instead. Ideally, tovid should probably default to attempt to use the same directory for the temporary files as output directory.
It would be nice if the GUI would allow for the possibility that all the videos it's dealing with are already encoded. Or to put it simply, the GUI should allow you to skip the encoding of videos while still constructing the menu.
I wanted to create an pal dvd image from an xvid-file. so I stared todvdgui and created the menu and than went to step 2. Everything worked fine, and the mpg was created. no I went to Step3 and said Author Disc structur, and not the strukcure was created, but the file was recompiled but this time not to pal but to ntsc, so it seems that there is an error in the parameters :-(
It would be nice if there was a "Play all videos" option in the menu. I have to go in and hack the xml by hand now get it to work right. I ruined quite a few DVDs trying to figure out how to do it too.
There does not seem a way to make 16:9 text menus, everything I do is 16:9, making 4:3 menus seems odd. I accept that they just stretch out anyway.
There is no concept of saving a project. I agree with the skip encoded files bit wholeheartedly and the temp directory. Though it should be a preferences option. There is also no estimation of finished size. You can throw in a few videos and wind up with an impossible to burn image that you don't find out until it fails to burn. There is no information about the videos available either such as duration.
Agree with all the above. Also, there should be an "Abort encoding" button that allows to stop the encoding process. At the very least, encoding should stop when the GUI is closed.
Is there an option to create a DVD without a menu? You can on the command line, but not with this GUI.
- The GUI doesn't fit correctly on my monitor. I'm running the monitor at 1280 x 768, but the vertical size of the GUI is way too big. I shrink it down so I can see the entire window, but I see that some buttons and text are cut off at the bottom, but there is no slide bar or anything to get to those.
[edit] Memory Usage
(This is in the Menu creating part of tovid (makemenuu)) There is a bug in convert (ImageMagick) that causes tons of memory to be consumed. With 1.5GB of memory, it consumes 70% before crashing. When it increases, the system immediately starts swapping memory. Then convert crashes. (For my specific computer, it won't crash, but freezes while swapping memory, and later returns to normal, if no other process had a memory leak.)
A suggestion is to process 200-400 frames at a time, and after processing, combine the whole menu together.
Some other evidence of convert's problems: [1] System is Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, on Acer laptop, 1.5GB mem.
[edit] Coding style
So what's wrong with the code? Doesn't it make sense? Isn't it totally obvious?
