tovid

The tovid suite is a collection of several components, each specialized for a certain task. All suite components are written in plain-text scripting languages, making modification and patching relatively easy. The suite is released under the GNU General Public License.

Developer comments

tovid was born in May 2004 as a simple one-line script for converting video to VCD format. I had found that it was not terribly easy to remember the required commands and command-line options for converting video from one format to another, and getting the output video to be compliant with a strict standard like VCD was not trivial.

The need to convert and encode video became more urgent when my wife and I purchased a DVD-RW drive. Suddenly, the possibility of creating our own DVDs was a reality. Unfortunately, it appeared to be quite difficult to find software that could reliably convert from one video format to another, particularly when the result had to strictly comply with a specific bitrate, frame rate, resolution, and encoding format. VCD, SVCD, and DVD must all be in MPEG format, at predetermined resolutions and bit rates. Even in Windows, most of the freely-available tools for video disc authoring had serious limitations when it came to converting video, if indeed they did any conversion at all—many authoring programs require videos to already be compliant with the target format.

I tried several approaches, including ffmpeg and transcode, before settling on the use of mplayer and mjpegtools. While mplayer's mencoder was not particularly well-suited to actually encoding video to MPEG format, mplayer is the most robust video player I know of for the Linux platform. It can play nearly any video you can throw at it, regardless of format. The utilities included with mjpegtools were perfect for getting MPEG format within the right parameters. Coupling the two together was fairly easy, thanks to thorough documentation. I soon had a working video converter, designed to take arbitrary video and convert it to VCD. Whenever I needed to convert to a different format, I just edited the script. I soon had a small collection of conversion scripts with names like todvd, tovcd, and tosvcd.

The desire for additional flexibility eventually prompted me to write one script with a choice of output formats. Once I had my script into more-or-less usable form, I posted it to LinuxQuestions.org. Soon after that, I was asked by a LinuxQuestions moderator if I'd be interested in posting the script in the LinuxAnswers section; I did, and soon received some feedback by other people who were using the script. With additional interest, I decided that it was worthwhile setting up a SourceForge.net project. Interest has continued to grow, and there have been several official releases, each with new features and bugfixes based on feedback from other users, and from my own continued use of it.

What is new in this release:

• This version features a new GUI for making multiple titlesets with tovid.
• It includes many updates and fixes for changes in the backends like ffmpeg and dvdauthor as well as numerous bugfixes.
• New libavfilter features from ffmpeg have been implemented, so the -quick-menu option now works again with a recent enough libavfilter and ffmpeg (0.8).
• Several new options have also been added, including the ability to use your own arbitrary images for thumbnail links.
• PNG is now used generally as an intermediary format instead of JPEG, resulting in improved picture quality.

What is new in version 0.32:

• It has been more than two years since the last release of tovid. I (Eric/wapcaplet) have been on a long break from development, to raise my son (now 3 years old), get a real job, and generally tend to more pressing matters. The Python rewrite of tovid still hasn't left the ground, there are a bunch of unresolved defects, I let the tovid.org domain lapse out of my hands and into those of some Russian dude who won't reply to his email, and in general things are a big mess.
• So, in an effort to get things moving again, we're putting this release out there. If things are broken or confusing, that's what the next release is for. After two years, I figure a half-assed release is better than no release at all.
• Starting with this release, all of tovid's executable scripts are now called via a single frontend script, simply called tovid, which takes as its first argument the "command" you want to run. For example, instead of running the todisc script directly, you run it with tovid disc. Here are the new command names:
• tovid gui
• Was todiscgui. Run the graphical interface to making discs.
• tovid mpg
• Was tovid. Encode videos to MPEG format.
• tovid disc
• Was todisc. Create a DVD with menus.
• tovid titlesets
• New. Create a DVD with multiple titlesets using the 'tovid gui' to set options.
• tovid id
• Was idvid. Identify one or more video files.
• tovid dvd
• Was makedvd. Author and/or burn a DVD.
• tovid menu
• Was makemenu. Create an MPEG menu.
• tovid vcd
• Was makevcd. Author and/or burn an (S)VCD.
• tovid xml
• Was makexml. Create DVD or (S)VCD .xml file.
• tovid postproc
• Was postproc. Post-process an MPEG video file.
• Since tovid is still predominantly bash-based, the actual executable scripts are much as they were before, except they will now be installed to a location that is not normally included in your system $PATH, such as /usr/lib/tovid.
• This change will hopefully solve a couple of problems--first, it will keep your /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin folder from being cluttered with all of tovid's auxiliary scripts, and second, it will make tovid more extensible in the future if additional commands are added.
• One consequence of this change is that the manual pages have also been merged into a single entry, man tovid. I realize that nobody likes ginormous manual pages, and this is not an ideal solution, partly because of the manpage format's general lack of readability, indexing, or inter-linking (I mean, the manpage format is like 40 years old!) This problem may be mitigated in the future by including comprehensive built-in help, or by switching to a more modern documentation format based on ReStructuredText or something similar; nothing is definite yet. For now, I'm afraid you'll just have to suck it up and do man tovid. It may not be great, but I promise it will never get as bad as mplayer's manpage.
• GUIs:
• The GUI formerly known as todiscgui is now the tovid GUI. Apologies to anyone who preferred the wxWidgets-based GUI, but that beast was just too hard to continue maintaining. It was my first real GUI, and my first real Python experience, and basically just seems old and busted to me now. If you loved it and want to resurrect it under a new project, be my guest--but I am done with it, and have no interest in continuing development of it.
• The One GUI to Rule Them All is now just called tovid gui. Run that to start the GUI interface (or use your installed desktop icon, assuming that's working). This thing has changed enormously since the 0.31 release, with too many modifications to remember or explain, but here's a very short summary:
• Pretty much every single todisc / tovid disc option is represented now
• Log window that shows the output of todisc / tovid disc as it runs, with the ability to interactively answers questions as it prompts for them
• GUI settings can be saved to a bash script, then loaded again later (note that this is not entirely working, and you will have problems with some options)
• Associative listbox controls for options that are associated one-to-one or one-to-many with the list of video files
• Font chooser shows a preview of the selected font
• Scripts:
• todisc:
• todisc now does slideshows. These can be single slideshows, multiple slideshows on one menu, or mixed videos and slideshows on the same menu. They can of course be used in titlesets as well. Additionally you can have submenus with slideshows: if -ani-submenu is used then the submenu will be an animated slideshow with transitions, else the submenu will be a static 'polaroid stack' montage of slides. The slideshows lead to a static display of slides, slide by slide.
• todisc now supports multiple cpus. By default one job for each cpu found will be run - this can be limited or increased with -jobs N. This results in a large speedup - on my athlon X2 3600 it runs 30% faster when using both processors compared to just using one. This should scale well for greater than 2 cpus as well.
• Encoding menus from images now uses ppm output and pipes, which results in less encoding steps and better quality, and better speed in many cases. Slideshows in SVN got a huge speed boost (600%) when the change to this technique was made.
• grouped files can now have submenus.
• thumb titles now go directly on the thumb image/video, allowing for multiline titles and keeping thumbs in aspect.
• submenu chapters now can have titles using '-chapter-titles'.
• You can now set the length of submenus, using -submenu-length N N N. This is particularly useful for slideshow submenus.
• Submenus can now have a background image or colour using -submenu-background or -submenu-bg-colour.
• -menu-fade now takes an optional argument, the time at which the menu start to fade in over top of the background. This means that you can use a video as a sort of 'transition' to the menu: this transition video will play/show as long as the duration you choose. Additionally, you can now use -menu-fade for a static menu. The '-transition-to-menu' option has been added for convenience: if you use this option the background will stop being animated at the exact point the thumbs finish fading in.
• -menu-fade now encodes just the images that change (animated) resulting in a speed up for faded menus.
• -button-style text now works for all arrangements. It also looks much better.
• Added -nomenu option for quick mpeg -> DVD with no menu
• Added possibility of playall button on VMGM menu
• Added 6 new thumb shapes (-thumb-shape)
• Added capability for user to supply thumb masks in $PREFIX/lib/tovid/masks or ~/.tovid/masks
• You can now use thumb shapes on the showcase image/video as well. (you can now do all effects on a showcase image/video that you can do on a video thumbnail.)
• Any makempg options can now be passed directory on the command line to todisc (they will be used by makempg if file(s) need re-encoding)
• submenus now working for grouped videos AND slideshows
• You can now use an image background for submenus, using -submenu-background.
• You can also use a background color instead, using -submenu-bg-color (-bg-color for main menu) Each submenu can have the same background, or you can use a different one for each.
• Added -grid option, which makes a second preview with a numbered grid on it to assist with options that require screen geometries
• todisc now honors WORKING_DIR variable in ~/.tovid/preferences
• todisc honors the new environment variable TOVID_WORKING_DIR
• many bug fixes were made and other changes that have been left out here. The diff to 0.31 is large: -2437 +6274
• The man pages have been updated - see 'man tovid' for details and some examples of usage.
• postproc:
• postproc had been broken because mplayer was not dumping streams properly. The script now uses ffmpeg to demux, and it is working again.