6 ms·

DVDStyler is a cross-platform free DVD authoring application (2021)

120 points by brudgers 4y ago

wildzzz 4y ago
Oh good, the perfect software for making DVDs of my aXXo XviD-encoded movies I got off of demonoid so I can watch them on my bedroom PS2. Wait, what year is it?
- RajT88 4y ago
  It's also hosted on SourceForge
  - kazinator 4y ago
    That doesn't narrow it down very well, but if you mention MySpace, we're in January 2001, ± 13 m (confidence interval 90%).
  - throwaway8689 4y ago
    Who report over 10,000 downloads last week. I used this years ago but can't see much use for it now.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  What shocks me is that many TV shows will still get released on DVD but not Blu-Ray. I understand there is still a market for DVDs, but any collector in a first world country probably wants nothing to do with a DVD of a show that aired in 2022.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
I tried to recreate some DVD menus as a website a few years ago (shameless link, it's quite rough: https://dvd-rom.netlify.app/info https://dvd-rom.netlify.app/info https://github.com/padraigfl/dvd-menu https://github.com/padraigfl/dvd-menu ). Was sorta disappointing to see how hard it was to get a lot of the older software for making DVD menus working (especially ones that interpreted existing DVDs). Wound up having to manually figure out a lot of configurations. I guess as a format it was fairly loose and a lot of the more ambitious DVD menus were doing lots of crazy stuff they weren't really meant to do. Even with almost everything I looked up online leading to threads from 15+ years ago, that was still a lot better than what I could find about how Blu Rays worked the time my PS3's blu ray player stopped working because I put in a new BluRay (from what I gathered the new BluRay made the drive install some new DRM stuff or something??)
- toast0 4y ago
  > from what I gathered the new BluRay made the drive install some new DRM stuff or something?? IIUC, the drives authenticate the player applications by keys, and the discs include a list of blacklisted keys to update in the drive rom. But I'm surprised the PS3 player would have gotten blacklisted? Did it work again after a ps3 system update?
  - JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
    Update didn't fix it but I figured out some workaround eventually; think it was basically the same process used for installing a new BluRay drive. I seriously doubt it would've happened with an unmodded PS3 to be fair This was a 2019 BluRay going into a PS3 Slim with modded firmware from 2016 that probably hadn't a BluRay video newer than about 2012 in it before.
- dylan604 4y ago
  DVD menus was a bit of a misnomer. Menus were just stylized videos or still images. DVD programming took place in Pre/Post/Cell flags, and you could only have a limited number of commands per flag (I'm thinking 16 per, but it's been a really long time). The actual movie content could be a menu as well, and was actually a common technique for special/hidden features The buttons were just hot spots. Each hot spot had to be linked (sometimes it was even done intelligently) to each other so that the up/down/left/right buttons on the remote worked. lots of fun there too. hidden features were often found through pressing a button sequence. We once did a Contra homage with an up/up/down/down/left/right/enter sequence to get to an easter egg video to a gag reel.
  - JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
    Thanks for the info! Yep, they seemed fairly basic from what I could see. I think I tried to create a data model that roughly reflected how they worked before reading up on anything and it was close enough to correct. Never heard about button sequences being a possibility! does that mean the menus were tracking the sequence of keys inputted or you structured menus in a way that allowed sequences to work (e.g. tons of spots at the end of a menu that all just overlap so the user doesn't notice)?
notorandit 4y ago
DVD? In 2023? Is this an archaeology-related piece?
- DanTheManPR 4y ago
  It's old tech, for sure, but it's what my parents still use. I occasionally will burn a DVD of some video I've shot for them to watch.
- cryptonector 4y ago
  "what's a DVD?"
- mbork_pl 4y ago
  I watch an old-ish tv series. I buy used DVDs and rip them to watch on my computer. Now I physically own them, and no clown company can suddenly decide I no longer can watch them. I don't think there is an easy/legal/cheap alternative to that, in 2000 as well as in 2023.
  - notorandit 4y ago
    You can also rip from streams. Can't you?
  - mxuribe 4y ago
    I'm slowly but surely beginning to buy DVDs of my favorite movies...Because I'm so tired of having streaming services remove them!
    - EricE 4y ago
      Or edit them to "update for modern audiences". Gah.
1970-01-01 4y ago
DVDStyler is from 2004. See changelog for details: https://sourceforge.net/p/dvdstyler/DVDStyler/ci/master/tree/ChangeLog https://sourceforge.net/p/dvdstyler/DVDStyler/ci/master/tree...
anthk 4y ago
I'l read it later, after setting up KDE3 to the theme I like and finishing up some Slashdot threads.
wingerlang 4y ago
Interesting how consistently active the forum seems, going from 2004 until today.
jszymborski 4y ago
I remember using DVDFlick[0] to author DVDs for ages before I found DVDStyler. DVDFlick was written in vb6 if I recall and was glacially slow. But it was totally free and that was hard to come by at the time (or at least for pre-teen me) [0] https://dvdflick.net/ https://dvdflick.net/
- wildzzz 4y ago
  Same, my family PC at the time had no good way to hook up to any TV in the house but I did own a big spindle of DVDs and had a PS2 in my room that could play them. I'd make authored copies of DVDs using DVDFlick for me and my friends so I could watch R rated movies and TV shows away from my parents' eyes. I even had an extra long audio cable I'd run to my bed so I could watch late into the school night.
dylan604 4y ago
We used to program DVD like QT movie experiences. You used to be able to program Flash buttons and switch between QT streams/tracks within the file. We were building multi-angle videos that would switch with buttons overlaid onto the screen. Switching audio streams, subtitles, etc were all possible. We'd compress down to MP4s for online distribution. This was well before streaming as we know it now. I think the term of art back then was progressive downloading. If you can find the old BMW series with Clive Owen, they were pretty good. You can probably find the videos on YT or whatever, but finding the actual QT MOV files would be the better example of showing how these were similar to a DVD experience With download speeds of today, that still seems like a viable format and I was always saddened that it didn't take off. Obviously, Flash being involved would be an issue today. However, there was another package that came out in the early 2000s that was its own interactive authoring package that did the same thing only without Flash. We worked with the developer generating some content for them to use and it worked well enough. It was all within the MP4 spec, but again, it just never took off. Our test content had 3 separate videos that if watched individually all told a story. There were 3 characters that appeared in each video at various times. However, the interactivity of the format would allow you to switch which stream you were watching to follow one character between videos which would tell a different story than just watching them all. All of that old guy shares unrelated story to say that I think this kind of format would still be cool vs DVDs. But seeing it's the older generation that finds the ease of a physical DVD vs using a computer makes it understandable why a cheap authoring package like this might still find use
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Netlify has something similar, interactive episodes of a show where the viewer selects what should happen next.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    That's interesting as that is not what my understanding of what Netlify did/does. Do they have their own content arm as well?
    - 4y ago
kypro 4y ago
Man, I used to burn random DVDs for friends and family all the time back in the 00s. I don't remember if this is the software I used to make the menus, but it looked a lot like this. I also brought some DVD labels too so I could make and print my own labels and stick them on the back of the DVDs I made. Never did this for illegal stuff as far as I remember, but for videos I made for friends and family it was a fun way to share stuff back before we had super fast internet and simple file sharing tools. I think the last DVD I burnt was in 2013. I sent it with a letter to my girlfriend while she was traveling. That may have been the last time I used a disc.
illwrks 4y ago
To add a positive spin on this ancient software, over COVID several elderly relatives passed away either due to age or I'll health. Due to COVID you couldn't attend but there were live streams of the services, I used ffmpeg, or YouTube-dl or plain old screen recording with an audio patch to record their funeral services. I then used the dvdstyler to turn those recordings into DVD's which I posted to relatives who were not tech savvy. It took time but provided closure and in a weird way a therapeutic. +1 for dvdstyler.
- spookie 4y ago
  My condolences. These have not been kind years.
- easton 4y ago
  My solution was much dumber, my grandma had an iPad she had no idea how to use, I put a shortcut on there that grabbed the RSS feed for YouTube for her church and put it into a menu she could tap and open the video for. Still works though :)
pastorhudson 4y ago
This software is great. During Covid we would pre-record our church service and then live stream it Sunday. We would use dvd styler to burn dvd’s and deliver them to our members who weren’t able to livestream.
nirav72 4y ago
I remember when I first bought a DVD burner back in 1997. Did lot of looking around for a affordable consumer level DVD authoring tool that would let me create custom menus and chapter points. At the time, there wasn't anything free or cheap. Other than getting it from a warez scene at the time. Even those were professional grade tools that had a huge learning curve.
paradox460 4y ago
This reopened an old wound, what Apple did to DVD Studio Pro. It withered and died with the rest of Apple's pro software suite, and has nothing to replace it. I heard that FCPX can author DVDs, but they're pretty bare-bones and ugly. DVD Studio Pro was powerful enough you could author professional content pretty easily. Had pretty comprehensive programming tools, and was a lot easier to use than Adobe Encore
- dylan604 4y ago
  I remember when DVD Studio Pro came out, and the industry was supposed to go through a paradigm shift. I took a call at the DVD shop I worked at, and provided the requested quote to the person on the phone. They laughed out loud at the price and said that DVDSP was going to put my company out of business within a year. Multiple years later and several awards later, the company was still rocking and never once used DVDSP. What we did do though is specialize in taking over jobs from people that could not complete a job in DVDSP and would come to us to save them. More than once, it would be from someone that called for a quote, didn't like the price, went some where else, and then came crawling back. The original quote was no longer valid as it was now considered a rush job. It was a great tool for wedding videos /s Any abstraction layer authoring tool removed half of the working space to hold the abstraction. This meant that projects that needed it were just impossible to do, and a lot of the people that only ever used DVSP didn't really know there were limitations until they ran head first into them.
PointyFluff 4y ago
[dead]

120 points by brudgers 4y ago

Oh good, the perfect software for making DVDs of my aXXo XviD-encoded movies I got off of demonoid so I can watch them on my bedroom PS2. Wait, what year is it?

RajT88 4y ago
It's also hosted on SourceForge
- kazinator 4y ago
  That doesn't narrow it down very well, but if you mention MySpace, we're in January 2001, ± 13 m (confidence interval 90%).
- throwaway8689 4y ago
  Who report over 10,000 downloads last week. I used this years ago but can't see much use for it now.
babypuncher 4y ago
What shocks me is that many TV shows will still get released on DVD but not Blu-Ray. I understand there is still a market for DVDs, but any collector in a first world country probably wants nothing to do with a DVD of a show that aired in 2022.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

JansjoFromIkea 4y ago

I tried to recreate some DVD menus as a website a few years ago (shameless link, it's quite rough: https://dvd-rom.netlify.app/info https://dvd-rom.netlify.app/info https://github.com/padraigfl/dvd-menu https://github.com/padraigfl/dvd-menu ). Was sorta disappointing to see how hard it was to get a lot of the older software for making DVD menus working (especially ones that interpreted existing DVDs). Wound up having to manually figure out a lot of configurations. I guess as a format it was fairly loose and a lot of the more ambitious DVD menus were doing lots of crazy stuff they weren't really meant to do. Even with almost everything I looked up online leading to threads from 15+ years ago, that was still a lot better than what I could find about how Blu Rays worked the time my PS3's blu ray player stopped working because I put in a new BluRay (from what I gathered the new BluRay made the drive install some new DRM stuff or something??)

toast0 4y ago
> from what I gathered the new BluRay made the drive install some new DRM stuff or something?? IIUC, the drives authenticate the player applications by keys, and the discs include a list of blacklisted keys to update in the drive rom. But I'm surprised the PS3 player would have gotten blacklisted? Did it work again after a ps3 system update?
- JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
  Update didn't fix it but I figured out some workaround eventually; think it was basically the same process used for installing a new BluRay drive. I seriously doubt it would've happened with an unmodded PS3 to be fair This was a 2019 BluRay going into a PS3 Slim with modded firmware from 2016 that probably hadn't a BluRay video newer than about 2012 in it before.
dylan604 4y ago
DVD menus was a bit of a misnomer. Menus were just stylized videos or still images. DVD programming took place in Pre/Post/Cell flags, and you could only have a limited number of commands per flag (I'm thinking 16 per, but it's been a really long time). The actual movie content could be a menu as well, and was actually a common technique for special/hidden features The buttons were just hot spots. Each hot spot had to be linked (sometimes it was even done intelligently) to each other so that the up/down/left/right buttons on the remote worked. lots of fun there too. hidden features were often found through pressing a button sequence. We once did a Contra homage with an up/up/down/down/left/right/enter sequence to get to an easter egg video to a gag reel.
- JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
  Thanks for the info! Yep, they seemed fairly basic from what I could see. I think I tried to create a data model that roughly reflected how they worked before reading up on anything and it was close enough to correct. Never heard about button sequences being a possibility! does that mean the menus were tracking the sequence of keys inputted or you structured menus in a way that allowed sequences to work (e.g. tons of spots at the end of a menu that all just overlap so the user doesn't notice)?

notorandit 4y ago

DVD? In 2023? Is this an archaeology-related piece?

DanTheManPR 4y ago
It's old tech, for sure, but it's what my parents still use. I occasionally will burn a DVD of some video I've shot for them to watch.
cryptonector 4y ago
"what's a DVD?"
mbork_pl 4y ago
I watch an old-ish tv series. I buy used DVDs and rip them to watch on my computer. Now I physically own them, and no clown company can suddenly decide I no longer can watch them. I don't think there is an easy/legal/cheap alternative to that, in 2000 as well as in 2023.
- notorandit 4y ago
  You can also rip from streams. Can't you?
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I'm slowly but surely beginning to buy DVDs of my favorite movies...Because I'm so tired of having streaming services remove them!
  - EricE 4y ago
    Or edit them to "update for modern audiences". Gah.

1970-01-01 4y ago

DVDStyler is from 2004. See changelog for details: https://sourceforge.net/p/dvdstyler/DVDStyler/ci/master/tree/ChangeLog https://sourceforge.net/p/dvdstyler/DVDStyler/ci/master/tree...

anthk 4y ago

I'l read it later, after setting up KDE3 to the theme I like and finishing up some Slashdot threads.

wingerlang 4y ago

Interesting how consistently active the forum seems, going from 2004 until today.

jszymborski 4y ago

I remember using DVDFlick[0] to author DVDs for ages before I found DVDStyler. DVDFlick was written in vb6 if I recall and was glacially slow. But it was totally free and that was hard to come by at the time (or at least for pre-teen me) [0] https://dvdflick.net/ https://dvdflick.net/

wildzzz 4y ago
Same, my family PC at the time had no good way to hook up to any TV in the house but I did own a big spindle of DVDs and had a PS2 in my room that could play them. I'd make authored copies of DVDs using DVDFlick for me and my friends so I could watch R rated movies and TV shows away from my parents' eyes. I even had an extra long audio cable I'd run to my bed so I could watch late into the school night.

dylan604 4y ago

We used to program DVD like QT movie experiences. You used to be able to program Flash buttons and switch between QT streams/tracks within the file. We were building multi-angle videos that would switch with buttons overlaid onto the screen. Switching audio streams, subtitles, etc were all possible. We'd compress down to MP4s for online distribution. This was well before streaming as we know it now. I think the term of art back then was progressive downloading. If you can find the old BMW series with Clive Owen, they were pretty good. You can probably find the videos on YT or whatever, but finding the actual QT MOV files would be the better example of showing how these were similar to a DVD experience With download speeds of today, that still seems like a viable format and I was always saddened that it didn't take off. Obviously, Flash being involved would be an issue today. However, there was another package that came out in the early 2000s that was its own interactive authoring package that did the same thing only without Flash. We worked with the developer generating some content for them to use and it worked well enough. It was all within the MP4 spec, but again, it just never took off. Our test content had 3 separate videos that if watched individually all told a story. There were 3 characters that appeared in each video at various times. However, the interactivity of the format would allow you to switch which stream you were watching to follow one character between videos which would tell a different story than just watching them all. All of that old guy shares unrelated story to say that I think this kind of format would still be cool vs DVDs. But seeing it's the older generation that finds the ease of a physical DVD vs using a computer makes it understandable why a cheap authoring package like this might still find use

lloydatkinson 4y ago
Netlify has something similar, interactive episodes of a show where the viewer selects what should happen next.
- dylan604 4y ago
  That's interesting as that is not what my understanding of what Netlify did/does. Do they have their own content arm as well?
  - 4y ago

kypro 4y ago

Man, I used to burn random DVDs for friends and family all the time back in the 00s. I don't remember if this is the software I used to make the menus, but it looked a lot like this. I also brought some DVD labels too so I could make and print my own labels and stick them on the back of the DVDs I made. Never did this for illegal stuff as far as I remember, but for videos I made for friends and family it was a fun way to share stuff back before we had super fast internet and simple file sharing tools. I think the last DVD I burnt was in 2013. I sent it with a letter to my girlfriend while she was traveling. That may have been the last time I used a disc.

illwrks 4y ago

To add a positive spin on this ancient software, over COVID several elderly relatives passed away either due to age or I'll health. Due to COVID you couldn't attend but there were live streams of the services, I used ffmpeg, or YouTube-dl or plain old screen recording with an audio patch to record their funeral services. I then used the dvdstyler to turn those recordings into DVD's which I posted to relatives who were not tech savvy. It took time but provided closure and in a weird way a therapeutic. +1 for dvdstyler.

spookie 4y ago
My condolences. These have not been kind years.
easton 4y ago
My solution was much dumber, my grandma had an iPad she had no idea how to use, I put a shortcut on there that grabbed the RSS feed for YouTube for her church and put it into a menu she could tap and open the video for. Still works though :)

pastorhudson 4y ago

This software is great. During Covid we would pre-record our church service and then live stream it Sunday. We would use dvd styler to burn dvd’s and deliver them to our members who weren’t able to livestream.

nirav72 4y ago

I remember when I first bought a DVD burner back in 1997. Did lot of looking around for a affordable consumer level DVD authoring tool that would let me create custom menus and chapter points. At the time, there wasn't anything free or cheap. Other than getting it from a warez scene at the time. Even those were professional grade tools that had a huge learning curve.

paradox460 4y ago

This reopened an old wound, what Apple did to DVD Studio Pro. It withered and died with the rest of Apple's pro software suite, and has nothing to replace it. I heard that FCPX can author DVDs, but they're pretty bare-bones and ugly. DVD Studio Pro was powerful enough you could author professional content pretty easily. Had pretty comprehensive programming tools, and was a lot easier to use than Adobe Encore

dylan604 4y ago
I remember when DVD Studio Pro came out, and the industry was supposed to go through a paradigm shift. I took a call at the DVD shop I worked at, and provided the requested quote to the person on the phone. They laughed out loud at the price and said that DVDSP was going to put my company out of business within a year. Multiple years later and several awards later, the company was still rocking and never once used DVDSP. What we did do though is specialize in taking over jobs from people that could not complete a job in DVDSP and would come to us to save them. More than once, it would be from someone that called for a quote, didn't like the price, went some where else, and then came crawling back. The original quote was no longer valid as it was now considered a rush job. It was a great tool for wedding videos /s Any abstraction layer authoring tool removed half of the working space to hold the abstraction. This meant that projects that needed it were just impossible to do, and a lot of the people that only ever used DVSP didn't really know there were limitations until they ran head first into them.

PointyFluff 4y ago

[dead]