In my recent article on QDVDAuthor, I skipped over the task of making a videoloop for the main DVD menu. Here I’m going to show you how I did it. The goal is a short loop of video that smoothly transitions through five different video segments and back to the beginning again. The audio is shaped and lowered to make it more or less even and not so distracting (loud menus can be obnoxious if they are left running).

Daniel James is the director of the Studio 64 GNU/Linux distribution, which serves as a basis for professional music studio mixing installations, as well as an experienced writer and editor. Thus it is not surprising that he should create an excellent book on music mixing.

There are not a lot of free software options for mastering DVDs. One of the more complete solutions is QDVDAuthor, although it still has a number of rough spots. It’s a front-end to a collection of command-line free software tools that do each of the individual steps involved in going from a collection of digital video files, audio files, and images to a DVD with menus. As such, it’s quite complicated, and not as stable as some software. Still, it is a rewarding experience if you stick with it. Here I’m going to walk through creating a DVD for a collection of animated videos by my new favorite free-culture artist, Nina Paley (partly because the CC By-SA 3.0 license eliminates any questions about copying the material here, and partly because they’re pretty cool in themselves).

I was surprised and delighted to find this video presentation by one of my favorite performers, Stephen Fry, called “Happy Birthday to GNU”, on the GNU project homepage.

Posted on September 1st, in honor of GNU’s 25th anniversary, it turns out to be only the latest in a series of entries on Mr. Fry’s official blog site praising the virtues of free software.

Ok so DEMO 07 was a great show and launched some 68 different products and services and by now the Net’s abuzz with chatter about the show. You can go to the DEMO 07 site and see all the presentations and you really should check this stuff out if you want to know what’s going to be cool in the next six months on the web.

I guess my previous post was a bit premature; for shorts, I was saying then that some Free softwares for video editing on Windows were good, but had no equivalent in the Free software world. While I was not wrong stricto sensus, I hammered a few of them during the last few weeks.

Thus, I’ll now write about the various free video treatment softwares I know and the slight shift in method this entails.

You’ll see that there are strengths and weaknesses on both sides.

This entry is first a plea for help. I enjoy reading and listening to interviews with people who have interesting and exciting things to say about their passions. My attention was recently directed to a web site named Questions Please…, where Jonathan Roberts informs us he has an inside line to free software luminaries Richard Stallman, Jeremy Allison, and Jeff Waugh. So what is my plea?

Questions Please…

I discovered Virtualdub back in the days when DivX was a ripped-off Microsoft experimental beta codec. Since then, I have used it to do some small captures, but also to recover some bad quality films that could gain major improvement through a carefully weighted application of filters.

Free software isn’t found on *NIX systems alone

The useful free software you can’t do without