I've posted probably too much already on the DVD authoring apps that have appeared on GOTD. Nothing's really changed too much. So maybe this will be useful?...
From the suggestions...
"Ability to REPOSITION and resize if necessary, the Video Buttons so that the background can be seen better visually"
This sort of thing is THE essence of what defines higher vs. lower quality DVD authoring software. The background will be included in a mpg2 video file, and everything else you see or add, text & shapes & graphics will be composited on top of that background. IOW you can create that background with text & graphics in any sort of graphics app, since it's just a still image that's encoded to a mpg2 video file. Now the hard parts. Every button is actually just a rectangular area. The visible changes you see when you select & then click a button are accomplished through the same overlays that are used for subtitles, & they too can be created in most any graphics app.
DVD authoring software just has to figure out a way to recognize your input, and imported graphics, & store the results in the DVD you're creating. That's a lot of extra work for the developers -- it's much simpler [& cheaper] to hard code however many choices. It's more work, just not quite as much, to achieve something in between, like letting you reposition buttons that are already there from a template, &/or choosing from more than one button highlighting option. The cost & capabilities of DVD authoring software increases with the amount of development work that's been done.
At this point some might ask about animations they've seen associated with DVD menus. Those are separate from the still image menus. You can have video clips before & after -- before the menu is displayed, &/or when the menu times out &/or the viewer clicks a button. And those clips can be in a separate cell of the same video file as the menu -- see below re: cells. When you use cells this way, the transition is smoother from the video to the menu or from the menu to whatever, another menu page or video title. The downside to that approach is that when the menu itself loops [most last 30-60 seconds] there's a longer delay before it repeats, since things are more complicated with multiple cells. Most pros then do what you'll see on most retail video DVDs -- they create duplicate menus, once with cells, one without... when the 1st copy times out it jumps to the 2nd, so then any looping happens faster & is less noticeable. How do you create those animations? Again the best way is in your editing software, though some authoring software will let you do some basic stuff -- just remember it will be lower quality than what you can achieve in editing software.
A final note on this topic... Video DVDs were meant for standard [not HD] TVs, so the subject of interlacing is relevant, *especially* with menus. It's not so much what is right for the viewing platform, but rather how the software handles creating an interlaced video from a still image. If you have the option [interlaced vs. non-interlaced], try it both ways & see what looks best with the software you're using.
"Add better editing capabilities like cutting video segments and managing chapter locations"
Editing is done in a video editor, which is much better equipped for that sort of thing. IOW you're not going to find much in current software in that regard, with one exception I'll talk about in a moment. Chapters are a bit special. Every video clip, regardless how long, is divided into cells -- there's by default 1 cell, but they can be inserted as close together as a couple of minutes without problems [I think there's a limit of 99 but I could be wrong]. Cells are really just a start & end time that you can think of as boundaries. A DVD player actually plays a playlist of cells rather than playing a video clip or title. And since the mpg2 video on DVDs is made up of I frames [complete key frames] every so often [often every 15 frames], cell boundaries have to coincide, be on a key or I frame. Any cell can also be designated a Chapter -- not every cell is a chapter, but every chapter is a cell.
Better DVD authoring software will detect exactly where an I frame occurs so you can set chapters accurately, if/when you've already got DVD spec mpg2 video. Better software might let you designate chapters in video you'll encode to mpg2, then make sure to add a I frame at that point. If neither of those things happens your chapters will vary a little bit, being placed on either side, before or after the exact point that you intended, as the software seeks the closest I frame. This can pose a problem when there's a drastic scene change at the chapter you set -- viewers will see a sometimes quite noticeable flash when they skip to that chapter, because they're seeing just enough of the prior scene to be very distracting. The moral is that if you can't control the exact I frame location, err on the side of caution & set your chapter a bit into the scene rather than at the very beginning.
Now, the reason I went through all that... Some DVD authoring apps plus most every DVD recorder will add a Lot of cells automatically. When you want to set a chapter it will use the closest cell. When you want to edit with a DVD recorder or in some software, or using PgcEdit to edit a DVD layout you already created, you remove however many cells from that DVD playlist. It's fairly quick & fairly easy, but it's not as accurate as real editing, plus since you're not really eliminating any video from the file(s), the video you cut will still count against the maximum data allowed on a DVD.
"When Sybtitle said to use Italic, then use Italic, others are Bold, Underline and Strikeout in the area of Subtitle"
DVD Subs are a bit contradictory -- AFAIK nothing but plain text is allowed by the spec, e.g. when you convert CC [which allow such things] to subs, any characteristics like italics & bold etc. are stripped out. OTOH DVD subs are basically stencils that are overlaid on the video. You can have 4 different areas or shapes defined per frame, each with its own solid color or transparency -- usually the background is transparent, the center of the letter is opaque, then you have a semi-transparent fade around the letter, then a semi-transparent shadow around that. But what the shapes are is irrelevant -- you can see this in some Anime. The problem is in finding software that will let you do such things that you can get your hands on.
"have the possibility to merge videos indispesably!"
I'm not at all sure what this person is saying, but again, editing should be done in an editor. That said, there are two variations on the theme you'll see with video DVDs... DVDs can include playlists, & they can present individual cells of a longer video file as separate titles. Both have advantages. A playlist lets you easily have different versions of a video, e.g. cut out the naughty parts, though it's more often used for special features, where you can select them individually or play them strung together, one after another. Using individual chapters/cells as separate titles can make going from one to another smoother. Every action when you're watching a video DVD also has an end action -- when the video for a menu or title or chapter/cell finishes, then something else can happen. If you have 2 videos & you don't want to re-encode, &/or when you want more flexibility, set the end action of the 1st to playing the 2nd.
That's BTW how you can add a fancy video transition from a menu to a title video -- have the menu button trigger a short transition clip, & set the end action of that clip to play the title video.
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From the comments...
"Since the WLAN and the USB sticks, i have not created any DVD in the last four years. Still valid for me, so I have no real use.""I no longer create DVDs instead I use my android tablet and connect via an HDMI port to a television, much less hassle and no loss of quality."
"How about SWF to VOB in one step?"
"this software seems to do a nice job but at the expense of recoding vob files, if you do a tv show-episodes discs for exemple.
"best software ever to make movies or tv show-episodes dvd is WOMBLE EASY DVD. they do not recode the files, the menus can look super professional and are super easy to do. it makes a dvd of tv shows in under an hour… worth a try and a keeper for sure. "
"Can I use this to combine onto one disk two DVDs (vob and ifo files)?
Will it compress the sizes if they overflow the DVD5 disk?"
You WILL LOSE some quality from transcoding/converting video -- period. As you are able, Leave the Video Alone. If you convert good to excellent quality HD video [e.g. 1080p] to smaller frame sizes you will get very good quality *when* you use a display where that HD doesn't make sense, e.g. on a tablet/cell. The mpg2 on a DVD is as capable as anything else, but it's less efficient -- there's no real advantage to putting anything that uses DVD frame sizes or smaller on a video DVD unless it's already mpg2. In that case use software that will pass through your existing DVD spec mpg2 video without re-encoding -- this used to be an issue in the earliest days of authoring software, but hasn't been for a decade, unless you use something like Aiseesoft DVD Creator, which is based on their converters & so converts everything [rather poorly as it's mpg2 is relatively lower quality].
Do Realize that bit rate = quality. Also realize that most ARM chips & similar running some version of Android, like most WiFi, limit bandwidth. Another tip is that apps like Womble's can do a great job of cut/join editing at I frames, but not always with the accompanying audio in sync -- in case of problems convert audio to wav 1st, edit, then convert audio to AC3. And yet another tip is try not to be so cheap -- the difference in price for single layer vs. dual layer DVD blanks isn't that great at all if you buy on sale. It's really not much of an issue any more. If you have a Blu-Ray player -- it's hard to buy a DVD player nowadays -- you can re-encode your video to AVC & do a BD5 [Blu-Ray on single layer DVD], and while you'll still lose quality from a re-encode, it won't be as much as reducing mpg2 bit rate to make it fit.
"However the two cannot co-exist. The earlier version was converted to “Trial”, and running it converted the new version to “Trial” too. The new installation did remove the uninstall files for the earlier version and take over some of its data directories, meaning a more complicated manual removal was required."
Most of these apps store their registration in the User files. Find them & back them up [copy them somewhere else, if only the Recycle Bin] before installing a newer version with the same title -- that way you can go back if you want.
