On Wednesday 01 December 2004 18:32, Joe Button wrote:
On Wednesday 01 Dec 2004 17:53, Ben Francis wrote:
I'm not a Java Developer. What do I do with a .jnlp file?
What I did with it was open it using /usr/java/jre1.4.2_06/javaws/javaws. I gather this is normally supplied in a .zip file as part of the Sun Java Runtime Environment, but on my Mandrake (10.1) system it seemed to be there already (after installing JRE). Try 'locate javaws' if you have trouble finding it.
I can confirm that it loaded and ran fine, but I didn't try doing anything much with it. Looks nice. Can I use it to make video DVDs? How does it compare with (say) qdvdauthor?
Joe x
As far as I know it needs Java 1.5.0; I'd be surprised if it did much with 1.4.2. On Windows it automatically goes and gets the Java update but I did that manually on my Linux system so I can't tell what might happen otherwise. Sun have added a lot of new features and included an XML parser, which the program uses to read its own config files.
I tried qdvdauthor and found it rather clunky. Plus it left bits of itself running on my system after it quit. Then I tried Varsha, a Java front-end for dvdauthor; this didn't work and there was no response from the author. I already had the photo organizer so I figured it shouldn't be too difficult to bolt another module into its GUI. That was about a month ago, so I guess it wasn't too difficult after all.
I'm assuming you have a pile of files in MPEG-2 format. If you're starting with DV-Cam AVIs, Kino is an excellent tool for converting them and doing other useful odd-jobs such as extracting stills. If your source is AVIs downloaded from (say) ShareTV via the e-Donkey network, these will need to be converted using transcode or mencoder; that's one of the next things for me to try.
The Mediacity DVD authoring tab helps you build a menu for a bunch of video clips such as the above. In this initial version you can only have a single menu screen; the DVD standard allows for hierarchical menus but I have no need for them so I didn't include it. (Oh, the power of being the author!) You import the clips, either into a single titleset or in groups into a number of titlesets, as you please, then create buttons that will each play a titleset. Specify a background JPG and a suitable sound clip. Menus must have sound - a small silence clip is suitable but must be in MPEG format. I'll email a short silence file to anyone who wants one.
I got really frustrated by qdvdauthor's button handling, so tried to do better. You can drag buttons round the screen with the mouse, though for resizing you have to do some typing. Buttons can have semi-opaque backgrounds, either to brighten or darken but either way make the text stand out better (that feature went in today) and you can change the font face, style and size.
There are text panels to show you the scripts the program builds to run the command-line tools, a button to launch a video player (e.g. xine) on your built DVD and finally a button to call the DVD burner. I've tried to make everything user-configurable and there's a built-in page of help available for all the main program features. It does help to get familiar with dvdauthor and its supporting programs, though the manpages are often terse.
-- GT