[OT] [Rant] making a video
- From: damon <dbriley5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 15:13:01 GMT
First off, let me say that I'm not saying any of this is Linus Torvald's fault or that Linux is crap or anything like that. I'm just trying to make a DVD to share with my family and it's gone wrong because of codec issues, file format issues, my own ignorance, and the limitations of the software I have.
For the past two or three years I've been using Pinnacle's "Studio 9" software to combine still photos and digital photos into DVDs on Windows XP. This has gone pretty well, with a couple of small hangups that I was able to work around. But yesterday I ran into a problem that I can't seem to solve.
I have looked at Kino on Linux. It has apparently a vast multitude of options. Many of these options are for things it never occurred to me to make a decision about, yet there's no default or suggested choice (ala k3b). And, sadly, it doesn't seem to have a particular option that I want-- the ability to put photos into the movie. (BTW, if it *does* have this abiltiy, then it's either poorly labeled, or buried in menus or both).
The difficulty is with some .avi files captured by Studio and stored on my Windows machine. When I tried to put one of these files into my Studio project, I got an error. The first frame or two in the file was not in widescreen, and so the entire file could not be added into a widescreen project. Now, Studio is supposed to cease captures when it detects a frame ratio change, but in this case, it apparently failed to prevent the capture of this file. (The frame ratio was difference was the result of taping widescreen video atop an older squarescreen video.)
The source tape has since been taped over, so the only copy of this video file is on the Windows computer. Neither Studio 9 nor Windows Movie Maker has the abiltiy to edit a few frames from the front of a video and then save again as a .avi file. The Windows Movie Maker program will only export to wmv.
One option may be to edit the file using Studio and then export it back to the dv tape, but I'm afraid that inserting the file into Studio to edit it will force the squarescreen format on the entire file. Still, I may have to try that.
So I looked, as I often do, to the Linux ecosystem for software that can help. I found avidemux, and I used it to trim a few frames from a test file, which I then took from Linux to Windows and tried to insert it into Studio 9. Studio 9 said it couldn't read the file. I tried just opening the file using Windows and got a more useful message-- a different codec had been used to create the .avi file than the one my Windows program uses.
This is a very frustrating situation, to say the least. I suspect my own ignorance is preventing me from seeing the solution to this dilemma, but I nevertheless feel like kicking the developers at Pinnacle and Microsoft that decided to leave out an "export to avi" function in their programs for what can only be seen as selfish "lock-in" motives, and instead left me with this time-consuming mess.
Unless Kino or some other program becomes easy to use for video on Linux, I'm going to have to replace the Windows machine with a Mac eventually. Making a DVD with my own content should be drop-dead easy nowadays, but for a variety of reasons, it's not.
-- Damon
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