shot in the dark

[worker201]

I'm trying to build a dvd menu using dvdauthor tools and the gimp. I'm having some troubles with spumux, the menu builder. Anybody know this utility? I can provide more info, but I won't bother if nobody is familiar with it.

[Void Main]

I don't have any experience with it but I am certainly interested in the outcome if you do get it working. There isn't a lot of documentation on this that I could ever find and I tried half heartedly a while back to do DVD menus without success and I don't even recall what software I was working with at the time.

[worker201]

I don't have any experience with it but I am certainly interested in the outcome if you do get it working. There isn't a lot of documentation on this that I could ever find and I tried half heartedly a while back to do DVD menus without success and I don't even recall what software I was working with at the time.

Yeah, google of 'spumux' yields only 10 hits, and one of them is the manpage. I think 3 are non-English.

I think my problems are image-based. You have your background image, your highlight image, and your select image. Background is a jpeg, and the other 2 are transparent pngs. The menu has been created, and it shows up in mplayer. But I am getting some errors based on my hilite image. I saw somewhere on the net that the image had to be indexed with no more than 4 colors, including the transparency, and I did that. But still no go.

Other than this, pretty much the last step, everything has gone well. Music plays while the menu is on and everything.
Following this lovely man's instructions:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=117709
It says Gentoo, but so far has been mostly successful in FC3.

[worker201]

Good news for Linux authors:
The above problems were achieved using dvdauthor 0.6.10, whose rpms came from Dag. After uninstalling the rpm package and installing 0.6.11 from source, I get no more errors. There must have been a problem with the png handler, or something. Hopefully, for those who aren't as good at installing from source as me , Dag or Freshrpms will put together a 0.6.11 package. It has 2 dependencies that I did not have already - libdvdread-devel and libpng-devel. Now that I say it, it was probably the fact that 0.6.10 did not have the png-devel requirement that caused spumux to fault.

Anyway, getting the dependencies and versions sorted out seems to do the trick.

Now, to put it all together!

[worker201]

Tested dvdauthor output in my home dvdplayer this morning. Worked like a charm. Things are smooth now. Once you have the right tools built properly, it's a piece of cake.

[Void Main]

Is there something I can build and make available? What all did you have to rebuild and what options did you have to build with (different than Dag)? I could put together some RPMS.

[worker201]

See my most recent post in the RedHat forum, to see how to get transcode working. dvdauthor should work right from source with only the barest of config, as long as you have libpng-devel and libdvdread installed. The dvdauthor rpm package doesn't require those packages, which is why it fails to work properly. Somehow, the author (dag?) shunted those dependencies.

Unfortunately, I don't have the configure script available anymore. But I'm sure it was no big deal. The only problem I had was with the libpng-devel not recognizing the png encoding right.

[Void Main]

See my most recent post in the RedHat forum, to see how to get transcode working. dvdauthor should work right from source with only the barest of config, as long as you have libpng-devel and libdvdread installed. The dvdauthor rpm package doesn't require those packages, which is why it fails to work properly. Somehow, the author (dag?) shunted those dependencies.

Unfortunately, I don't have the configure script available anymore. But I'm sure it was no big deal. The only problem I had was with the libpng-devel not recognizing the png encoding right.

So what you are saying is that the dvdauthor RPM from Dag does work if you also have the libpng-devel and libdvdread RPMS installed? If I understand correctly all I should have to do is 1) add in a "Requires" for those packages in the dvdauthor RPM and 2) build a transcode from the beta version you listed in the other thread. Does that sound about right? Also, is the libpng-devel really needed for anything other than building the packages? If so, this should be a "BuildRequires" on the package(s) that need it and I can add those as well.

I'll build my own but I guess I should get on the freshrpms mailing list and suggest they do the same to theirs so I don't have to build a separate one packages.

[worker201]

The problem I had with the dvdauthor rpm was that it would not read the png navigation buttons I had made with the gimp. Everything else I did with dvdauthor worked fine. It was in the process of building dvdauthor from source that I found out about the libpng-devel dependence. Which makes sense, based on the probelms I was having.

I assume that the rpm would work if the dependence for libpng-devel was met, but since I had success with the build from source, I didn't bother to try.