Creating a DVD on SUSE Linux 10 with MainActor

It was time for me to take the video footage from a recent skiing holiday in Bulgaria and make a DVD to distribute to family and friends. I haven't created a DVD before, so I needed to work out what software I needed, and how to get it all working.

Now, I have a deskside system at home that is designed for video editing: twin AMD64 CPUs, 2G RAM, 300G SATA II disk. However, I use this machine as a build and test machine (some multi-threading bugs never show up on a single CPU machine, you have to use a multi-CPU machine). Normally a video PC would be running Windows XP or Mac OS X, and you would have a fine choice of video editing software. However, my build and test machine runs SUSE Linux 10, and that makes it tougher to find the right software for putting your DVD together.

In terms of editing your video footage together, there seem to be 2 main options: Kino and MainActor. Kino is free, MainActor is commercial. Kino is the simpler package, while MainActor is intended to be professional quality software. I did a quick test with both packages by importing some digital video and then exporting it in a number of formats. What I found was that MainActor produced usable video more reliably than Kino did, so that was enough for me to decide to go with MainActor. I used to work as a multimedia developer, and I know that you are only as good as the quality of your output, and it was the output processing that seemed to be the key strength of MainActor.

That said, MainActor is not without its problems, and I'm going to list the ones that I encountered. I should mention that MainActor for Linux is compiled for use with SUSE Linux 9.3, and I'm using SUSE Linux 10, so the setup wasn't ideal from the outset. However, I think it is useful to note what does and doesn't work under SUSE Linux 10, especially since the MainActor forums were recently closed.

Initially, I tried MainActor 5.5.7, which comes with the SUSE Linux 10 distribution. Once I read the manual enough to understand the X-Windows style GUI, it turned out to have a pretty good visual editing approach. However, I had the following issues:

• Could not import digital video directly from my digital video camera (Panasonic NV-GS17, firewire interface). I ended up using Kino for this part of the exercise (and it did the job well).
• Did not correctly import the audio track with the AVI files from my digital camera (Canon PowerShot A95). There seems to be a problem with the 8-bit audio in these AVI files. The workaround was to use Avidemux to extract the audo track from the AVI files as 16-bit audio. When I imported the AVIs into MainActor, I separated the audio track, deleted it, and inserted the 16-bit audio track instead. The audio track was always some seconds shorter than the matching video track (for reasons I still don't understand), but MainActor allowed me to shorten the video track to match the audio track, and that seemed to work.
• The 2D Text filter (for putting titles onto a video segment) did not work. In particular, whenever you tried to open the properties for this filter (to edit the text and set the screen location) MainActor just crashed immediately.

The 2D Text filter problem forced me to look at later versions of MainActor. There were two options. MainActor 5.5.19 was the latest release version, while MainActor 5.5.24 was a beta version that was meant to address some apparent issues with AMD processors. I decided to go straight to 5.5.24. The 2D Text filter worked (yay!), but there were still issues:

• Could not import digital video directly from my digital video camera (same as with 5.5.7).
• Did not correctly import the audio track with the AVI files from my digital camera (same as with 5.5.7).
• The main "Playback" button did not work from an arbitrary point in the video timeline. You could only play the video by selecting a segment and using the "Play IN-OUT segment" function.
• Here is the big one: MainActor 5.5.24 crashed at the boundaries between my video segments. This happened so often that it was just unusable for me.

OK, so MainActor 5.5.24 was out of the question, and MainActor 5.5.7 wouldn't do the (few) titles for my DVD. That left me with MainActor 5.5.19. The good news was that 5.5.19 was the best of all. It didn't crash between segments, and the 2D Text filter worked. The 5.5.19 issues were:

• Could not import digital video directly from my digital video camera (same as with 5.5.7).
• Did not correctly import the audio track with the AVI files from my digital camera (same as with 5.5.7).
• The main "Playback" button worked from an arbitrary point in the video timeline, but the sound didn't. You could only play the video with sound by selecting a segment and using the "Play IN-OUT segment" function.

So MainActor 5.5.19 isn't perfect, but it was good enough. I put my video sequence together easily enough, and exported the whole 50 minutes as a DVD format MPEG (i.e. 720x576 for PAL video, with 48kHz audio). Worryingly, MainActor 5.5.19 crashed at the end of exporting my video each time, but the exported MPEG itself turned out to be fine.

Once I had my MPEG, I needed to convert it into the file structure used for DVDs. For this, there aren't a lot of options under Linux; the one option seems to be dvdauthor. This is a command line tool that requires you to set up your DVD configuration using an XML file, which isn't everyone's cup of tea (but suits me fine). Actually, for a simple DVD like mine, with no menus and such, just a video that starts automatically and plays to the end, the XML configuration is really simple (and they give you the template in the docs), so it turned out to be completely straightforwards.

So, the DVD is done, and I'm happy with the quality of the result. MainActor isn't a perfect package by any means, but I think the fundamentals are good, and I hope they will be able to resolve the outstanding niggles to make it a package that can be recommended without hesitation.