Automatically create movie DVDs?

Question

Our family has been using a digital camcorder for years (with an internal HD for recording). Which means that we have several hard disks filled with our movie files.

I want for us to burn all of our movies onto a DVD.

There is software that lets you do that: you open the dialog, you click on the video files you want to burn, and then it burns the DVD. (It will let you put captions on the DVDs using their GUI, it will add a "Scene selection" page, etc.)

How can I do this automatically/programatically? I have a list with each movie file along with a caption.

What I want is to:

1. Read from this list
2. Use an algorithm to figure out how much would fit on a DVD, and how to group the individual videos (which I can do.)
3. Use some program which will allow me to specifiy which videos to burn to the DVD, and crease some sort of "scene selection" page.
4. Create an ISO

Mind you, the scene selection doesn't need to be fancy - it doesn't need to have thumbnails of the video (but it would be nice), though it should display the caption.

What software exists to do this? Is there a commandline utility? Or a GUI with a cmdline interface?

My preference is something linux-based, but I also have windows available.

Basically, the only "human" intervention I want is to physically pop the DVD in the drive and remove it when its done.

What kinds of solutions are there? (Or things that I can use for any of the intermediate steps?)

Answer 1

IMHO the best tool to use is AutoIt for Windows at http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/, it has an extensive library to automate and record tasks. It works with scripts and has a BASIC like syntax. AutoIt is free. It has an excellent help file with many examples how to deal with specific problems. If you have questions then the forum is a very helpful place to ask questions.

About your algorithm: 1 & 2). Reading from a list and getting the file sizes can easily be done with the file access functions within AutoIt.

3 & 4). This depends on the program you want to use to make a DVD movie, but I recently used a program called DVD Flick that does what you're asking: it has a simple scene/title selection feature with a DVD menu, and it burns the DVD or creates an ISO. You could record and alter a script with AutoIt to automate the batch.