For the benefit of the (probably very few) readers who haven't heard me going on about this for weeks on end…

I've spent my spare time during the past two weeks mostly writing DVDs. When I upgraded my main home computer in January the new one came with a DVD writer at negligible extra cost. I hadn't bothered to equip my previous machine with one of these, on the grounds that it never seemed terribly important, but now I had one anyway it seemed like time to play with it. So I bought some blank DVDs (rewritable for testing, write-once for the final results) and started looking around for the software I needed.

In the process I discovered all sorts of really ghastly things about the DVD standards, and some fairly ghastly things about the available Linux software to deal with them. (Pride of place here goes to the man page for dvdauthor, whose entire description of several of its command-line options reads simply ‘foo’.) I found that the Panasonic DVD player I acquired in late 2000 is by far the pickiest DVD-reading device I've so far found (which surprised me, since previous experiences had made me expect the PS2 to be the one that had done a half-hearted job). I filled my brain completely up with terminology like VMGM, VTSM and PGC, I desperately tried to memorise the set of illogical restrictions on which bits of a DVD are allowed to contain scripting directives causing jumps to other bits, and I came out of the other end of the experience with a lot less respect for DVDs as a video standard than I'd started with.

But I also came out with results. Foremost among these results is a DVD containing forty-five minutes of swirly fractal animation, of much the same type as the brief video file on my fractals web page but higher-resolution, longer, more varied, and generally suitable for putting on the TV at a party and letting it be hypnotic in the background. I took that to the Finches' party on Saturday, where it received a generally positive response (though some people seemed to enjoy the credits sequence more than the fractals themselves :-). One person has already asked for a copy.

Also I sorted out my problem with the Star Wars limited editions, namely that they're in letterbox format rather than anamorphic widescreen. This makes no visible difference on a 4:3 television, but on a widescreen TV you have the option of either (a) watching a tiny 16:9 rectangle in the middle of a huge 16:9 screen, or (b) if your TV supports it, zooming in so that the film occupies the whole screen but the occasional subtitles (Greedo, Jabba etc) fall off the bottom of the display. So I scaled the movies to anamorphic widescreen and wrote myself alternative versions of the DVDs which put the subtitles somewhere more sensible, and now I can watch the original Star Wars films the way I should have been able to before. Better still, this actually seems to have improved the quality: of course stretching into more pixels can't have improved the quality of the actual movie data, and the subsequent re-encoding must have introduced further artifacts, but this turns out to be a negligible effect compared to the fact that mencoder is significantly better at stretching pictures than my TV, so it has improved the quality of what ends up on my screen.

And now I've finished: I had a mental list of things I would have liked to do if only I knew how to write DVDs, and now I've found out how to write DVDs and done everything on the list. So now I can turn my attention to things that aren't 12cm across, round and shiny, and I can let all of that confusing terminology fall back out of my brain. I think that's a relief.