dvdauthor and spumux

Spumux is an opensource utility to mux subtitles or menu buttons into an mpeg2 stream. It comes with the dvdauthor package available at http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net

I use a very useful plugin for gimp by Jamie Strachan to generate the images and config file for spumux. You can get it at the gimp plugin page or directly here.

Using dvdauthor to author dvd's can sometimes be frustrating because some things are not that apparent from the start. The following are a few hints and tips to explain dvdauthor and spumux in more detail. I hope it will be helpful.

There are some transparent .png images on this page, so if your browser does not support them please upgrade to a better browser. I can recommend

• spumux and it's color capabilities/limitations (how many colors are too much in a dvd menu?)
  Read this if you get an error like:
  INFO: PNG had 4 colors
  INFO: Pickbuttongroups, success with 1 groups, useimg=0
  assertion "useimg" failed: file "subgen-image.c", line 726
• Getting semi transparent menus/subtitles with the dvdauthor gimp plugin
• Turning dvd subtitles on with dvdauthor (forced vs. normal)