Hello people!
This is my first post here. Please be patient because I’m a bit “experienced” (72).
Even before Jobs and Gates started their businesses, I was busy battling punched cards and one-task-at-a-time huge data centers in the mid 70’s, coding in COBOL, Algol and Intel 4004 assembler. Yes, the very same CPU that is still running beyond our solar system inside both Voyager spacecrafts.
Anyway, more recently, some 2~3 years ago, I was using a DVD editing software that offered a menu-like opening page that could jump directly to pre-selected scenes. It was very handy since there was no need to look for the scene minute by minute. I suspect it was an option only for the DVD burner, but if any of you happen to have any ideas on how to implement this in your wonderful editor I would love to know.
Thank you for having me in your forum!
Hi Paulo and welcome here,
yes, what you think about is a special function of DVD (and BD maybe, but I don’t know for sure). This menu resides in some of the smaller files on the disc, your movie resides inside the larger .vob files. You need something like DVDStyler for that.
Here in kdenlive you will output movie-files only (mp4/vob/…).
But I found a thread here around, maybe you can export these ‘Guides’ - Textmarkers along your timeline (if you defined some) and use this for chapters. Didn’t use that so far.
But for many years I used another ‘trick’: MKVtoolnix(-gui) has a feature to add a chapter-file (plain text) where you can define your chapters. RTFM.
If you start ‘at zero’, I think, you should use these Guides, but remember - its kdenlive only.
Hallo Paulo.
The DVD Wizard was part of Kdenlive until version 21.04. With version 21.08 we removed it as the code was not maintained since long and leads more and more to issues (specially in preparation to move to Qt6).
Best would be to render your video out and do the DVD part for instance in AVS Video Converter.
Thank you for your kind replies, @Eugen_Mohr and @wolfn.
In the meantime, I sent my kdenlive generated .mp4 files to my son, who has a much more updated software knowledge. And he used a command line tool (How to Add Chapters to MP4s with FFmpeg - Kyle Howells) to insert metadata information into the .mp4 files. It worked wonders! Now I have my chapter titles available along the progress bar under the screen, with clickable entry points for each chapter. It is worth taking a look at it.
Thanks for sharing your solution!