System requirements[]
There are no known minimum system requirements for running tovid. If your machine is capable of running a standard Linux installation, then you probably have enough CPU power for video processing and playback.
If you're going to work with video files, you probably want to have plenty of hard drive space to spare; the process of authoring a DVD might consume 11GB on your disk, and if you are working on several DVD projects at once, the space requirements multiply quickly. At minimum, you should have about 20GB that you can devote to authoring DVDs. If you only plan to create (S)VCDs, you could get by with only 6-8GB.
The tovid suite is developed and tested primarily on Linux. Some users have also reported successful execution on FreeBSD, Cygwin, and OSX with only minor modifications. Nearly all of the components, being written in the bash scripting language, require bash, as well as standard UNIX utilities like grep, sed, cat, bc, and awk. If you are running Linux, all of these should already be available.
Both GUIs, and several upcoming command-line scripts require Python. tovid will be using more Python in the future, since it's much nicer than shell script.
Dependency list[]
Here's the complete list of software needed by tovid, along with brief explanations:
Building tovid[]
If you plan to install tovid from an SVN checkout, you will need the following:
- txt2tags
- A program that takes a simple text file and makes a variety of output files (.man, .html, .tex, ...). You need this to make the man pages.
Command Line[]
- mplayer
- Probably the most robust and mature video player for Linux. Almost all of the tovid components depend heavily on mplayer for video playback and conversion, so this is a must-install. You'll want mplayer anyway, if you plan to be working with video.
- mjpegtools
- Command-line tools for encoding and working with video, particularly MPEG. This is required by most of tovid's components, and you will need it in order to do anything useful with tovid.
- ffmpeg
- Tools and libraries for recording, converting, and streaming audio and video. Used by several components, and required if you want to create DVDs in NTSC format. Note: because ffmpeg is evolving very quickly, it is often breaking compatibility. It is recommended to use the lastest stable version with tovid, particularly if you run into problems.
- ImageMagick
- A powerful set of command-line tools for formatting, resizing, converting and drawing on image files. This is used by tovid disc, (all in one frontend to transcoding, menus, and disc creation). If you want to create video discs with menus, you need this. Many Linux distributions install this by default.
- It includes the commands: convert, composite, mogrify, display, identify and montage ... among others.
- dvdauthor 0.6.0 or newer
- Tools for creating DVD filesystems. If you want to make DVDs with tovid, you need this.
- growisofs
- Part of dvd+rw-tools, this utility burns DVDs. If you want to make DVDs with tovid, you need this.
- sox
- The swiss army knife of audio processing. If you want to use tovid's advanced options, you need this.
- normalize
- Fast and accurate volume normalization for wave files. Some distributions call this package normalize-audio. If you want audio normalization and gains in tovid, you need this.
GUI[]
- Python (and python-dev, if your distro has it)
- Python programming language. An increasingly large portion of tovid (including all of the tovid GUI) is written in Python, so you probably want this if your distro doesn't already provide it.
- python-tk
- Needed for tovid gui to function.
- Tix
- Needed for tovid gui to function
Recommended[]
These you can install if you want.
- transcode
- Video stream processing and conversion tools. This is used by tovid disc' for seeking in videos when generating menus with video thumbnails. As of tovid-0.35 transcode is no longer a hard dependancy of 'tovid disc', as ffmpeg will be used if it is not installed. Version 1.1.0 or greater is required if you are using transcode. Transcode will speed up seeking in videos for making animated submenus.
For best results, install all dependencies before installing tovid.