Greetings from a multiAVCHD Masachist

[NorthBear]

I've been using multiAVCHD for 15 years or so. Just simple projects like "play a welcome and then a movie" (no menu) discs
and multi-title discs for TV shows. This is now all under Linux/Wine.

A couple of weeks ago I started looking at making complex projects (using chapter support) for concert videos.
multiAVCHD is quite the mess in this area, but I've made some great progress. Looking forward to posting my findings about
multiAVCHD and my scripts to make it a little more usable. Thanks all ...


[Attachment 94054 - Click to enlarge]

[Secoast]

Yes. Certainly the most eccentric app I've ever used. The Custom settings dialogue being hidden behind a button titled more ? always amuses me.

If you battle with it you can achieve some great results though. The only option that never worked for me were motion chapter menus. Chapters were not something I really used though, so was never a concern.

Never found a way to customise the IG's, apart from colour/transparency. Other than that it was extremely versatile. Just incredibly frustrating.

Not sure how many still author like this, but there are few alternative options, so I suspect it still has a place.

[mail2tom]

Well said. There are very few alternatives for MultiAVCHD, but I use it several times a week in a pretty basic way, for the authoring ability for episodic TV series, and no other programs match that capability in a simple manner. The biggest challenge for me has been not to upset the delicate balance between the "helper" programs that run and incompatible updates. I'll stay tuned.

[NorthBear]

For over 10 years I've used multiAVCHD to create movie discs and tv discs. Movies are the simplest with just a welcome
screen and then direct to playing the movie (no menus). For TV shows, it's multititle using the xmb menu. But the "menu"
is actually the poster for each episode full screen. So, the user hits up/down to get to the episode to watch and presses "play".
No visible buttons, etc. The only thing is collecting and editing those individual posters for each title. I use gimp for that.

My journey down the rabbit hole came when trying to do discs of concerts with chapters. 47 is a lot of chapters and multiAVCHD
can't handle them directly. I generates the chapter pages OK, but any thing after the first 12 chapters and you can't jump to
them even though you have a nice menu saying you can.

So I've developed scripts (Linux/Wine/Bash) that split an MKV by groups of 12 chapters, create custom backgrounds for the
individual titles and even pause multiAVCHD to replace the chapter thumbs it generates with thumbs of my choosing. Lots of
tap dancing to keep that old app useful.

And all that weirdness with multiAVCHD.ini and multiAVCHD.mpf! A 300+ line text file with no comments for a .ini? And no loading
the .mpf at launch. You have to manually get the app to load it. And, that .mpf has a copy of the .ini in it, but those setting are
ignored. Sigh....