Looking at Sonic DVDitPro, MinervaDVD, and Apple DVD Studio Pro, it occurs to me that Houdini's (Halo's/COP's) base would make excellent envrionment for DVD authoring tool. I mean all that is needed is to call already compiled DLLs to access the DVD-R and MPEG-2 encoding. Minerva Systmes licences the DLLs which contain MPEG-2 encoding and DVD standard command calls. Really all that is needed is to make some tiles that load files, pass them to encoders, and give the DLLs some user controls. Then a DVD-ROP writes the directory structure onto the disk using DVD-R or writes the ISO file for duplication.

Having said that, as far as I know, hardware device control unde XPPro and Win2000Pro is handled through DLLs. I assume that Houdini SDK has ways to call DLLs so hardware devices (DVD-ROM, DLT) can be controlled from ROP.

P.S. Looking forward to playing with my own 6.1 with ATI X1 card that I won on App. Challenge. The computer magazines all highly rate the board but all site driver problems albeit with Maya and dedicated 3DS MAX drivers. Given the machine I currently have I am not sure how I can squezze a double space AGP board into it! Figures! But I am sure it will beat my current GeForce3.

Dave Rindner

And there is software to allow frameserving between software. For example if you don't want to use ULead Media Studio Pro's MPEG2 encoder, you can frameserve to TMPGEnc. It seems that perhaps Houdini could take advantage of this somehow…

-Craig

Lets get the compositing working first before delving into platform-specific DVD creation.
There's plenty of DVD creation packages out there - this isn't really SESI's market…

JC