free DVD authoring with specific features

[Alba Ra]

Hello, this is my first ever post here on Doom9 but I have been an avid reader of this forum (and tried and adapted many guides) for a long time.

Recently I've switched from buying DVDs to buying Blu-rays and HD-DVD (the latter only when they are cheap) as my PC is equipped with a BD/DVD writer (that is also capable of reading HD-DVD). Well, when I bought my new PC last year I made sure he was equipped as best as an XP-run PC can be that is not used for games.

But for the time being I want to view that on my stand-alone DVD player, so I convert my new discs to DVD. (And no, there's no MKV playback capability, yet!)

Recently I thus backed-up a HD-DVD (Frighteners).

I won't bore you with all details (but you may request them if you feel they're needed to answer me correctly) but in the end I had them demuxed, treated and prepared so I had:

• the original video stream VC-1
• the English soundtrack (AC-3 in 5.1)
• the director's commentary (AC-3 in 2.0)
• two subtitle streams (IDX/SUB)

Now I'd like to know whether there's a free DVD authoring suite that can use these formats (without re-encoding audio and subtitles)?

I found DVD Flick but according to its website it can not handle DVD-compatible subtitles (like IDX/SUB created from HD-DVD/Blu-ray using BDSup2Sub). Else it would be perfect! (Because it this missing feature I haven't tried it yet.)

So basically the best solution would be a free (or even better: open source) application suite that can handle E-AC-3 (or direct stream AC-3), DVD subtitles (or anything that BDSup2Sub can output using the original design) and Avisynth script.

Any ideas?



To get an idea of what I've done, read Jeremy Duncan's VC1 encoding guide except on step 2 I used EVOdemux, also eac3to for the E-AC-3 audio streams and, obviously, BDSup2Sub for the subtitles.