It's home cinema manufacturing time! 🏴☠️ Gonna put my pirate show on my shelf! (I'm doing an Arts and Crafts Project and I'm making it everyone's problem.)
After seeing how much they cost, I abandoned the idea of getting a Blu-ray writer for now. For the time being, good old DVDs is what it's going to be! My TV is old and not very big, so DVD resolution is gonna be fine.
It's been ages since I last burned a DVD. For the full experience, I'm gonna create nice menus and pretty sleeves for the boxes. Graphic design is my passion! Um.
Well. First needed to find a program to do stuff with. I'm a Linux guy, so I'm using Devede. (Which is free, btw. In case someone else wants to do a low cost spot of putting pirate show on the shelf.)
DVDs fit a maximum of 120 minutes of video. So, four episodes, I thought. But after a quick attempt, the program refused to do more than three (maybe because of the menu also taking up space, and four episodes cutting pretty close to the 120 min mark?). Anyway, three episodes per disc it is. It's a pretty nice runtime for watching the entire disc, IMO. An hour and a half, and then you can return to reality to realise you should probably eat something, or go to bed because it's midnight.
OFMD with its current two seasons has a total of eighteen episodes, which is divisible by three. You get the following setup:
Disc 1: Pilot, A Damned Man, The Gentleman Pirate - That's pretty good, Stede's introduction to piracy all on one disc!
Disc 2: Discomfort in a Married State, The Best Revenge is Dressing Well, The Art of Fuckery - All bangers. Great to watch together, our boys meet and shenanigans happen!
Disc 3: This is Happening, We Gull Way Back, Act of Grace - Many romantic moments, lots of great scenes, shit hits the fan at the end there. Alright!
Disc 4: Wherever you go, there you are, Impossible Birds, Red Flags - ... Pain and angst! What have I done!?! The disc of horrors. Gotta make sure to have tissues at hand when I watch this. But hey, it also has messy bun Ed! Small mercies.
Disc 5: The Innkeeper, Fun and Games, The Curse of the Seafaring Life. - Another disc with all winners. I love all these episodes so much! (You can watch this disc to recover from the trauma of the previous one!) But seriously, this one slaps.
Disc 6: Calypso's Birthday, Man on Fire, Mermen - Great combination again. Season finale! Love and excitement!
... Honestly, except for the psychological damage of putting all the most painful episodes together, this is coming out pretty cool. Says a lot about how good the show is. I actually really love all the episodes (yes even the painful angsty episodes of massive depression). Thinking about this little project really reminded me how much I love this entire show.
So, we got a tracklist, now menus, then we can burn this stuff!
I did the menu backgrounds in GIMP. Realised I have a big folder full of screenshots I took myself, screenshots someone else took and posted on Tumblr, official promo pics for the show, and I have no idea anymore where most of them are from, because I named the files according to what's on them. Which is useful for when you want to find pics (Need a picture of cursed suit Stede? I have files named that, easy peasy!), but not so great if you wanted to give credit to whoever took a given pic you used. (It's probably @sherlockig or @ofmd-ann or @blakbonnet. Please feel credited, your beautiful screens and gifs brighten my day, and some of them are now probably part of my DVD menus. Shrunk down and cropped, but, yeah.)
I originally wanted to structure my menus as having the title of an episode, then some pics from it, then the next episode, then pics from that, and so forth, but I couldn't convince the program to give me the necessary padding between the menu items, so I ended up just putting the episode images below the menu. Still like it.
Anyway, DVD menus can also play sound! Behold a crappy video of my beautiful creation (provided entirely for sound):
More crappy pics of my other disc menus:
Gonna make them some nice sleeves next. Some day. Gotta make sure they all work properly first. So. I'll be on my sofa, watching my DVDs. With menus! (Edit: here are!)
