How to convert a PDF file to a DVD movie?

Question

Each page would be navigable with the player's 'next' button. The result should have a directory called VIDEO_TS, to ensure it will play in old players.

Answer 1

First that you need to do is convert PDF file into series of images - one image for one page. To achieve this we could use convert from ImageMagick program:

convert -scale 1600x1600 -density 300 pdffile.pdf somename.jpg

This command convert pdffile.pdf into series of somename-NUMBER.jpg files.

Next thing is to create slideshow from these files. For this we could use dvd-slideshow tool.

dir2slideshow -n 'NAME' -t 5 DIR
dvd-slideshow -n 'NAME' -f NAME.txt

First command will create file with description of slideshow with name NAME, time for picture 5 sec from pictures in directory DIR. Second command will generate vob file that you need to burn to DVD (to VIDEO_TS dir). Quick introduction to dvd-slideshow you could read in this blog.

In example that I presented there pages are changed automatically (-t option in dir2slideshow). I'm not sure if navigation that you want could be easily achieved. My only idea is create DVD with chapters - one chapter for one JPG file and constantly loop each chapter until the 'next' button is pressed.

In this solution you could change slide time to 2 seconds and pause it after change, so when you unpause it next slide will be displayed after one second.

Answer 2

I would be very surprised if there is software that does this automatically, but if you take a screenshot of every page and save this as a graphics image, then most DVD creation software will allow you to take each image into a menu structure.

If its a long PDF, then its going to be quite a bit of work.

Answer 3

I believe DVD-Slideshow is capable of doing this.