It would be nice if there was a command-line tool that took a definition file (could be XML, JSON, RSS, or some other plain text format) that contained references to video files (in the case of a DVD) marking each chapter and could simply make a DVD ISO file from that. Same thing with audio CDs. I realize a non-trivial amount of encoding or re-encoding might need to happen in the process but ffmpeg has this covered, no?
I ran into the same situation a while ago, needed a simple command-line tool to generate an audio CD image (which is just raw PCM audio data with a .bin extension) and cuesheet out of a set of source files. Needless to say, I ended up writing a minimal 200-line Python script to do the job [1]. Generating a DVD-Video image is several orders of magnitude more complicated than that though, so perhaps a bloated tool is justified in that case.
That would burn the finished ISO to disk. What I'm talking about would be along the lines of:
Chapter 1: "The establishing shot", ~/videos/nh-vid/ch01.mkv
Chapter 2: "Meeting the protagonist", ~/videos/nh-vid/ch02.mp4
Chapter 3: "The establishing shot", ~/videos/nh-vid/ch03.mp4
Chapter 4: "Hero meets villian", ~/videos/nh-vid/ch04.mov
Chapter 5: "The Clash", ~/videos/nh-vid/ch05.webm
Chapter 6: "The Smoke Clears", ~/videos/nh-vid/ch06.vp9
Chapter 7: "Resolution", ~/videos/nh-vid/ch07.wmv
and the command line app encodes all of the videos to the correct format for DVD, builds the chapter structure, and then builds/compiles the ISO file for an app like IMG burn to put to physical media (or to save to my NAS or ship to the media fulfiller who will press 50,000 copies....).
After Apple discontinued iDVD there was a significant gap (for me) for DVD creation at a reasonable price. Nothing that I’m aware of even attempts to provide blu-ray authoring (at least for Mac users).
There’s a lot of additional metadata that might be needed for anything worth sending to a presser - for example menus, but I agree, having a simple tool for DVD creation would be great.
