GreyMamba

A short diversion to explain the motivation. My dear wife Chrissie belongs to a small (but perfectly formed) book club. The 'rules' of this club are pretty civilised - they take it in turns to choose a book and then the chooser hosts a meeting a month later where they bake a cake, supply wine and the group discusses the book (or so I'm told). Chrissie wanted to do 'I Robot' by Isaac Asimov.

‘I Robot’ is a collection of related short stories written by Asimov in the 40's and is a brilliant look into the future of robots and robotics - Asimov, indeed, actually coined the term 'robotics'. It sets out some key principles that might be needed as we develop Artificial Intelligence, immortalised as the 3 Laws of Robotics. The stories then explore the intricacies and consequences that might, and in fact probably will, occur as AI is developed. The Will Smith film really is really a pale imitation of the book.

Today, the topics covered by the stories are increasingly relevant as we are on the brink of practical AI. Look, as an example, at autonomous cars. Cars like the Tesla model S have a limited self driving ability (called Autopilot). To quote from their web site:

“Your Tesla will match speed to traffic conditions, keep within a lane, automatically change lanes without requiring driver input, transition from one freeway to another, exit the freeway when your destination is near, self-park when near a parking spot and be summoned to and from your garage.”.
By all accounts it is capable of much more than this but doesn’t have these extra abilities enabled for safety and regulatory reasons. The point is that this already spots danger ahead and takes action to mitigate the danger (slow down, change lanes, brake). Son cars will have even more autonomy and this is were the Laws of Robotics might start to be relevant.

Consider an vehicle driving down a single track road with pedestrians walking on the pavement at either side. A small child jumps into the path of the car, too close for it to stop. Should it a, run into the child, b, swerve left and run into an old age pensioner couple or c, swerve right and run into a lamp post (potentially injuring the passengers). This isn’t an easy question to solve for a human – how do we equip an AI to make it?Anyway, back to the problem in hand, I’d got a number of audio (.mp3) and video (.mp4) files that I wanted to burn onto a DVD. Crucially, the DVD needed to be playable on a standard DVD player and present the viewer with a simple menu to select the media file they wanted to play.

Once again, Google was my best mate and it turned out to be pretty straight forward.

Firstly, I changed the .mp3 audio files into, effectively, a video format - .mp4 – using one of the online converter services. In my case I used MP3Toolbox.net. Then I downloaded and installed DVDStyler.

This is distributed as free software under the GNU General Public License. The software is cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux and it may be free but is very competent. It’s not difficult to use and easily produced a menu driven DVD for me.





There really is no need to say any more than this as you just can’t go wrong if you stick to the simple stuff. You can, of course, do lots of tweaking if you are so inclined. Good software – and free!