can't pause menu, dvdauthor+supmux

[Azgene]

I've created a DVD with menu buttons and a background video, visible thru transparent button overlays. The menu buttons display o.k., and respond properly. However, the background video plays for its 2-second duration and then goes to black screen (buttons still show o.k.).
I have <pgc pause="inf"> in the <titleset> / <menus> section.
Here's what I have tried, so far, All with no success:
(1) moved the pause="inf" to the <vob file="name" pause="inf" /> section...
(2) duplicated pause="inf" in both the <pgc..> and <vob...> sections...
(3) used numerical pause="120" for all the above combinations...
(4) removed the ..widescreen="noletterbox" tag from <video... /> which I need in order to have 14 buttons...
More details, possibly relevant -- The video is 16:9 aspect, 720x480 resolution. dvdauthor version 0.7.0-1.2, spumux reports 3 colors in both "image" and "highlight" bmp files, there are INFO but no WARN messages from spumux and dvdauthor, the button positions are explicitly defined in the <spu...> section of the .xml file for spumux, the background video is 2 seconds, 61 frames, duration and the audio is 1.95 seconds -- separate mp2 files merged with mplex, a 4:3 aspect video with different files DOES pause its background video while displaying the button overlays.
Any solutions or work-arounds? The only work-around I see is to make the menu background video much longer and then live with the black background that eventually appears. As I said above, the menu buttons display and work o.k. even though the background does not pause. I am browsing through the dvdauthor source code but that is a daunting and tedious route.
Thank you for reading this and thanks for any replies.

[manono]

Any solutions or work-arounds?

Use one of the front-ends for DVDAuthor? I use DVDAuthorGUI and don't have your problem.

[Bjs]

Obviously you need to find out what the difference is between to two backgrounds used.

Try using handbreak to encode the 16:9 background with anamorphic flag set

[Azgene]

For manono --
It seems that dvdauthorgui is not available for Linux. Following your suggestion I did find out about Qdvdauthor and Bombono that are Linux front-ends to dvdauthor. Both, however, have not had any developer activity in several years with the result that they require older libraries that I cannot install without "breaking" currently installed libraries that some applications depend upon.

For Bjs --
I'm pretty sure the existing 720x480 videos are already anamorphic mode as both mplayer and xine display them in an 854x480 box. The 4:3 videos, to which I referred, would not have been anamorphic so maybe there's something there to follow up on. On first blush one wouldn't expect an interaction between the "pause" attribute and the format of a menu video but I can imagine that the 4:3 and 16:9 videos have different header formats on the DVD (VTS_01_0.IFO). From what I have seen, so far, in the dvdauthor source code the "still time" parameter is written at the same byte offset without regard for the aspect ratio. I'll keep exploring that issue.

By changing the "pause=xxx" value I find the parameter is written at byte 6348 of VTS_01_0.IFO but I don't know if that is the right place. As everybody working in DVD authoring already knows, and I am just finding out, the exact specification of the DVD file formats is a closely controlled "standard" not freely available to us amateurs.
For the time being I will just work around this problem with an extra long menu background video to give the viewer plenty of time to make a menu selection before the background black-out occurs.

[manono]

For manono --
It seems that dvdauthorgui is not available for Linux.

I don't remember you mentioning you were on Linux in the first post. Seems like a lot of trouble to go through just to author and make menus for a DVD. Using DVDAuthorGUI, once I've made my menu backgrounds it takes something like 10-15 minutes to create the buttons and commands for a DVD. It's also a simple matter to have either motion or static menus loop continuously.

For Bjs --
I'm pretty sure the existing 720x480 videos are already anamorphic mode as both mplayer and xine display them in an 854x480 box.

Ignore him. He comes around every once in awhile, says silly things, and then disappears again. Handbrake doesn't even encode MPEG-2 video.

The 4:3 videos, to which I referred, would not have been anamorphic so maybe there's something there to follow up on.

There's no problem having 16:9 menus with 4:3 videos.