Some silent DVD menus won't work on Toshiba Blu-ray player

[denali]

This is a strange one, not 100% confirmed as of yet but I thought it worthy of mention.

I've been using SVCD2DVD and DVDShrink for years with hardly any issues, occasionally for movies but mostly for putting TV episodes on DVD5 discs, four episodes per disc each with its own VTS and menu button. I use a stock grey bitmap as a background and simple text buttons for each episode, and while for some discs I use an extract from the TV show's theme as background music, most have no audio on the menus.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a Blu-ray player, a Toshiba BDX1200, and it has generally performed brilliantly with retail Blu-ray, retail DVD and AVI/MKV files on USB all playing perfectly.

Earlier today I put a freshly made SVCD2DVD episodic TV disc in and the menu was not functional. The text displayed, the first episode was highlighted with the selection colour, but neither the arrow keys nor the OK button worked to navigate the menu or start the episode playing. I could use the STOP and 1-4 buttons to select each title manually, and it would play fine, but the menu was completely static.

I then tried a handful of previously created discs, all of which had played perfectly on my other PCs and DVD players, and on other family members' players. One disc with only two episodes worked fine but two with four episodes didn't. From this I thought maybe it was the number of episodes that was the issue but a third disc, also with four episodes, did work as did another disc with 12 short 'webisodes' and a custom menu with background audio. There didn't seem to any pattern.

I tried various re-authors and re-burns with different options but nothing worked. I tried shrinking with SVCD2DVD's Auto Fit option instead of using DVDShrink, to no avail. I tried switching DVDShrink's menu compression from automatic to none but that didn't work either. I skipped DVDShrink altogether and tried burning the raw SVCD2DVD output to a DVD9, but still the menu wouldn't work. I even tried burning the discs with different ISO disc titles, thinking that maybe the player's Resume function had become confused with multiple discs with the same name, but that didn't work either.

Finally, in sheer desperation having tried every other option imaginable, I created a 30 second silent MP3 file and applied it to the disc's menu as background audio, with the Encode Video To Audio Duration option selected. Voilà - one disc playing perfectly on the Toshiba player.

I've no idea why this worked, or indeed why at least one of my four episode discs plays fine even though it has no menu audio. More experimentation is needed to determine the exact circumstances that lead to this incompatibility but for now it would seem that adding a silent background to future menus might be the way to go.

I've Googled for 'SVCD2DVD menu problem', 'Toshiba BDX1200 DVD menu problem' and various combinations thereof but as far as I can tell there doesn't seem to be anyone else with the exact same issue, which makes it difficult to determine whether the culprit is the player or the software or just an unfortunate combination of quirks in both. And I don't know enough about the internal workings of SVCD2DVD's menu creation system, or the DVD menu specification itself, to even begin to guess where the incompatibility might lie.

Years ago I used to edit menu structures with IFOEdit and I did toy with the idea of firing it up again to see if I can goose one of the non-working discs into behaving with a couple of choice tweaks, but it's been so long since I got "under the hood" that I'd probably end up digging myself into an even more confusing hole than I'm in now.

I don't expect much to come from this post, it's more about getting the information down for the record (and perhaps if someone else does have similar symptoms one day, their search will bring them here). But if anyone else has seen similar behaviour that my search didn't turn up, please let me know. After years of faultless SVCD2DVD use with a plethora of different hardware and software players, I'm really curious to know why this particular player seems to require sound (even the sound of silence) in its menus, or at least menus of a non-zero duration, before it'll let me navigate.

For what it's worth I'm using SVCD2DVD 2.5.5030 and DVDShrink 3.2.0.15 on Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit.

[aedipuss]

i could be wrong but i believe even a "silent" dvd has to have a dvd spec compliant audio track.

[Jikchung]

I ran into this recently too. Without audio added to the menu, it only "plays" for a moment, then is not selectable as it is not playing anymore. The quick solution is as denali posted, add audio so your menu plays long enough to make selections. Won't help with past DVDs, but it will going forward. Perhaps ChrissyBoy can have a look as he gets time.

[denali]

Thanks for the feedback Jikchung. I'm just glad I'm not the only one to have seen this, given how obscure it seems to be. And having just burned another non-working menu because I forgot my own advice, I've now set my default preferences to loop the 30 second silence on new menus unless I tell it otherwise

[Jikchung]

No, you're not the only one to have seen this. i should also add that my problematic player is a newer Sony, so it's not brand limited.