Im tired of having vcds without menus can someone help me?

[Nik22]

Im good with editing graphics and what not and I would love to have cool interactive menus for my vcds. I use Nero and TMPGENC for my vcd burning so if I had some help in making my vcds more interactiv and make cool menus I would really appreciate it!

[adam]

Nero's menu making capabilities are extremely limited. Try using VCDEasy instead. Try reading my guide for ideas.

http://users3.ev1.net/~CavemanLawyer/

It assumes you have a DVD source, but just apply it to what you're doing.

[EddyH]

I find a simple one-screen menu works OK for most my movie (after all, there's not -that- many tracks on there

What you do... find a suitable poster picture, capture the menu image off the DVD, whatever. Keep it hi-rez for now.
Figure out how much of the pic your TV cuts off (may help to make a RW with a few hi-rez pics on it, maybe a specially drawn calibration one with a different colour bar every 8 pixels etc) and see if you can get a pic with elements you want (not too complex!) within that frame, but plenty of overspill for the overscan / PC screen / other 'bigger' TVs. If you're using something like paintshop / photoshop it may help to make a temporary layer with the border drawn out on it for the next steps.

Work out what text you want on the pic; remember it won't be selectable like DVD. I usually include the title, tracklist, instructions on how to select them (in case of borrowing), and maybe some basic details in the corner eg PAL/NTSC, x/standard VCD, running length, wide/fullscreen, mono/stereo/prologic, age rating bla bla bla. (that's a bit techy tho )

Add the text... be creative but sensible. It needs to be readable on a small TV, and on players which may reduce it to half rez, like my bro's crappy portable. 14 point is about as small as you can really make it. A little larger with a thin contrasting border and/or shadow works well. Or just putting the text on a plain, well contrasting bit of the pic.

Remove the guide layer, merge it all, (weak) sharpen, and resize to your chosen rez. For VCDEasy, 704x480 or 576. For Nero, the thing seems to have a bit of a brain hemorrhage, PAL has to be 704x528 (and just choose 'center') or it resizes it badly; NTSC I haven't yet figured out, 480 may be OK, or a smaller number yet.
Weak sharpen again, and run a 1-pixel, straight vertical motion blur on it. This stops the text (and some bits of the pic) shimmering nastily, but doesn't actually remove much resolution or readability. Save as a BMP (or whatever format works).

Now, a couple paths.

VCDEasy
Import into VCDEasy as the first item, then the movie, extras, pics etc. Have links out from it connected via the player buttons and number keys (eg, the movie would be PLAY and/or FFWD, and 01-Enter; extras could be RRWD to get the first one (then FFWD to skip thru the rest) and other numbers), and links back via the RETURN button, or RRWD/FFWD on the movie/last extra. Link the others together in any which way
Burn. Done.

Nero
Add in the movie and extras in the order as you tracklisted on the pic (may want to do this before making the pic actually; then you can be sure of what arbitary order Nero's put them in). Open the Compilation Info dialogue. Enable menu, choose your pic as background, and center it. Remove all default text and dividing lines. Now the tricky / timewasting bit.
Set text to "Titles - Centre" (i think.. could be Centred Titles, which are two different things). Open up the movie and change the name to one LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG lot of spaces. Just do eight or nine then copy-paste is fastest. Then select the whole lot before pressing OK and copy it to clipboard. Use the copied spaces to make changing the name of any extras and pics to " " a whole lot quicker. If you've added enough, you should get an error saying about the name being truncated, this is fine.

Now when you preview the menu (select it and hit the play button at the bottom)... there should be no 'extra' text (added by nero) on the image, not even the track numbers for the titles. And it should all be one page with no page-counter, unless you've added a LOT of stuff; as well as getting rid of the numbers, this process shrinks the (unseen) font down really small so about 30 items would fit on the page were you using it 'properly'.

Then hit burn

There is an easier method than the menu-tricker, using some 'blank' font that can be downloaded, but it hasn't caused me problems yet.. it doesn't take so much time. Despite the longer explanation it's easily 3x faster than doing it in VCDEasy.. just setting all those links to be easier than the standard oddness takes a while. Neros are similarly odd, and unchangable, but not quite as bad. Just use the numbers and FFWD/RWD/Return.


Anything more complex than that, I'm afraid, I don't know. No use for it yet You can make video menus, but the rez will be a bit low.. VCD is fine for films but not for text.. you get an effective resolution something akin to a Genesis.


Oh and in case you're wondering... I don't bother with chapters. Not worth the time and hassle of extracting, fixing, applying etc (and learning how to do it ). Rarely use them on DVD (films are made to watch all in one go, surely), and just use the search-by-time instead if needed on the VCD. Plus they mess with the numbering of the extras...

[ckdexterhn1]

You can also make VCD menus quick and easy with Ulead Movie Factory 2.

I don't use menus on my VCD's because menus can cause VCD's to be unplayable on some DVD players, as they get stuck on the opening screen.

[EddyH]

Figured out the Nero resolution problem... thought that the 528 size difference seemed familiar

It's trying to fit the pic proportionally to 704x576 from 768x576, automatically compensating for size even if you've done it yourself (so goodbye Ms and stuff). So if it's 576 high it looks OK but horizontally smurshed. If it's 720 wide it gets messed up anyway. 704x528 just so happens to exactly fit into 768x576.. It even does it with stillframes too, somehow I never noticed this when it did it to my pics before (though I -thought- they were a bit narrow.. horizontal resizing is far less noticable on TVs than vertical, especially now i've measured my set to only have about 350 horizontal-line resolution instead of the full DVD 500 :/ )

And this probably happens in reverse from 640x480 for NTSC.

No "do not automatically resize this picture in a dumb way" option? Bad Ahead.GmbH! No Bratwurst!
What's worse is it can't grok MPG stills produced by VCDEasy either.

So, guess this means either shifting to 768x576/640x480 pics and lumping the horizontal squish, or using nothing but VCDEasy from now on. Working the button translation and getting it burnt is a total pain in the ghiblies though (can't get my ASPI to work for love nor money, so CDRDao has to be worked... by hand, in a DOS box).
Anyone know of a way to produce a Nero-burnable file from VCDEasy? Like a .bin and .cue rather than all that .toc nonsense?

Meh.

[vitualis]

Regarding menus, I suggest you read the relevant guides here: http://www.michaeltam.com

It explains the resizing issue as well.

As for creating an MPEG still image to measure overscan, that's on the Official VCDHelp.com Demo VCD here: http://www.vcdhelp.com/vcd

As for VCDEasy, I'm not too sure where your pain lies. The ASPI issue is actually quite easy...

Download ForceASPI from here: http://www.michaeltam.com/aspilayer.html

Install it.

Reboot PC immediately.

That's it.

If you don't want to burn with VCDEasy, I'm not too sure where your problem lies either... VCDEasy (which is a front-end to VCDImager) creates standard CUE/BIN images and you can burn that with a number of proggies including CDRWin or Nero (as long as you have a recent version).

If you have an older version of Nero and Nero is the ONLY working burner on your PC (which implies you need to get some newer burning proggies!), you can do the following.

Have VCDEasy only create the XML descriptor file of your project.

Then download and install VCDImager Tools GUI from here: http://www.michaeltam.com/vcdimager_tools_gui.html

Load the program and choose the option lkVCDxBUILD.

Load the XML file. You will notice that one of the build options is to create an NRG (Nero) image.

Click Go and once it's done, you will have used VCDEasy/VCDImager system to have made a VCD in the Nero disc image format.

Also, contrary to a remark by a previous poster, have menus will not make your VCD less compatible, as long as you make your menus properly and you use a program that knows what it's doing. Nero has had a reputation (don't know about the newer versions) of screwing up menus so that they hang on software players and even some hardware ones. However, if you use a program that is known to be good (i.e., VCDEasy/VCDImager, VCD Toolkit, VideoPack, a few others), menus will work properly and as expected on ALL VCD compatible devices.

I generally make menus of ALL the VCDs I make. If it is a backup or conversion from a DVD there will at least be the main menu (which is from the DVD main menu) and the screens for scene selection. Depending on the mood I'm in, I may or may not also backup additional material (e.g., biography, cast and crew, etc.)

Regards.

[Rond66]

MAGIX video deLuxe 2.0 can supply your movie with a graphic selection menu. It appears when you insert the disc into your player. For all formats VCD, SVCD, MiniDVD and true DVDs.

Movie menus and chapter menus. In addition to the movie menus, there is a chapter menu for each movie. Select a movie and switch to the applicable chapter menu. Now you can select individual chapters via the remote control.

[vitualis]

VCDEasy can do all the above and more for S/VCD... and it's free...

Regards.

[MaximumIce]

Got a question,

Do any of you know a simple way of getting Text superimposed on the last frame of an SVCD so that you are prompted to Enter Disc 2?

The standard 'print screen' on to the clipboard method doesn't work for me. I dunno why, maybe I don't have a clipboard??? If someone could help out with that one, it would be helpful.

THanks
ICE

[Matt D]

For a prompt to enter another disc, just create a menu page that plays right after the first disc video ends. VCDeasy is by far the way to go because you can create incredibly detailed discs and the proggie is FREE.

[yuzzy]

Another exellent free tool is VCDcomposer whish is not as popular as VCDEasy in here but still can do complex menus. Much Easyer, and most of all... you can save your work !!!

[adam]

Latest version of VCDEasy now lets you save and load your work.

[yuzzy]

maybe i should upgrade my hard drive... I might be missing al lot of new stuff...LOL