Don't do this at home....

[DaBarrister]

Authored a home video DVD in DVD Architect with animated thumbnails for both the root and the chapter menus. I had been disappointed in the "jump" at the end of the looped video in the thumbnail, so I decided to increase the length of the audio and, consequently, the length of the video loop, so most people would never see the loop point before making a selection. I increased the loop to almost 2 and a half minutes for the root menu and 4 pages of chapter thumbnails (6 each).

I forgot that DVDA has to reauthor the video and audio for each screen. Do you have any idea how long it takes to create the video and audio for five pages of thumbnails? Well, in my experience it turns out to be 16+ hours, at the end of which the computer will crash without writing the video_ts files needed for burning.

Since I had Go Back installed it should have been a breeze to recover... nope. Go Back also crashed and uninstalled itself, leaving me with a corrupted master boot record. Of course, I had no idea that the MBR was damaged - I only knew that Go Back would not run, Windoze would not load, and the disk would not boot. Rather than tell me what was wrong with the hard drive, Windoze forced me to run Scandisk, which would promptly hang at various % marks every time I used it, even when booting from a floppy.

Recover disks would not work - they could not even diagnose the problem. Same goes for recovery software like Lost and Found, which found only 10% of the files on the disk. I had recently backed up the drive, so the only important data at risk was my current project, and I could read the contents of the disk as a slave to another disk, so the data wasn't lost and the drive wasn't completely dead. Still, I didn't want the pain of reformatting, reloading Windoze and a ton of other programs.

Please note that I am not a computer newbie (I built my own system from scratch) but I was totally in the dark with this problem. Luckily, after days of searching for a solution I happened upon a site that recommended FDISK /MBR to restore a "generic" master boot record for a frozen harddrive. Booted to floppy. Restored the MBR. Crossed fingers. Booted. Cured! And all the old video was there, so I didn't have to recapture and reedit.

I will now be authoring a new DVD with 20 seconds (tops! I promise!) of animated thumbnails. Or, maybe I'll skip the whole animated thumbnail thing. It's overrated anyway.... but a motion background would be cool!

Lessons learned/confirmed:
1) BUD: Back Up Data (confirmed);
2) KATS: Keep Animated Thumbnails Short (learned); and
3) Don't trust in recovery disks, recovery software, or any progs that modify ANYTHING in track zero (tough lesson learned).

This is my story. Don't make the same mistake I did. With respect to the solution I used - use at your own risk. Since I was nearly fully backed up I had little to lose. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

[garryheather]

Doesn't the DVD spec limit the "animated menus" video to 20 seconds ?

I think you have been well and truly wasting your time with that one, my friend.

[teegee420]

Tough break man, I feel for you. I had a simillar crash and I was able to fix the boot record by running the recovery console from the WinXP install disc and using the "fixboot" command. Took all of 5 minutes.

[housepig]

Doesn't the DVD spec limit the "animated menus" video to 20 seconds ?

I don't think so - I know I've done animated menus that are a minute long.

unless it's a limitation of his authoring software.

[noki]

DaBarrister
which windoze OS are you running? thanks

[DaBarrister]

Garryheather: As far as I know, the only limit on menus (motion or not) is that the total size may not exceed 1GB. It may be that my menus may have exceeded that amount (albeit DVDA expressed no reservations about re-encoding them), but there is no limit on the length of such menus. I've built 2 pages of 30 second animated menus before this without a problem.

As best I can tell, by the way, the only time "20" is mentioned as a "limitation" in the DVD spec is on the number of chapters per movie, and I actually had 20 (3 screens of 6 each and 1 screen of 2, total 20. I stated earlier that I had 4 screens of 6 due to an editing error, and that's incorrect. Sorry for any confusion).

Motion menus of 20 seconds versus 15 seconds versus 30 seconds (and so on) seems to be a matter of taste, not specification, so long as the total size of all menus remains under 1 gig.

So as far as wasting my time? Yup, I thought that point was obvious from my post. The purpose in posting it here was so others would not make the same mistake re: encoding. Keeping it simple is better anyway. Have fun.

[DaBarrister]

Noki asked:

which windoze OS are you running? thanks

Windoze 98SE. I've finally gotten it to the point where it is fairly stable, so I don't want to risk "upgrading" now (although I'd like to surpass the 4GB file limit).

[epo]

Shortly after I started with PC-video, I migrated to W2K mainly because of 98's crashes. Lifting 4GB limit was only a bonus (when HW-capturing to MPEG2, one can live with limit, but this life isn't very good).

About this 20-chapter-limit... It exists in Ulead DVD (not MF, another one) trial only. IIRC, spec limit is 99, like title number limit.

[DaBarrister]

Epo is correct re: limitations. Thanks for the tip in.