DVDLab Pro - Movie on first play won't work on all players?

[thechicane]

Hi. I am trying to get a 'splash'-like short movie to play before the root menu appears (using DVD Lab Pro v1). I want the root menu to automatically load after the splash movie without any intervention from the viewer.

I've gone to "Connections" view and connected the "First Play" button to the splash movie, and connected the movie to the root menu so it goes there after the splash movie plays. It works as I want when I play it on a software player (PowerDVD) on the PC, but it stops loading on my external DVD player as soon as the DVD loads up (it recognises it as a "DVD video" DVD but doesn't play anything). I can actually push play on the external player after it stops on loading and it goes straight to the first movie (not the splash movie).

I also tried connecting the splash menu to the "Title Button" in "Connections" view but the same thing occurred.

It worked as I wanted on another external player for me though.

Is it safe to say that this technique is highly incompatible or have I missed something else? I can't find much else on this on the forums (just one post highlighting how easy it is to get the connections working). Thanks for any help anyone can offer!

[SaSi]

You are doing the correct thing in DVDLab and obviously something is wrong or the first play video would play.

From within DVDLab, check in the assets window your splash video. What is the frame size and bitrate? Does it have audio? If so, what is the audio type (LPCM/AC3/MPEG) and what is the bitrate and sampling rate?

Possible causes for your problem are high bitrate for the splash video or no-audio or incompatible audio.

DVDLab can be made to ignore such incompatibilities of assets, however your DVD Player may not like the DVD.

S/W DVD players are a different thing. The decode and assume the best they can and will typically playback troublefree DVD Videos that are unplayable on standalone players.

[thechicane]

Thanks for the response. The splash movie is 4109kbps (which is not that high) so I don't think that's it (the same player handled some 8000kbps movies from the same DVD fine).

You've mentioned that having no audio can cause problems? That's one thing the splash screen doesn't have! Does that cause playback issues? Encoding the splash movie with some 192kps audio and recompiling in the meantime to see! Thanks.

[thechicane]

Damn. Adding audio to it didn't make that player play it either.

[guns1inger]

Audio should be the same for all titles within a titleset. It the first play clip is in it's own titleset, then you should be OK. It is is the same VTS as other movies, make sure the audio matches. (When I was caught out by this, at least it played - just with no audio).

Your best bet, if you haven't already, it to report this in the mediachance forums.

[SaSi]

Do you connect both the First Play and the Title circles to the menu? Is the menu a VTS menu or a VMG menu?

[thechicane]

Found the culprit! One of the movies' audio was encoded at 384kps and the rest were at 192kps (plus the splash uses a PCM WAV file). I removed the 384kps movie from the project and the splash and everything else played fine on the picky standalone player.

Now to keep that movie in I'll have to create a VMG project and shift everything to that. Is there any easy way to copy entire menus across from a VTS menu to VMG? Can't find any info on that on the boards or DVDLab Pro help (the help has some good b/g info re VTS/VMG that I didn't know though).