Creating custom menus to replace existing, keeping heirarchy

[Sgaileach1]

I have been eagerly awaiting the end of my one day moratorium on posting after signing up for a new account here. In the meantime I have searched the forums for what I thought would be a relatively common question, however while there are indeed many threads dealing with the general concept of menus and subpictures, none seemed to address the software and process involved with this particular scenario.

So, here’s the scenario:

I have a DVD of Final Fantasy Advent Children, and for the past weeks (okay, more like a month) I have been working on a personal English translation, and now have a final working copy synced up to the video as I like it.

My goal is to maintain all the menus and chapter navigation of the original movie; however I also want to eliminate some of the extra features from the disk so as to reduce compression loss on burning to a new DVD. This much has not proven a problem, thanks to the “replace block” feature of DVD Remake Pro.

I even went so far as to extract the video sequence for the main menu and applied a mask over the two buttons that previously linked to the special features so that the others continued to animate, as opposed to simply switching to a still.

The problem I encounter is when I play the reauthored disk the menu buttons are now all offset (well, just for the menus that I edited, the chapter navigation buttons still seem okay.) Also, the particular track with the menus is set to 16:9 pan/scan (letterbox is not checked), yet for some reason the menus I changed are acting like a combination of both, essentially squishing the entire thing into the 4:3 frame and distorting the aspect ratio, and throwing off the buttons as well.

Here is my question: How can I keep the button programming and flow of the original menu structure while also replacing the default movie and background files for these with my own custom versions, preventing the subpicture from becoming out of alignment, maintaining aspect ratio, and also using my own custom sub picture for the menu with the still background so that I can modify the setup section to use English words for the sound selection buttons as well? (This last part is not as important as the former two.)

If anyone can help me with this I would be extremely grateful, as I wanted to be able to show this at Christmas to family and friends who will be over.

I have read much material on the general concept of using DVD Lab to replace or create custom menus, however it is apparently not capable of importing entire DVD hierarchy from disk as DVD Remake can do. Besides, I’m not sure how I would keep the original programming and flow of the menu structure.

[FulciLives]

I just bought the USA DVD release of GODZILLA: FINAL WARS and there is a trailer on it for FF IV: ADVENT CHILDREN.

So I am sure an official English subbed DVD is on the horizon.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[manono]

Hi-

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=555936#post555936

That should give you some ideas about how to go about it. He replaced the subtitle menu still with his edited one, which is part of what you're doing. Replacing a motion menu follows the same principle.

As far as replacing the subpictures goes, I don't know how to do that. You should be able to extract the bitmaps and replace them, but I've never had to do that before. I have followed that guide successfully on a number of occasions though, with my own Japanese R2 DVDs. If your only problem is the DAR of some of the replaced menus, (I didn't understand all of that part of your post), then that can be changed using PGCEdit. If some of your edited menu M2Vs are the wrong DAR before replacing, you can change that using ReStream.

None of this requires DVDRemake. Even replacing the reencoded movie back into the DVD is a simple matter using the freeware VobBlanker.

[FulciLives]

You might want to look at this link first ---> CLICK HERE

What's the point of doing this now that an official release is about to come out?

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Sgaileach1]

Thanks for the quick reply to this post. This is a very helpful forum.

I was able to follow Msc_Alex’s guide with both the stills for the audio/subtitles menu as well as the motion for the main menu, and when viewing in Power DVD it looks more or less perfect.

However, I am having the same problem now that one of the users posted as a follow up to that thread, which is that when viewing the DVD on my TV DVD player, the button highlights are appearing out of alignment.

Can anyone help me through the process of creating a new subpicture for my menus and overlaying/muxing it correctly?

[Sgaileach1]

Well, I managed to extract all the subpicture elements for both 4:3 and 16:9 from the menu vob, so now what I really need is a guide on how to replace the existing subpicture tracks.

[manono]

Hi-

I didn't know the answers to your followup questions, so I went looking for help. My friend blutach of Doom9 and DivX-Digest kindly offered some comments and suggestions:

1. He should use MenuShrink on his menus – he can keep the ones animated that he wants animated and still the ones he wants stilled. The aspect ratio and commands are kept perfectly.
2. If he has problems with menu button commands/positions, he can use PgcEdit’s menu editor to change them. Ditto for aspect ratio. Very simple job. (Edit by manono: Open the DVD in PGCEdit, use the Preview to find the right menu, right-click the highlighted menu and hit "Menu Buttons" and then "Edit". There's a wealth of things you can do in there, including setting how long the menu remains on screen and repositioning the buttons.)
3. Here is a monster thread about menu making with muxman thanks to goonix:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=99306
– buried in it is a method which works brilliantly (see post 10) (Edit by manono: I think that in Posts 1 and 10 can be found the answer to the question in your last post)
4. That old method by msc_alex is (to the best of my knowledge) the basis of MenuShrink’s and VobBlanker’s methodology of Menu2Stills (and probably Dimad’s too) – a great thread, and a method which I used to use all the time before jeanl came up with something which did it in the blink of an eye (Edit by manono: News to me. I'll have to go and find out about this. jeanl is the author of MenuShrink and has written a number of guides for PGCEdit, so I guess it's in PGCEdit. I don't know for sure)
5. Creating new menus from scratch – try DVD Styler (free at Sourceforge) or Numenu4u (from Zeul). PgcEdit also has a little guide on overlaying a big invisible button, if that’s what he wants.

I hope that some of that information is useful to you. If you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask. You're way out of my league now, but I sometimes know who to ask about things. Many of the authors and experts of these tools hang out at Doom9. If you haven't registered, it'll take 5 days from the time you register until the time you can post there. I'm not trying to direct you away from this excellent forum, but some forums specialize in some things more than in others.

[Sgaileach1]

Thanks for taking the time for such a thoughtful reply. I also wanted to say I have since figured this out sufficiently to finalize my project, so again thanks for all the help.

If anyone is interested, I posted a link to my own subtitle text (in both .SSA and .SUP format) along with a tutorial for replacing the Japanese track on the present DVD over on the Advent Children.net forums.

http://forums.adventchildren.net/showthread.php?t=55716

Happy Holidays!

SG1

[manono]

Hi-

I'm glad you figured it out. Nice guide you wrote. However, your last paragraph says:

In DVDRemake go to file, Import DVD, and select your previous output folder. Click to highlight "Video Title Set 2," and on the menu to the right click the "SubPicture Tracks" tab. Double-click "Track 0" to change the language to English and the Description to normal. Click file, Export DVD, create/choose a new folder, and viola!

This can be done more-or-less instantly, with no recompile necessary, using the freeware PGCEdit. Open the DVD in PGCEdit and double-click on the movie. In the lower left of the new screen, hit "Current Domain Streams Attributes". In the new screen, for SubPic 0, change ja to en, and unspecified to normal, OK your way out of there and save the DVD. Test it out in PowerDVD or whatever software DVD player you have, delete the PGCEdit backup folder, and you're ready to burn.

[Sgaileach1]

Thanks again, that is definitely a much easier process than the shareware alternative with recompile.

The only issue I'm having now seems to be with my dual-layer burner. It seems perhaps the technology is not perfected, or the industry rather not quite prepared to accept it, because several burners I bought before this one (a pioneer, the best of the lot) wouldn't burn standard discs at all.

(Probably a conspiracy to get us all buying widescreen/plasma TV’s!)

This one still seems to fail like 50% of the time. A friend and expert on digital media suggested I first copy my disc to ISO, then burn it. However, I am not certain what application I might use to do this for a DVD dual-layer.

Also, I am currently uncertain whether telling Nero to burn at-once while compiling is such a good idea, though it seems to fail just as often either way.

* edit *

I just found a guide here that seems to explain the above proces, so I'm trying it out.

How to burn Dual Layer Disks with PgcEdit

[Baldrick]

please post dvd to dvd reauthoring in the dvd to dvd forum. moving you.

[manono]

Yes, that's the guide to which I was going to point you. You have to choose a place for the layer break, and it's better (in my opinion also, like your friend) to create the ISO first.

The more you learn about PGCEdit, the more you'll find it indespensible for so many things.

[Sgaileach1]

There is so much outstanding freeware software available today. I cannot give praise enough to the authors and their talented generosity.