Menu authoring with video descriptions?

[vance003]

I am trying to create a BD that will be a collection of various video files. The menuing demands are relatively easy. I would like to have a single top level menu that allows me to scroll through the choices to pick the video I want. Chapters within the videos are not needed, nor are in-video pop-up menus. I think multiAVCHD would be good for that bare-bones description, but there is a wrinkle that has me scratching my head. In this menu, when each video choice is highlighted / scrolled to, I would like to be able to present onscreen a brief (one or two sentence) description of the video. So I have to reserve a bit of screen real estate in the menu for essentially a comments box --- easy enough, but then for each video I need to link it to the brief verbal description that would appear when it is the highlighted choice in the menu. Does anyone know of a consumer-level authoring program that can handle these per-video comments?

[MindController]

I'm not aware of the Blu-ray format allowing you to do what you described.

[Cornucopia]

There is no function in the Blu-ray spec that automatically creates/supports such a feature. This can of course be "emulated" in either BD or DVD by figuring out all the possible choices/options ahead of time, finding the info for them and creating "menus" with text info included in them. Whether Consumer-level or Pro-level, doesn't matter - will have to be done by hand.

I would venture that an app could be created that generates menus with the text provided by tags or comment fields or a spreadsheet/database, but there is such a rare need for this specific kind of app, that I believe YOU would be one of the few benefitting from it. Since DVD and BD already have a strict subset of possible codecs & settings, so you already kind of know what you're getting, and it is already guaranteed to work with your player.

Scott

[manono]

You can't just create the comments at the beginning of each video - encode a 2-second long video with text and append it at the beginning of a video?

[poisondeathray]

I think Scott is talking about the "switched menu" technique - it can be done but the downsides are audio is interrupted, and switching latency can be high (it depends on specific player model)

[videopoo]

I am trying to create a BD that will be a collection of various video files. The menuing demands are relatively easy. I would like to have a single top level menu that allows me to scroll through the choices to pick the video I want. Chapters within the videos are not needed, nor are in-video pop-up menus. I think multiAVCHD would be good for that bare-bones description, but there is a wrinkle that has me scratching my head. In this menu, when each video choice is highlighted / scrolled to, I would like to be able to present onscreen a brief (one or two sentence) description of the video. So I have to reserve a bit of screen real estate in the menu for essentially a comments box --- easy enough, but then for each video I need to link it to the brief verbal description that would appear when it is the highlighted choice in the menu. Does anyone know of a consumer-level authoring program that can handle these per-video comments?

Consumer level? No way.

[Tom Saurus]

If your original videos where .mpeg2 files you could drop them into Womble Mpeg Video Wizard as it has a fairly good Title function. What I do is I drop the video on the timeline, then I select Location and Duration. Then I make sure I select Frame and input 151 into the box. This way I can put a five second title that I created onto the title line. The five second title takes up exactly 150 frames.

I suppose what you could do is create a blank .bmp the size of the video frame of the video you are working with. I have done this in the past, but I am drawing a blank exactly how I did it. I know somehow I used a program to stretch that .bmp after I put the appropriate text on it, to the duration of 5 seconds. Then I looked at the exact specs of the file I wanted to append it to and made sure I encoded the .bmp to become a .avi or whatever that matched for bit rate, ect. Then if the files were the same type I would append them together using AviDemux.