MPEG Stills Problem Using VCDEasy

[yweichin]

I tried following the guide posted in http://www.vcdeasy.org in producing MPEG stills using VCDEasy 1.1.3.

Requirement:
Create a VCD 2.0 with 1 main menu and about 20+ pages of sub-menus to displaying around 600 photographs in total.

Within the main menu,
1. Pressing the numbers from 1 to 20 will display the corresponding sub-menus.

Within each sub-menu,
1. Pressing the Previous and Next buttons will display the previous / next page of the sub-menu.
2. Pressing the Return key will display the main menu.
3. Pressing the numbers from 1 to 20 will display the respective photographs.

Within the photographs page,
1. Pressing the Previous and Next buttons will display the previous / next photographs of the same category.
2. Pressing the Return key will display the previous sub-menu.

All the menu and photographs are JPG files which are converted to MPEG stills using the Mjpeg Tools v1.6.0 rc2 from VCDEasy 1.1.3.

After generating the BIN/CUE file, the image was burned using Nero 5.5.8.0.

The burned Video CD 2.0 and the intended interactivity works perfectly when played back on a JVC DVD player. However, the CD could not be played at all in a Pioneer DVD player and a Panassonic 5-disc changer VCD 2.0 player. On the Pioneer, it simply says "PBC Play" but nothing is displayed. On the Panassonic, it just says "Reading". Both the Pioneer and Panassonic players have no problems playing movies from Video CD 2.0 CDs.

I have tried using both the PAL high resolution (704 x 576) as well as PAL low resolution (352 x 288) and the results are the same. In high resolution, I also tried varying the quality from 220kb to 194kb but the results are still the same.

Does anyone have any idea what could be the problem?

Thank you in advance.

[Bizuser]

Could you possibly tell me how to create the submenus you refer to? The guide I found only tells me how to create a basic picture VCD, which worked great. I have the same desire as you - main menu, multiple sub-menus. Don't care about transitions or music.

If you can tell me how you did this, I'll burn one myself and try it on my various players - Apex 1500D, Akai DVPS 760, etc.

Thanks!

[yweichin]

By the way, I figured out what went wrong for the problem above. It is due to the fact that I burned the BIN file directly using Nero. This obviously did not work. The correct method is to select the CUE file which will in turn burn the BIN file in the correct format.

The submenus I am referring are actually just another menu page created as an image, just like the main menu. To quote an example,

The main menu can have the following options
1. Cars
2. War Planes
3. Passenger Planes

The submenu of Cars can consists of the following:
1. Mercedes
2. BMW
3. Lexus

The submenu of War Planes can consists of the following:
1. F-15
2. F-16
3. F-18

The submenu of Passenger Planes can have the following:
1. Boeing 747
2. Boeing 777

In the main menu, define the behaviours for the numeric keys 1, 2 & 3 to open the Cars, War Planes and Passenger Planes respectively.

In the submenu of Cars, define the behaviours for the numeric keys 1, 2 & 3 to open the respective photographs of Mercedes, BMW & Lexus respectively. Define Rteurn key to open the main menu.

In the submenu of War Planes, define the behaviours for the numeric keys 1, 2 & 3 to open the respective photographs of F-15, F-16 & F-18 respectively. Define Rteurn key to open the main menu.

In the submenu of Passenger Planes, define the behaviours for the numeric keys 1 & 2 to open the respective photographs of Boeing 747 & Boeing 777 respectively. Define Rteurn key to open the main menu.

In the photograph screen, define the Previous and Next keys to open the previous and next photographs. Define the Return key will return to the submenu of the respective sub menu. For Example, the Previous key of BMW will open Mercedes, the Next key of BMW will open Lexus. The Return key will open the sub menu of Cars.

Be warned that this is a rather tedious process and you will need to define each and individual menu options explicitly. It will take several hours if you have hundreds of photographs.

[Bizuser]

I get it - menus and submenus are nothing more than still pictures, with many keys defined. It's up to you (the author) to make those still pictures look like menus - that is, to have text and numbers as a guide, then define the 'interactivity' for each menu. Hmmm - yes, I see how that could be very tedious! However - you could stop the menu at the 'cars' / 'warplanes' / 'passenger planes' level, and link the 'cars' key (1) to the first of many 'car' pictures; link the 'warplanes' key (2) to the first of many warplanes, etc. On the first car picture, you could define the 'next' to be the next car, and 'return' to be the menu, and ... here's the tricky part I'm not sure of yet ... automate the application of this behavior to all car pictures? Is there a way to automate the application of 'next' to the next item in sequence, rather than having to hard code it to the next one?

If money were no object, is there a good program for this kind of thing? I have used various web authoring tools that do this for web pages - auto-generate thumbnails and links so you can manage hundreds of pictures for posting to web. In fact, life would be easy if TVs/DVDs could read html - you could build a web page for your images on the web, then burn to CD, and pop into the DVD player. Menuing would be a challenge since there's no mouse (yet) with TV/DVDs...

In the meantime, I played with Nero. It did a GREAT thing ... I chose "VCD", dumped a bunch of pictures into it, and enabled the 'menus' feature. It automatically built a menu with numbers and file names as lables. You pop it into the DVD player, and up pops the menu! You press the key for the menu entry and up pops the picture. You can return to the menu, or, just press next/previous to navigate through the pictures. The only problem, I think, is you can't layer your menus - it's just one big menu (multipage, though) with an entry per pic, while what I want is a high level menu per category, without a menu entry per picture. Back to the drawing board ...

Hmmm ... I can see why this is not easy!

The Disk I built using VCDeasy played great on my Akai DVPS 760, but stumbled on my apex 1500D - it skipped images for no apparent reason.

[yweichin]

Actually, the Previous and Next interactivity is assiged to the previous and next picture by default, provided you dragged the MPEG stills into VCDEasy in the correct sequence. One way is to name the filename so they appear in sequence.

For example, you could name them as "1-Mercedes.mpg", 2-BMW" & "3-Lexus". However, the Next interactivity of "3-Lexus" will be set to the next file (maybe 1-F-16.mpg) by default. You will need to explicitly set it to "Event Disabled".

I could not find any other program which allows interactivity to be set in such details besides VCDEasy. Neros has a limit of only 99 pictures. Other software such as Ulead PictureStudio does not seem to allow such details to be defined. I heard Philips VCD Toolkit can accomplish such tasks bu the learning curve seems to be rather steep. I have not figured out how it works yet.

[Matthias Kloppmann]

I am new to VCDEasy -- have learned about it from the current version of the German magazine c't, which mentioned it in its most recent edition last Friday, and really like it. Since then, I have spent a couple of nights to burn a still image VCD like the one described in this thread, with sub-menus allowing access to a range of pictures.

I would have loved to assign the return key of each picture to go back to the menu, and the numeric keys to go to the respective section. However, doing this for 250+ pictures is a tedious task, to say the least.

Is there a more efficient way to assign the same keys to a bunch of pictures? I assume not, so the next logical question: Is this something delphi might consider for a future release? It sounds like this would be a useful feature for others, too (?).

Thanks for a great program.
-Matthias

[sterno]

Be warned that this is a rather tedious process and you will need to define each and individual menu options explicitly. It will take several hours if you have hundreds of photographs.

If you want to avoid spending any money and are willing to do some experimenting and learning, you might be able to reduce a little of your work by using ImageMagick's "montage" program to automate creating the thumbnail screens. It's not a pretty pointy-clicky GUI application, but it's very versatile and will directly read and write a very wide variety of image formats. http://www.imagemagick.org/

Is there a more efficient way to assign the same keys to a bunch of pictures?

In the current version (1.1.3) you can click the ellipsis button (the "..." button) next to the function you want to assign and it'll pop up a window where you can select pictures (or movies, or chapters) to copy the current setting to.