neoDVD, how-to???

[ktnwin]

A few of you (Bob W and housepig) have been very helpful in convincing me to buy (and save money) neoDVD software.
I am still very novice in dealing with neoDVD. Hope some of you can help me with these questions:

1) how to create a second menu and add chapters to it ? I can add a second menu but I cannot click EDIT in order to add chapter points.

2) neoDVD seems to support two levels of menu: top level allows to select a movie clip which bring you a another menu allowing selecting chapters within this movie clip. Does this mean I can have multiple video files on one project ? For example I can have 3 videos (camping, birthday, picnic). The top level will have 3 choices (3 thumbnails) and each will bring to a second level menu for each of those videos. Then I can choose the chapter to play in the selected video.

Also another little issue during DVD encoding with neoDVD. Twice, I ran into problems where neoDVD say it run out of virtual memory.

3) What caused this and how to solve that problem.

Thanks for any help.

[ktnwin]

No one answered, never mind. With patience, I finally figure out #1 and #2.
I still don't know why I got "out of virtual memory" (I have 256MB RAM), very large HDD available space. This is only a warning and neoDVD still complete authoring the DVD. So that's OK.

[SHS]

there no demo to download answered solove

[ktnwin]

Right, there is no demo. Thanks to Bob W's suggestion, I checked CompUSA and it sells an analog capture card bunbled with neoDVD standard for 39$+tax - 30$ rebate = ~13$ only.
For the superfast DVD conversion (with very good quality), 13$ is pretty cheap. All other MPEG conversions softwares I tried are slow (6 to 8 times slower), except CCE which cost a lot (250$ for the basic version).

[Bob W]

Yes you can have mulitiple files in one project. I have made movie DVD's using four files with four different main menus and sub chapter menus.

On the virtual memory thing. I would go into windows device manager and set the virtual memory myself to at least 1.5 times the ram or in your case set it to 384MB min, and 384MB max or even 500MB min/max . That should stop the error message. Finally 256MB is not a lot of ram these days.

[ktnwin]

Bob W,
thanks again for your response.
I have been able to create two levels menus with multiple video clips.
I do have anothe stick of 256MB memory, did not have time to install in my PC yet.
I will add RAM and increase the size of my virtual memory. Hopefully this will eliminate the problem.
I ran into another little problem (on two different projects): after about 5 mins into encoding, neoDVD generates an error and quits. I restart it and restart "MAKE DISC", also bring up the task manager (to watch CPU and memory usage) then it completes OK. I never had PS8 crashed on me during DVD authoring.

[Bob W]

Weird maybe a memory chip error. I would try just using the second 256MB chip by itself and see if the problem goes away. Computers are strange creatures and some take on their own personalities it seems.

[ktnwin]

Bob W,
I have ran diagnostic on my system (including memory test).
I had my first 256MB RAM failed on me causing random system crash before, so I bought a new stick to replace it , never had problem since.
The extra 256MB is the lifetime warranty replacement for the bad one, I just did not have time to install it.
If I have flaky RAM, PS8 and other apps will crash too. neoDVD when crashed, always after displaying the "not enough virtual memory" message. Hope that both will go away when I increase the virtual memory.

[ktnwin]

Bob W,
thanks for your solution. I no longer have "not enough virtual memory" messages.
I also downloaded the updated version neoDVD standard. This one encodes using variable bit rate, which is surprising.
My last few VHS to DVD projects take only 1X to encode/author. I do not have to wait 1 hour after the encoding part (still with just 256MB memory).