Several DVDs incl. ORIGINAL Menu on 1 DVD-R

[crazyluke]

Any Ideas out there ?
I have e.g. two DVDs each 2,5 GB size with rather complex menus (takes much effort to reauthor it myself). I'd like to copy these two DVDs on 1 DVD-R and want to keep the original Menus.
The idea is to generate one toplevel Menu where I can select each dvd with it's original menu.
Any help appreciated :P

[crazyluke]

C'mon guys. Over 50 views and no idea.
It seems that I'm not the only one

[andkiich]

Do a forum search, this topic has been covered a bunch of times.

[crazyluke]

Sorry no way.
I did, but all solution require re-authoring of the menus yourself and I want to keep both original menus.
can you give me the link to the thread ?

[Jimmykicker]

This is something that I have been interested in too for a long time -- never seen anything on how to do it. As far as I can tell, you can only easily have one working original menu on a DVD...this is unless you know how to and can spend like a million years to redo all the menu links in the 2nd menu...something that I can't figure out how to do EASILY. It would be nice to see an easy solution to keeping two working menus...

[SLK001]

It can be done, just create a new original menu that is just a selection menu that selects either of the movie menus that you want to view. However, you will have to REMAP VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING (VTS sectors, etc), and as Jimmy said, is not a particularly easy task.

You have to remember that a DVD is not a file system (if it was, this would be a piece of cake), but is a file structure.

[crazyluke]

Hi. Thank you for your responses.

Maybe I am too naive. I just thought that regardless of what filestructure a DVD has there is always one thing constant which is the time (actual playing time of the movie).
From my point of view a menu-link can be interpreted as a link to a certain point in movie-playing-time (as you do it when reauthoring yourself). So shouldn't it be possible to map chapters and menu-links automatically to their respective movie-playing-time points ?
Then when putting several DVDs together these movie-playing-time points could be remapped to the respective DVD-Filestructure.
If this way of thinking was true, then it should be possible to find a tool somewhere, that does exactly this job....
????

[SLK001]

From my point of view a menu-link can be interpreted as a link to a certain point in movie-playing-time (as you do it when reauthoring yourself).

The DVD could care less about the movie times. The times are interpeted only by the player. The DVD file structure tells the player where to go next to get the data needed to display.

By far your easiest path would be to reauthor with an additional "Movie Select" menu.

[heiber]

So how do you remap vectors and such if you want to try and do this?

[crazyluke]

From my point of view a menu-link can be interpreted as a link to a certain point in movie-playing-time (as you do it when reauthoring yourself).

The DVD could care less about the movie times. The times are interpeted only by the player. The DVD file structure tells the player where to go next to get the data needed to display.

[added by crazyluke] OK. Still the position where to go could also be interpreted (by a tool) as a movie time when copying the dvd to HD, and vice versa when creating the new Filestructure for the copied DVD.
I guess my way of thinking is wrong, otherwise such a tool existed already

By far your easiest path would be to reauthor with an additional "Movie Select" menu.

[added by crazyluke] but this means that i lose the original film menus ?