creating menus on dvd for launching divx movies

[mdc007]

I have alot of divx movies on my hard drive that i want to put on dvds. I can get 3 or 4 movies on a dvd. I want to have a menu come up when i put the dvd in the drive to launch each individual movie. Has anyone done the same thing? I have gifs of the dvd covers that i would like to use for the menus can anyone help?

[gcgreen]

Ok, first you are going to have to convert the avi's into mpeg's (format for DVD). Then you will need to author the DVD and then burn it.

There are numerous guides giving step by step instructions on how to do this. I would suggest that you spend some time reading the guides first and then come back with specific questions.

[Innershield]

It sounds to me like he wanst to leave them in DivX format and burn them as data to the DVD because he said he wants to fit 3 or 4 movies on one DVD.

[gcgreen]

Sorry if I read your post incorrectly. I am not sure there is a way to have a menu written to a data DVD containing video files. Maybe if you could make an icon using the gif's as a shortcut to each individual video. If your DVD drive is set to autoplay it should open a window with the contents of the DVD.

[Silver Zero]

I'm revisiting this post to see if anybody has thought of any better ideas. I have a similar question about burning several avi's to a DVD data disc (not converting) and making an autorun/menu system that pops up when I put it in the PC-based drive.

Thoughts?

[mdc007]

ah a breakthrough. I havent had time to work on it recently but the is exactly what I want to happen - A popup menu of the titles that will play the avi on the computers default player !

[Silver Zero]

Are you saying you've figured something out, or just glad you found people with similar woes?

[Gazorgan]

Very simple way to do it.

A single HTML page with links to the files. Use relative links not absolute (you can't reference a drive letter, just reference teh file name). Put the HTML file in as Autorun and your done.

Basically you will have the autorun.inf file, and icon file, the HTML file, the AVI's and whatever jpeg/gif's you used in the HTML file. All of this is in the root of the DVDR.

LMFAO, I just cobbled something together on a CDRW and it works fine (1 MB avi's as a test).

[Silver Zero]

Haha, sweet, I actually thought of using an html file today, too! Great minds, I tells ya. . .

Still, I think I'm going to have to reapproach all this, because even having a way to launch these files from a menu leaves one fundamental problem: Once they're done playing, the player (whatever it is, WinDVD, for example) doesn't close itself out and return you to the html menu.

I wish I could solve this, it would be cooler, but I think another solution is to just autorun a playlist, then just skip between chapters. Might take a few seconds to get to the one you want, but it should be easy to throw together until this other issue is addressed.

[Silver Zero]

Add on to previous post: It appears that Zoom Player has an option to close itself when play ends. Intriguing. . .

[andkiich]

If you have any programming knowledge, it wouldn't take much to write a a quick and dirty app in Delphi/VB/VisualC to do this.

You could autorun it like was suggested before and have the app close down whatever player you are using.

I might actualy work on something like this. Give me a reason to play around with VB again. If I do, I'll post whatever I write for others to use.

Found this info on the Microsoft Knowledge Base. Might be useful if you want to use Media Player to play your files. You should be albe to launch these command from an HTML page.

Command Line Options Available for Windows Media Player

This article was previously published under Q241422

SUMMARY
When starting the Windows Media Player from a command prompt, you can specify several startup parameters.

MORE INFORMATION
The Windows Media Player has several command line options:

/open: Open the file, don't automatically start playing.
/play: Start playing the file as soon the player is launched.
/close: Close the player after playback (only works when used with /play).
/fullscreen: Start the file in full-screen mode.
/new: Use a new instance of the player.

For example, to play a file and close the player when done: Mplayer2.exe /play /close C:\Asfroot\Sample.asf