DVD-style navigation

[Silver Zero]

Hey all, here's a question. I'm making an autoplay DVD for use on a computer. I'm building a DVD-style menu to navigate with. My question is, does anybody know of a way to allow the user to navigate from button to button (i.e. chapter thumbnails) with a single click of, say, a remote control button? I'm using Autoplay Media Studio, and the forums there are not geared toward simple folk like me.

Any ideas? Thanks!

[daxriggz]

If I understand the question correctly then yes, TMPGEnc DVD Author can do just that. It even lets your buttons have motion to them. Like for example, it will play a loop of like the first 15 seconds of each chapter in the chapter select thumbnail! I hope that helps you, if not, please feel free to be more specific and i will see if i can help you further!

[andkiich]

DVD-Lab can do this too.

[Silver Zero]

I don't know if this will change answers, but here's some more specifics: I'm burning this disc as a data DVD, not re-encoding. I'm burning a lot of .avi files, and then just building an autoplay.exe file system that will spool up when I pop the DVD in a drive (on a PC-based media system, not a standalone, because I don't want to re-encode and use all that extra space). The reason I was using AMS was because it was the only autorun frontend I found that worked for me. But I will have to check out some of your suggestions.

[daxriggz]

oh, ok, i see what you mean now, guess that explains why you were using auto play menu studio. let me think for a sec about the way i would approach it... hmmm.... ok, so you want to use regular avi's to watch in your computer, that include menus. (not a bad idea actually) well, to be honest, i also would go about it using AMS. i know that you can in fact use thumbnails to link around in the autoplay menu that you create. if you need me to go further in depth, message me back and i'll try to help walk you through it. but the basic idea is to branch of from title to avi and so on... by branch off i mean, from the title page to an alternate page built with your thumbnails. ok and for the chapters, that may very well be harry. not hard, just time consuming and take up quite a bit of space as you would have to divide the video file into seperate pieces, via tmpgenc or v-dub, whatever you'd prefer. i assume that since you would not necessarily want to have to manually click each chapter, you'd have to also put the movie as a whole onto the dvd, which would leave you with one full version and the chopped chapters, leaving you with 2 versions of each movie on the dvd, still most likely at around 700 for a complete dvd-ripped to avi, alot less space consuming way to do it. i'm sorry if this is a jumble, i can try to clear it up for you if there's something you don't understand. i'd be happy to try!

[Silver Zero]

Hey daxriggz, thanks for checkin' up on me. I actually got somebody to hold my hand over at the Indigo Rose forums (and build a sample project for me to copy), and I've got a good handle on what to do now. I can map out arrow keys to jump from one button/thumbnail to the next, and then trigger an action whenever I want. It might take a few minutes, but I've got all the pages set up already (after making a Photoshop template it went quick). Since I'm burning a bunch of separate movie files, chapters aren't really what I meant, just that concept (each episode is already a seperate file). Also, since I'm using a bunch of seperate files, I'm just going to link a "Play All" button to a playlist that will load into Zoom Player.

I must say, I recommend AMS for this type of project. This whole idea seems great to me, but just because it gives me another excuse to build a media PC. I love recombining all my random hardware.

[daxriggz]

Very glad to see ya got the help you needed! If there's anything else you run across that you need, just give me a post or a pm! Good Luck!!!