Hotspot colours

[DEmberton]

Hi,

I'm playing with DVDAuthor and spumux and writing the XML files myself.

Quick question:

According to the spec, and according to the DVDAuthorGUI program, you can have 16 colours for the hotspots. However it seems few if any DVDs use more than one. Is there a reason, or is it just style? I'm thinking maybe it's part of the spec that wasn't fully supported so authors don't generally use it.

Dave

[borax]

I think you mean the colors for a highlighted (or selected) hotspot.
More or less it is style (or a simplification for the color management). Within my GUI for dvdauthor you may use two colors: One for the filled 'interior' of the hotspot and another one for the frame around it.

IIRC you have 4 'additional pictures' for a title on a DVD:
- Hotspot normal
- Hotspot highlighted
- Hotspot selected (activated)
- other subtitles

All these 4 pictures share the same 16 color palette.
As transparency also counts as one color, the number of 'useable' colors is 3 per picture (if each picture uses different colors, which is probably assumed by most authoring programs).

[DEmberton]

Thanks. Yes I'd delved a bit deeper yesterday and discovered it is 4 colours per image, and so effectively 3 as you need one to be transparent.

Still seems odd that most things only seem to use one. And with three alpha levels you can antialias, but most things don't seem to do that either.