How to make a PC disc of movies with menu, etc

[DVantrease]

Here's what I want to do. I want to take about 30-40 WMV videos and put them onto a DVD disc, in such a way that when I put the disc in my pc DVD drive, a menu comes up with thumbnails, and I can just click on the movie I want to watch. Ideally, when I quit playing a movie, it will go back to the menu. To clarify, this is for the PC, not for a standalone DVD player, so I won't be converting from the WMV format. Does anyone know of a good program for doing this? I'm not sure if there's a standard name for this type of disc.


Thanks, Dave

[Bob W]

I think what you want is called VCD or SVCD format. There are many programs that will do what you want. Myself I would just use NeoDVD Plus to make a SVCD CDR disc with thumbnail menu.

[DVantrease]

No, I'm not looking to make a VCD/SVCD. That would mean converting to MPG and burning onto CDR. I'm going to keep the original WMV format and burn to DVD disc to play in the pc.

[Hardcoreruss]

Bob,

DVantrease said that he did not want to convert. The simplest method for me would be to copy them all straight to a disc, when you insert the disc windows will ask what you want to do. Select files and folders and then right click in explorer and choose view and then details.

[thor300]

I would convert the WMVs to Mpeg2 with Half D1 resolution and then author with a dvd authoring proggie to make the menus. In theory, for PC it should be possible to do it with WMV or other formats also, but i dont think there are any authoring programs that will allow you to author that kind of files to a DVD, and even if it was possible i guess most DVD software players would have problems playing such a disk, they would expect a Mpeg1 or Mpeg2 video stream.

[Hardcoreruss]

I would convert the WMVs to Mpeg2 with Half D1 resolution and then author with a dvd authoring proggie to make the menus. In theory, for PC it should be possible to do it with WMV or other formats also, but i dont think there are any authoring programs that will allow you to author that kind of files to a DVD, and even if it was possible i guess most DVD software players would have problems playing such a disk, they would expect a Mpeg1 or Mpeg2 video stream.

Again, he does not want to convert.

[thor300]

And i said i would convert. And anyway, he want menus, i didnt see you suggest a way to do what he wants.

[Hardcoreruss]

He said he wants a menu to come up with thumbnails, my method has answered his question.

[DVantrease]

To clarify what I want... It's very similar to when you are viewing a folders content under WinXP and select the 'thumbnails' view. Basically, I could just burn them all onto a 'data disc' format. and view the drive contents in thumbnail mode. Then, clicking on a file would launch my player, which is perfect.

The main reason I don't want to do this is so I can customize the thumbnail preview. It defaults to just showing the 1st frame of the movie, which is often just blank, and I'd want to customize it and select a much better sample frame.

Plus, I thought a menu would be handy if I give copies of my disc to friends.

[mats.hogberg]

Try some CD / DVD autostart application. A quick Google dug up this.

/Mats

[bunyip]

I use HTML/Javascript to do this.

You can create a thumbnail menu and using frames have it running down say that left side of the screen and arrange it so that when the user clicks on a thumbnail the video plays embedded in the right-side frame, double-clicking on the video will still have it play full-screen if you desire.

All the code and videos are bundled on the CD so the user just needs to click on the 'index.html' file to start it up or you can set up an autorun to start the index.html file when the CD is inserted.

The PC needs to have a web browser and windows media player for this to work.

[mats.hogberg]

...or for a truly platform independent solution, look at eMovix!

/Mats