Tell me how to make simple DVD menu

[Ka-Spel]

Hello all,

I’m new to the world of DVD burning so bare with me.
I have 2 episodes of a TV show that I want to burn to DVD-R using DVDshrink or NERO but I would like to add a very simple non-animated non-motion menu, and I would like to do this with a freeware program.

Is there such a program? I really want to do this as cheap as possible.
I found, how to make a menu using Photoshop (I have PS 5) from www.doom9.org but I wouldn’t know how to add it in the DVD files. I don’t know what to do next. So I’m looking for step by step, holding noob by the hand lessons.
Heres what I want:

Menu- basic background image
On top of that-
Show 1 (title of show, clickable). Next to that Small static box image of seen from show (clickable)
Below that-
Show 2 (title of show, clickable). Next to that Small static box image of seen from show (clickable)
All that as 1 Menu

That’s it. Seems like that would be simple enough right, can’t really find any tutorials searching on this forum.
What other programs would I need to author the files?
How, I tell you, How do I do this?

Yours truly,
~Ka-Spel~

[lordsmurf]

Use a template in your authoring software.

[jimmalenko]

TMPGEnc DVD Author, DVD-lab ... to name but two.

Go to the guides section, and select the tool in question that you are going to use. Press search, and it brings up all the guides that use that tool.

[fritzi93]

TMPGEnc DVD Author will do what you want, easily. But it's payware. As to freeware, dvdauthor can do it, in conjunction with one of the GUIs offered over <---there in tools.

You're looking at a lot of time here. Everything is manual. First you must view your movie(s) and note down the times for scene changes and capture a thumbnail for each. (Alternatively, you could do just one thumb for each title and enter arbitrary chapter points, i.e. every five minutes. This would be much quicker). Lay out your menu with thumbs in your image editing prog. When done, resize if necessary to 704 or 720x 480/576

Open DVDauthorGUI and create an m2v still of your menu. Add your title, manually enter chapter points (the format is time, not frames, 00:00:00.0, hrs: mins: secs.).Then you must associate your thumbs with specific nav commands, i.e., click a thumb and it takes you to the correct chapter point. Read a guide first!

Repeat for each titleset. Whew! Maybe you'd be better of just buying TDA. Although using dvdauthor will certainly help you learn about DVDstructure. It's possible other GUIs make it easier, I dunno, but I've used DVDauthorGUI a fair bit.

Good luck.

[jimmalenko]

TDA is free and fully functional for 30 days

[fritzi93]

TDA is free and fully functional for 30 days

Ah, forgot that. No question then which to use, unless you want to do all that rigamarole just for the hell of it.

[burnman99]

You could also try DVDBuilder, a free & simple menu creator/Author program that will accomplish the above task.

Have fun stormin' the castle!

Rog