Duplicating the "Photo Gallery" effect....Eureka!

[NCC-2000]

I've tried searching theough the how-tos and forums looking for some help on this issue, but finding nothing specific enough to help me, I registered so I could ask for more help.

Here's the basis of what I want to do. I currently have all Garfield comic strips saved on my computer. All the way from June 19, 1978 to now, March 22, 2005. I think it would be really neat to create a DVD for viewing these comics, but with a more user friendly look as opposed to just dumping all the images on a CD and hoping the DVD player supports reading JPEGs.

Now, I've tried a few trial programs to see what they could do, but the majority of these are designed to do slideshows, which auto advance the image from start to finish. This doesn't work for what I want to do. I want to create something that goes something like this:

Main Menu...Select Year>>>Select Month>>>Select Day>>>(comic strip from that day is displayed)

So, is this even possible to do? I've read a few tidbits that this sort of thing (photo galleries) are really just menu after menu where the "photo" is itself the menu. I'm not sure if a DVD has a set limit for how many menus it can contain, there are almost 10,000 comics to incorporate into this if I was to do it.

If any of you DVD authoring wizards can give me some suggestions on what to do, or the easiest way to create something like this, I'm all open.

Thanks.

[reboot]

DVDLab. You could make it slideshow, or motion, if you encoded the jpg's to mpg first (in something like EasyVCD).

[NCC-2000]

As stated in my post, a slideshow is not what I'm looking for. That would force you to start at one comic and wait possibly several minutes before you reach the one you want.

[dipstick]

Not nesicerally, If you encode your slideshow as DVD spec M-peg, you can set chapter pionts that you can make links to in your menu. No doubt it would be very time consuming to do that. But it could be done.

[reboot]

Not that time consuming, depending on the software used.
Once encoded, set up chapter points for each one, and corresponding menu.
If each chapter point is equidistant, (each "slide" is displayed for a given amount of time) it's very simple, whether you use a slideshow type of thing, or encoded mpeg.

[northcat_8]

If you use TMPGenc DVD Author, suppose you are doing July 1999 or whatever. You want to add a new track, and then add all the film strips for that month. For August, you would add another new track, and add all the video clips to that track.
Chapter points will be created automatically for each video file.
You will need to turn each film strip into a video file (and that will take some time) but that will work.

As was already said, you would have to encode each jpg to MPEG-2 and you will need to set a time length to show each clip. Which really wouldn't be that difficult, just time consuming...you do have 10,000 comic strips

[NCC-2000]

I've finally managed to produce my DVD in a satisfactory manner. I ended up using Adobe Premiere to create MPEG2 videos for each year, and then create chapter stops for each month in DVD Lab. I had to split it over two discs, but she works! This goes to show that if you want to create something bad enough, you'll find a way to do it! Thanks for all the pointers, this place really helped me get an understanding of how to create DVDs I can use for future projects.