Burn a disc that plays a video on DVD and pgrm on computer?

[JonahW]

I'm working on an interactive director program that is used to play video, and display various text documents. I'm doing this project for a private investigator, and what I'm trying to do is have a CD (or DVD, depends on the length of video) that will play JUST a single video file if it is put into a DVD player, but if it is put into a computer it will use an autorun.bat file to run the director program. So, point is - if this company ships a CD to somebody who doesnt have a computer, they can still see the video on TV.

Can someone help me out? Thanks!!!

[TBoneit]

Autorun should work if they're not smart enough to turn it off. Easy to do, just look at any autrun disc, IE WIndows disc, see how they autorun and then duplicate the methodology. Autorun can co-exist with the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. A DVD player will play the video as a DVD as long as those two directories are present. I often create DVDs with other directories off of the root holding things like text or images.

[Cornucopia]

Understand, though, that the presence of autorun.inf doesn't guarantee that when put in a computer it will AUTOMATICALLY play the director file. That does require that autorun is turned on for that drive (controlled by the user), and--on a side note--you have to watch out for users who already have a DVDplayer app installed, particularly those who allow it to stay resident in the system tray. This can cause problems when both Director (insert any other autorun app here) and the DVD player app will both try to read different parts of the same disc at ~the same time (when disc is inserted). Many times, there will be a lockup.

With that consideration, put a readme.txt in the root of the disc that says what to do for manual users ('click "Director_Autorun.exe" to start', etc).

Also, it's usually better to use a standalone EXE than a batch file, as certain OS configurations may vary in their understanding/interpretation of the batch script, with sometimes unfortunate results.

Scott

BTW--you can do this sort of thing with DVD-Videos, Video-CDs, and EnhancedAudioCDs(multisession kind)!

I have a few past posts that help with creation of such...