Would like to re-create a non-functional menu

[sickboy_xl]

I purchased a DVD recently, and the main menu does not work. I can't move the cursor around to select the scene options. All of the video within the DVD is playable on it's own, but I can't access any of it through it's original menu. This is a tricky question....is there any way to create a new menu (with elements of the original one if possible), and make it functional with the video? I'm sure this is a tricky process but I'm all ears. The DVD is essentially 8 live concert clips accessable through a scene menu. Any help would be appreciated.

[ozymango]

Is this a motion menu (with either a motion background, or clips with motion in them), or just a simple text/snapshot kind of menu? I can think of a couple of ways to take a non-motion menu and just put some frames/buttons on top of it to make it work -- the cheap and dirty way -- and a few complex options to "recreate" the entire thing, though that may be more effort than it's worth.

Or there may be a really easy fix for this, depending on why the menu doesn't work in the first place (e.g. is it a bad copy, did the menu never work because it was poorly done, etc.). So I can come up with a bunch of answers depending on what you've got to work with, as well as your tools and interest level, though I'm sorta hoping somebody else chimes in with an easy fix first.

But barring that, can you tell us more about the original DVD, what kind of menus it has, how many screens, etc?

EDIT: Oh, I missed where you said it was a concert DVD with 8 chapters (or something like that). Shouldn't be too hard to either fix or recreate. But again I'm hoping somebody else decides to join the conversation to save me the work.

[sickboy_xl]

The Menu Has Non-Motion Background which is easy to obtain. It contains music which I can also obtain. A friend has the same DVD and the menu doesn't work on his copy either. It seems to be a defect within the production. The menu is there, the cursor is there, you just can't move the cursor around to select anything. The DVD itself consists of 3 live clips, 3 music videos, and 2 other random clips. The live clips are compiled in a file named VTS_1, the music videos are named VTS_2 and the random clips are (duh) VTS_3. The main menu has a "PLAY ALL" and a "SCENES" option. The "SCENES" menu breaks down the 8 clips seperately. It would be nice to just somehow make the cursor work, but I suspect I may have to disassemble the VTS files somehow (no idea how to do that) and make 8 seperate avi files or something like that, which I would just reinsert into an advanced menu creation program (which I have no idea about either)....I'm not sure. I've always wanted to create advanced full motion menus anyways, so an advanced program would be beneficial to me actually. Time consumption is not an issue.

[ozymango]

Okay, nobody else wants to jump in so here goes.

Again, there are probably a couple dozen different ways to do this, but what I would do is use Ulead DVD Workshop for this. You can download a free trial (30 days, has a few limitations but should work fine for your project), and it's pretty easy to figure out. Actually I think it's dead-simple to use (a bit too easy for some people, actually), plus it's cake to make motion menus with so there's that.

As for "disassembling" the DVD so you can work with it and make a new menu, that's fairly painless. The steps I'd use would be:

1) Copy the DVD to your hard drive using DVD Decrypter (free), this'll create a VIDEO_TS folder with all your VOB files.

2) Use VOB2MPG (free) to take those VOB files and turn 'em into MPG files for easy inclusion in your project (I've tried just renaming VOB files to MPG for DVDWS and sometimes it likes them, sometimes it doesn't, so I'd use VOB2MPG).

3) Fire up DVD Workshop, import the MPG files to your project, then go crazy with the menus. Again, I find DVDWS very intuitive and you can pretty much drag and drop images and buttons and motion menus with ease, but it may take some playing around to get the hang of all it can do.

I dunno if this sounds like a lot of work or not, but it's mostly pretty painless. It does end up taking a lot of disk space, though, so depending on how big a hard drive(s) you've got, you may need to do this in steps: Rip the DVD, convert to MPG, and delete the original rip from your computer before you open in DVDWS. That'll free up quite a bit of space.

There are guides on the left for each of these tools, but trial and error playing with them is the best way to learn.

Hope this helps get you started!

EDIT: The point of using these particular tools in this order is that you won't actually have to convert any of your original DVD, there's no decoding/re-encoding, the VOB to MPG thing doesn't change the actual video stream. DVDWS should then be able to take those MPG files and put them back together without changing the video or audio tracks, so your original quality remains the same. For better or worse.

[sickboy_xl]

I am going to attempt your the steps in your guide tonight. My work schedule hasn't allowed me to even sit down at my computer for the past couple of days. I will let you know how it goes. Thanks for all the detail.