The disappearing 5-second menu...

[dadrab]

Good day all.

Here’s an interesting occurrence…

I’ve authored quite a few discs now with GUIforDVDAuthor. I find it does an admirable job (especially considering I also have Ulead DVD Movie Factory and Roxio’s Media Suite 8. The latter two don’t offer much flexibility from my perspective, so I stick with GDA.

I’ve recently discovered how to add background music to a menu, but I’ve run upon a rather strange occurrence that I can’t seem to figure out.

I pull the movies and their respective AC3 files onto the menus. I then change the menu backgrounds to suite me and add a music track. I proceed to work my way through all the gyrations of building the menu. At the end, I have what I consider to be a pretty nice looking accomplishment.

But…here’s the strange part…

When I play the DVD in my set-top player, the menus that I crafted so painstakingly only show up for five seconds. The screen then defaults to my DVD player’s “splash” screen.

If I work the buttons on my remote fast enough, I can indeed play the DVD. The movie files themselves seem unaffected, but I just can’t linger at the menu screens and enjoy the fruits of my labor. 8)

Has anyone else experienced this?

Just for the record, I see no settings in GDA that should affect length of play time on the menu. I have a Denon (can’t remember the model number) DVD player and I can find no menu settings on the player that would short cut the menu. If I build a disc with no sound inserted, the phenomenon does NOT happen. I can sit on the menu screens as long as I like.

Anyone with any suggestions?

By the way, I really appreciate this site. I’ve learned to do so much on my own just by reading – and the results I’m getting are very nice. Perhaps the thing this site has taught me best is how to help myself.

[borax]

Really strange...
A few questions to (hopefully) trace the error:

Which GfD version are you using?
Are you using GfD in dvdauthor or muxman mode?
How long (in seconds) is your background music track?
Played with a soft player (WinDVD, PowerDVD, MPC) does the menu also stop after 5 seconds?

[dadrab]

Hey borax,

Thanks for the reply.

1) I'm using GFD in authoring mode. I'm not familiar with muxman.

2) The tunes I'm using are the full-length songs, converted to AC3 and dropped into the menu from the GUI via the line executions on the left-hand side of the screen.

3) I haven't tried one of the discs in a software player yet. I realize that might sound kind of silly, but I just never loaded one onto my system as I don't normally view movies there.

[borax]

We had some issues of similar kind already... See the FAQ:
http://download.videohelp.com/gfd/Help/GfdFAQ.html
For maximum compatibility using still menus (with sound!) create animated menus (or select 'Full length' encoding in the background dialog of the correspondent menu) to keep video and audio at the same length.

I don't know your source material, but for DVD compliant elementary files you should at least try it with MuxMan (faster and until now, no problems using still menus with sound). Some users reported sync problems i.e. for NTSC. Therefore it is very important to use the correct project settings (the whole project must be NTSC if one movie is NTSC)

[dadrab]

borax,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to give it a whirl tonight or at some point this weekend. I surely do appreciate the help.