Adding audio to I-Author menus?

[DJ Teknosys]

Is there a way to add audio the menus in I author? I'd like to have music playing in the backround while the menus are displayed.

[adam]

To do this you have to create a segment which means your menu will actually be a program stream as opposed to a still pic, though it will look just like a still pic. The downside to this is that to be compilant you can only use a resolution of 480x480/576 rather than the still picture resolution of 704x480/576. You can experiment with the still picture resolution if you want but remember playback will not be guaranteed on all players.

Take your still pic and load it as your video source in TMPGEnc. Now take your audio and load it as the audio source. For a compliant SVCD just load the appropriate SVCD template. Use a low video bitrate, it really doesn't matter since its essentially only a still pic. Set your audio bitrate to whatever you want. Now encode it into an mpg program stream. Now get mpgxmps (look in download section at www.doom9.net) and load your mpg file and convert it to an .mps.

Create your menu in I-Author as you normally would. In the space where you load your .bmp change the filetype to .mps and select your mps file.

That's all there is to it.

[DJ Teknosys]

Thanks for your help! I followed your instructions, and now the audio plays with the menu, but the audio playback is choppy. There is a puse about every 2 seconds or so. Any idea why this might be? Also, I'm not sure if this is related or not. When plying the SVCD back in WinDVD, the menu with audio does not display. I can hear the music, but no picture. When I move to a chapter menu, which has no audio, it looks fine. This is only on WinDVD. On my APEX 5131 everything looks fine except for the choppy menu music.

[adam]

What was your audio source? Was it any from of compressed audio such as mp3? If so you may want to decompress it to wav before encoding. Is the audio choppy on the pc too or just the dvd player?

Make sure and use a low bitrate for the video. Philips SVCD Verifier claims that segments do not support as high a bitrate as video tracks, though I don't see mention of this anywhere else. In any case you would never need high bitrate for a segment like this anyway.

As far as the menu being black in WinDVD I have no idea. My motion menu's play fine in WinDVD 3.0.

[DJ Teknosys]

I just double checked, the audio is fine in WinDVD. I'm runnig v3.1. Maybe the bitrate is too high for the APEX> The movie plays fine though.... What bitrate would you suggest for the still picutre?

[DJ Teknosys]

Oh yeah, the audio source was a .wav file.

[adam]

As low as your dvd player will allow. Use 500kbits to start.

[DJ Teknosys]

Should I use constant bit rate, or VBR for stills?

[adam]

It really doesnt matter.

These are not actually stills. They are going to be mpg's just like the movie except they will be stored as segments.

[DJ Teknosys]

Well after playing around a while and test many bitrates, the problem is still there. I used bitrates from 500 up to 2000, and mp3 bitrates from 192 down to 64. The only differance that makes is audio and video quality, the chopiness is still there. Now, remember this is just during menus, the movie plays back great.

I don't think its a problem with the player, as I've played many SVCDs in it with audio menus and they all worked great. Buyt this is the first one that I've made, so it must be something I'm doing (or not doing!)

What else should I look for?

[adam]

Sorry I really can't think of anything else that could be causing this problem. Just double check and make sure everything is being encoded compliantly. If your using ntsc than just encode the moving menu's in 29.97fps. Also the audio was downsampled to 44100kHz wasn't it?

You explained your procedure pretty clearly but let me just make sure I understood it all. You encoded your wav file along with your still picture source in TMPGenc, resulting in an mpg. You authored this mpg along with your movie in I-Author and then burnt the image it created. When played on WinDVD this menu plays fine but on your dvd player the audio is choppy. Did I get that right?

Maybe try to isolate the problem a little more. Try making a short sample clip. In I-Author use this clip twice, once as a video track and again as a segment. Just create two play items and on one go into its properties and change it from mpeg track to segment. If the video track plays and the segment doesn't than I am baffled.

[DJ Teknosys]

After mesing around with it some more....I still can't get everything right!

So I decided to make a new menu for Oceans 11, which I had just finished converting with dvd2svcd. I though maybe my audio skipping problem was because the last movie was packed to the rim with data, the disc wasn't overburned but almost! This time in dvd2svcd I set the taget media in the bitrate tab to be set for 74 min, that way I'd have plentey of space left over for audio menus.

Well, it works now. So far so good playing on the Apex. BUT, when playing it in WinDVD I still just get a black screen while I hear the music playing. What could this be? The movie plays fine. Could it be that WinDVD just doesn't like I-Author menus? Let me see if I have PowerDVD installed on one of my machines...

[adam]

I author all my disks in I-Author and the menu's play fine on my version of WinDVD. I don't know what your problem is but I'm sure the software supports these menu's.

[DJ Teknosys]

Well, PowerDVD works fine. Guess I just gotta live with it...

[JediXR]

I am really wanting music playing in my menus too!! I am still trying to learn all the vcd stuff so for now I wont even wory about svcd or maybe I should?? I just want it to work on as many players as possible.. Anyways I looked for that mpgxmps on doom and couldnt find it.... maybe what section is it in exactly... I know downloads but like I said I didn't see it there