(S)VCD making tool able to make *good looking* custom menus?

[SammyTBull]

I had a few video clips that I wanted to burn to a VCD, complete with a simple but nice menu... I converted them to MPEGs with TMPEGEnc, and then started looking for a VCD creating tool that would let me do what I wanted. First, I wanted to try VCDEasy, but it does not have any options allowing to create custom menus (though I did find two guides that were supposed to show how to create a menu in VCDEasy in about five days and 500 steps, with software I don't have, such as Photoshop, so it's of no use). So, I tried Nero and NeroVision. They both had the menu creation options, and I made the menus and burned the VCDs, but menu-wise, they turned out unusable, because (this was why I tried NeroVision after Nero, but the result was identical): the menus look worse than horrible. The background picture I used is awful, all pixelated, distorted and washed out, as if it was recompressed as a JPEG with quality set to 10. The background sound I wanted to have stutters, plays only partially, and does not loop. Additionally, the menu is slow and freezes often (that's not my main concern, though, I'm mostly angry at how ugly the picture looks) I tried the VCDs with PowerDVD and WinDVD, and the difference was that with WinDVD, there was also a pinkish tint instead of a black picture background.

So, is there any secret I need to know to make the menu look and work properly with the Neros? Or, since it seems to be a problem with Ahead's programs, are there any other recommended VCD creating tools, by different programmers, that I should try? And what would they be? I tried Ulead's DVD something - it crashed and refused to burn anything - when I uninstalled it, it left junk codecs and other trash files preventing players from working until I deleted and unregistered them manually; NTI CD/DVD Maker (killed my whole system and even deleted my settings and critical system DLLs, forcing me to restore an old copy of the registry), EZCD Creator (doesn't seem to have any proper menu-related options, could only "import MPEG" as menu...? ), DVD-It! (coasters)...

[Znooky]

Hi!
If you want to make your own menu to your VCD, I recommend you to use VCDEasy. There's a lot of great guides of how you can make simple and advanced menus with VCDEasy.

I know that the program might look hard to understand in the beginning, but once you have made your own working VCD with menu and all, you'll find it very easy.

The menu itself can be made in any paintprogram (even MS-Paint). Take a look again in the guides and give it a try.

// Znooky

[Panash]

All I can do is echo Znooky in recommending VCDEasy.

I did a VCD of a friend's trip to Zimbabwe and simply used a map of Zim, imported intp Paint shop pro or something like that. One thing I did do was lower the contrast and colour saturation considerably to make the lettering stand out.

Next I printed white text onto the bmp. Below the main title was a list of names of the chapter points

I used TMPEnc to turn this bitmap into an MPEG video and multiplexed this with some music as my 'basic' menu screen. This is the only way I know to play music within a (S)VCD 'menu'. This was set to replay continually unless a button on the remote was pressed.

I programmed 'play' or 'enter' to take you straight to the main mpeg sequence. I programmed 'up' & 'down' to take you to the same bitmap (using the mpeg still function in VCDEasy) except that instead of being white, I had highlighted the menu entry in yellow. This mpeg still would remain until a button is pushed (enter to select, or 'up'/'down' or it timed out, in which case it went back to playing the music.

I had to encode each bit map & menu entry for each chapter which took a bit of work but it just looked fantastic. Its all in VCDEasy, but you have to be prepared to put the effort in to get the results.

PN