I'm working on a GUI to create a slide show using the dvdauthor tools to do most of the work. I handle scaling and adding black bars to match the aspect ratio. I am able to produce silent slide shows using video stills (one frame of video) and then using a pause of 5 seconds after each file is played. It works great, produces a tiny VOB and compiles very quickly.

Tools such as Ulead DVD Movie Factory and DVDLab can do the same thing but add music. Ulead's tool is very fast while DVDLab is painfully slow at getting the job done.

From the examples that I have seen for dvdauthor it looks like the way to add music to a slide show is to repeat the frames fed into mpeg2enc for the length of time to pause at each frame. Then mplex the audio and set up chapter points in the "movie". This seems to be a very slow process but does allow transitions as well as pan-and-zoom effects.

When I look at the VOB created by Ulead it is not much larger than the audio file. When I try playing it in media player, it zips through all the images which leads me to belive that the MPEG2 file only has a single frame per image.

There seems to be a trick that I am missing as to how to create an MPEG2 file that has the pauses in it for the video but not for the audio. Are there magic settings that can be used with mpeg2enc or some other tools?

I have found that I can mplex 5 seconds of audio onto a single frame but it does not seem to be possible to make the multiple segments play seemlessly.

If there is no secret I'll just repeat the frames. Maybe there are some settings to tell mpeg2enc that all the frames are the same so that it can keep the file tiny.