Windows-Autorun VCDs with Roxio Player / menues

[wobisch]

I have a problem with Windows-Autorun VCDs with Roxio Player when
using menues.

Details:
I am creating my VCDs with NERO and I use menues because I like to have this kind of startup screen from which I can choose the 'chapters' of a VCD. Since NERO does not allow to create real chapters, I always divide the video into serveral parts, before I render it to mpg (this works fine on my DVD player).

Since not everybody has a DVD player (and I'm tired of explaining how to select the .dat files in the MPEGAV folder) I also want to add an 'autorun' feature for Windows PCs - together with a copy of the Roxio VCD player for Windows.

This is how my "AUTORUN.INF" looks which I copy into the VCD's root directory:

[autorun]
open=VCD_PLAYER.EXE

("VCD_PLAYER.EXE" is how I named the Roxio Player that I also added to the VCD's root directory)

When I insert the VCD in my Windows PC, the Roxio player starts, finds the VCD and displays the menu (I was really happy to see this because I did not expect that it could also display the menu).

But now comes my problem:
If I press "start" on the Roxio player, nothing happenes. I also have tried to press 1,2,3 or 4 to select a track (like I do this
on the remote control of my DVD player). But again: nothing happens.

In the first attempt I had set the time after the menu to infinity. So I thought that maybe this caused Roxio Player to wait. But in a second attempt I set the time to 8 seconds. When I pressed "play",
Roxio player waited 8 seconds (the "play" key was grey) - and after that came back without doing anything else.

I think that I am quite close to my "dream solution" for creating VCDs that any idiot can also easily play on Windows PCs - but I can't find a solution for this last step (and I don't want to throw away my beautiful menus).

Can anybody give some good advice here?

Thanks very much in advance,
Markus

[Earthbulb]

I think you'll find the problem lies in the way the roxio player expects to handle menus and the way nero creates them... The Roxio player when running with Videopack authored disks will let you select the chapter by clicking on a defined button in the menu. You author the buttons with VP by simply selecting an area with a lasso type tool and creating a link associated with it.

Im guessing nero doesnt allow you to make buttons or doesnt make the buttons in the way the player expects them, and so the player just sits there and waits.

Also there a whole bunch of navigation commands you can use in a VCD like next and previous and return... These allow you to create more complex navigation routines, the roxio player handles all these functions but i think nero just puts each file after each other and probably doesnt even create a next/previous link in the VCD structure between files, it just leaves the files there and assumes the player will have a function to select to the next file.

I would suggest authoring with VideoPack 5.

[Cornucopia]

I've used the Roxio player a number of times with VCDEasy / VCDImager. Works great!

Only thing I've had probs with was with earlier version of VCDEasy which included v1.60 of the MPEG Stills encoder. It would work on some settops, but always messed up on Pioneer settops. Using a different encoder would work with Pioneers, but then the Roxio player wouldn't work (Had something to do with the stream Hex signatures and the relative priority between the Hi-Rez and the Lo-Rez copy). But don't worry...

The most recent version of VCDEasy (and its more recent MPEG Stills encoder) doesn't seem to have any problem.

You can do just about everything that Videopack can do, except you'll have to type in the Hotspot coordinates by hand in the XML file.

Try it out!
Scott