Separate files or single file with chapters ?

[JN]

Hi. I would like to place on DVD cca 60 music videos (mpeg2
files,352x288,CBR). I would like to play them one after another and
also like to browse between them by prev/next button. I have 2
choices:
- Author them as separate files. The videos really can be browsed by
prev/next button, but it works only in my standalone DVD player
(Samsung). In SW players (PowerDVD, WinDVD) the prev/next buttons
don't do anything. I don't know who behaves properly - Samsung or SW
players?
- Merge them into one file and make chapters. This solution has one
problem. First I had to find the right SW to do the merge - M2Edit .
The TMPGenc refused some files, though they all had been encoded in
TMPGenc, other simple utils produced unusable result. The problem is,
that the I-frames are not exactly at positions, where the previous
videos were merged - I can't point a chapter to first frame of former
video. Also when making the chapters - something is wrong. I cannot
step over the merging point, the timer gets confused. I must drag a
slider a little forward and step back. Tried many authoring programs -
DVD Workshop, DVD Movie Factory, DVD-lab. They all behave the same.
I have 2 questions:
- In separate files case - what is the right behavior of prev/next
button ?
- In single file case - can the files be merged so the I-frames start with
every new merged video? If so, what utility can do this merge?
Thanks.

[SaSi]

The behaviour of the Next/Prev buttons depends on the way the DVD is authored. Certain DVD Players extend their behaviour and work properly with badly authored DVDs. To give an example, my settop player can accept a DVDR (ROM) with any mixture of MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 files recorded and will play them back one after another with next and previous skipping forward and backward. PowerDVD won't even recognise the disk.

I believe the best approach for your task is to combine all the files into a single MPEG-2 file and author that with chapter points. Tmpgenc's Cut and Merge utility should accept all these MPEG files. The only reason I can guess for failure is that some files are MPEG-2 and others are MPEG-1. You can't concatenate the two.