Sizzle button limits...can I just join mpgs?

[bigjuggler]

I am trying to put together a compilation disk of animated shorts. I have ripped about a dozen short movies off various DVDs I have and want to author them all to one DVD for easy watching.

My DVD burner is external so iDVD is not an option. I can't afford DVD Studio Pro.

I have been using the wonderful Sizzle with great success. My problem is that it appears that Sizzle limits the number of buttons on the main TOC menu to 9 (I have about 12-14 titles I want to work with). After nine, clicking "add button" does nothing.

I thought I might be able to add a couple of mpegs to each "title" menu, but the buttons there can only link to a chapter in the designated title, or another title's menu.

I then thought I could just join a couple of vobs together, use the joined file as a title and then create chapters for each separate animated short that I joined. Alas, I cannot join the vobs. mpgtx and ffmpegx join commands do nothing at all.

Any ideas how I could either a) join the vobs for chaptering or b) add more than 9 titles to my Sizzle project?

[galactica]

to join the vob's you have to get them into mpeg format.

i am not sure if it will work or not just renaming them to .mpeg and trying to join that way

but you could always demux them, remux them (now as mpeg) then join them together

demux and remux again the joined file to correct any time code errors and you shoudl be set!

[Vintageman]

You could use DVD2One to join all the vobs as one it has a seamless feature and it will add a chapter to each movie individually. You wont have a menu per say but you can play all the movies seamlessly or use chapters to jump to the next movie. Best I can think of.

[Vintageman]

Just thought if you do that in DVD2One then you can demux and bring into Sizzle and set your chapters and menu anyway you want.

[Vintageman]

I would use Extractor to demux. It lets you demux as just 2 files MP2 and AC3 without giving it to you in chapters. And it pretty fast.

[digitaldave]

From MacOSXHints

*A fix for the Sizzle 0.5b1 menu button creation problem
*Mon, Dec 22 '03 at 09:28AM • from: whiteinge

Sizzle is a tremendously cool program for creating DVDs and DVD menus. Many thanks to the author, Henry Mason.


In Sizzle 0.5.0b1, for the menu creation, you can only fit about eight total buttons per menu, because each new button appears above the last and they quickly run off the top of the window. There's a pretty quick fix if you download the source code. The author is aware of this problem and I'm sure it will be fixed, so this post is for the impatient and hopefully so peple don't bother him about it as much.


Open Sizzle.pbproj (you will need to have the Developer Tools installed). In the Find Menu, search the project for "buttonShift," then double-click the last entry called "[newMenuButton...". In the file that opens, simply remove the following text (and nothing else): "+buttonShift", and save the file.


Lastly, you'll need to compile the program, but for some reason on my system it was looking for the source code in a specific location, so I just moved the "Sizzle 0.5-src" directory to that location. I made a symlink in the /Users/ directory called hmason that pointed to my login, in the terminal type ln -s /Users/yourLoginName /Users/hmason. The location was /Users/hmason/Projects/Sizzle 0.5-src/


Click the icon of the hammer to compile the program. If there were any errors, you can view them in the "Errors and Warnings" section of that main Xcode (or Project Builder, perhaps?) window. There shouldn't be any except related to the path to the source directory.


When you're adding new buttons in Sizzle after this, just make sure you move the button from it's default location before you add a new one because they'll all appear in the same starting location.

Good luck.