With regards to the whole process of backing up a DVD to SVCD I have tried a bunch of tools. So far I have been most happy using DVD2SVCD (with the D2SRoBa plugin) as it does the whole 9 yards for me and does it well, EXCEPT, putting a menu on the SVCD.

Now I have put a lot of work into learning how to author the SVCD with menus, and can now make nice menus, even those ripped from the original DVD. But all of this is more that what I really want.

All I want is a nice simple menu that allows random access to chapter points, with a still thumbnail image for each choice. I have so far found that Ulead's DVD movie factory is the easiest for doing this, but it is still not as easy as I would like. Mainly, the issue here is that you have to manually enter chapter points (as discovered by ChapterExtractor).

Now this isn't too bad, but what I am looking for seems like such a simple thing to do (relative to what is already being done by these programs) that I can't help but wonder if I just haven't yet found the tool I need.

So here is my first question. Is there a tool that can find the chapter points from the original DVD (even if I have to paste in info from ChapterExtractor) and automatically generate a simple menu using those chapter points and just attach the first frame of that chapter as the thumbnail for that choice? That is the basic functionality I am looking for.

To take it a step further, the user could then edit this auto generated menu to change the thumbnails (sometime you would like to move forward in the chapter a few frames to find a frame that might be more meaningful than the very first one of that chapter) and add text (unless the original scene selection text can also be automatically ripped from the original DVD, I am not sure if that info is stored in such a way to make that feasible).

Finally, if such a tool does not already exist, I wonder how difficult it would be to create it as a add-in/plug-in/front end to something existing, like DVD2SVCD (which would make it a truely all-n-one tool for me) or maybe just add the feature of auto selecting the chapter points to Ulead's product. Any input on the technical barriers to that would be appreciated. I might consider trying to tackle the job if it seems like something I can learn how to do (I have some programming experience, jut not video processing experience).

TIA for any input on this.

RJ