GUI_DVDAUTHOR animation background jumps

[RKDYork]

I am creating a main menu in GUI_DVDAuthor and am using a 15 second animation I downloaded from http://www.2d-media.de/home.html# but when I create the DVD the menu jumps at the end, and GFD preview show the length as 15.03. I have changed the animation default to 15 seconds.

Any suggestions as to how to get a smooth animated menu? Is is the fault of Quenc or GFD?

I am now using CCE Basic to convert from AVI to MPEG2. Quality is excellent and speed good (less than 150 mins for a 90 minute video using 2 pass VBR). It also works very well with GFD and DVDAuthor. I consider it well worth the $58.

[borax]

I think it is a problem of different timings for the background animation. In order to have a smooth looping menu, the duration of the background animation + background sound have to fit exactly to the 'animation time' setting. This may sometimes be critical as GFD allows only full seconds ATM. Could you send me your MMScript.avs file? Then I can have a closer look...

[mats.hogberg]

Is it possible to have a 100% smooth looping animated menu at all? Both commercial and home brew looing menus have a slight (~0.5 s) pause at the end of each loop - and I'm pretty sure it's up to the player how well this is handled. Or was that not what you meant?

/Mats

[RKDYork]

Is it possible to have a 100% smooth looping animated menu at all? Both commercial and home brew looing menus have a slight (~0.5 s) pause at the end of each loop - and I'm pretty sure it's up to the player how well this is handled. Or was that not what you meant?

/Mats

Mats,

You are probably right. Perhaps I am aiming for perfection and it cannot be achieved. If you know of any free animated backgrounds that don't attempt to be continuous I would be interested.

[borax]

If you have enough space left on your DVD, you can also create a "long" animated menu with several minutes. The lopping within this long animation is "perfect" and one "jump" each 5 or 10 minutes is not really a problem IMHO...

[borax]

OK. Things are a little more complicated sometimes...

The jump caused by repositioning of the laser in the DVD player cannot be avoided at all (as mats.hogberg already mentioned).
BUT:
GFD uses the avisynth filter MPEGDecoder.dll which is based on dvd2avi and still has the "lost-frame-bug" (for details have a look into the docu of dgmpgdec, to be found here: http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises/files/dgmpgdec121_20050222.zip ).

For "menu clips" e.g. from the movies the 3 missing frames doesn't matter IMHO, but for a looping menu it matters!

Currently there are 2 possibilities to avoid the lost frames:
- Use an avi file (you may convert looping clips from other formats like the mov files from http://www.2d-media.de/home.html# into avi with the RAD video tools for example)
- Use dgmpgdec for mpeg2 files and edit the avs script created from GFD "by hand"

I have tested both possibilities with the cr4.mov file from 2d-media, and there was no noticeable jump in the looping any more (checked with WinDVD 4.0 and Media Player Classic)

As dgmpgdec is in a development stage, I will replace the usage of MPEGDecoder.dll by DGDecode.dll as soon as the (already planed) enhancements are ready:
- Automatic D2V file generation
- MPEG-1 support

Thanks to Donald A. Graft for the new dgmpgdec package (which works flawless) and thanks in advance if the enhancements are working!