Using only one opening for TV series

[tonemgub]

I'm reauthoring a TV Series to DVD, and to save space I thought it would be nice if I could cut the opening off of the episodes and just have one video file of the opening credits on the disc, so that when you played an episode it would jump to the one video of the opening and then back to the start of the selected episode. Is this possible to do? I'm using GUI for DVDAuthor to do authoring, but I have no idea how to approach this. Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

[guns1inger]

It is possible, however there would be a slight pause between the end of the opening and the start of the episode. Of the opening ended with a video and audio fade out, this might not be noticable.

I don't use GUI for DVD Author, so I can't comment on how you would go about it with that package, but it should simply be a matter of setting the sequence to go Menu Selection 1 -> Opening -> Episode 1, Menu Selection 2 -> Opening -> Episode 2 etc. The authoring package will hopefully know that Opening a single title repeated, and only put one copy on the disk. I know this is easy to do in DVD Lab Pro.

[dvd3500]

In GUI for DVDAuthor, DVDauthorGUI etc you can set that a particular video is always played before another.
For example let's say you have 6 episodes and your opening credits:
Epsiode1
Episode2
Episode3
....
Opening

In Gui for DVDAuthor or DVDAuthorGUI you can set a "First Play" to "Opening".

[borax]

Yes, that is possible, but not a very easy task...

It is easy as dvd3500 mentioned, to use the opening as an intro, but then it will be played only if you insert the DVD into your player (first play action). If you really want to have the opening to be played before each episode, there are several ways to do it, depending on what other features you want/need (titlesets, chaptermenus, subtitle/audio menus, switched menus, start + end actions...)
But in each case it is only possible with a little xml editing...

If you want to try it, send me your current author.xml file as an 'example' (my email can be found in the GUIAuthor.log). Then I can have a look and tell you how to achive this 'effect'.

Another approch would be to use the opening as 'background animation' for the main menu. Then it would also be 'played' if the dvd is started, as well as 'after' each episode (but you can also say 'before' you start the next ), if the post action is set to main menu.