Activate hidden Button with DVD-Lab Pro

[Afterlife]

Some dvd players are refusing to have sub titles on by default, not many but one of mine in particular. Ive tried everything possible.

Most dvd players it works fine, first play for all movies on the dvd have the subs, some dvd players it refuses until I manually set it with the remote.

So now what I want to know is, is it possible to have a hidden button auto-activate upon disc startup?
Or even simpler, the selection of play all or an episode/chapter etc also activates this button.

I will create a button which turns subs on, but I dont want it to be selectable.

So if anyone knows of a way to do this it would solve a lot of problems for me.

Thanks!!

[Shadowmistress]

When you say the players refuse to have them on by default, do you mean that they reset to default (no subs) each time you turn the player on or off?

You can set each movie in dvdlab to force subs on. Go to the connections window. Select your movie. Right click. Choose UOPs & Settings. At the top right, under "Initially Set Subtitle" choose your sub stream. Do this for each movie. You may then still turn off the subs in your player using the remote.

This will make the subs play every single time the movie is viewed, unless manually turned off. If that is your intention, (such as viewing by the hearing impaired) this is the way to go.

[Afterlife]

I did as you said and yet putting the dvd in and playing shows no subs.

Only way to get subs is to manually press the sub button and chose that stream on the remote.

Ive even gone into the IFO and changed the substream to be on and nothing. In my playstaion 2 the dvds work fine, in my dvd player they will not show.

So this solution is the only one I can think of. So I need a way of making buttons do multiple actions. In this case: Subs stream = 1 and play movie x.

[Shadowmistress]

Nasty dvd player.

Try this: Create a blank menu and invisible button. Right click on button and go to link> set subtitle> sub stream 1 and also "go to next menu". Set menu timeout to force activate the button after 1 second. Then set this up as your first play menu and draw connections to your root menu.

If this does't work I'd say the fault lies in your dvd player not knowing how to follow instructions. You'd probably get better performance from an el-cheapo player if you replaced it.

[skeg64]

It's probably easier to author the disc then use this guide to set the subs on by default with PGCedit:

https://www.videohelp.com/~r0lZ/pgcedit/third_party/2cool/subtitles/subtitles_on_default_pgcedit.htm

[guns1inger]

Have you actually gone into the DVD player;'s menu and checked the subs setting there ? You might have to tell the player to use subs by default.

[Afterlife]

Ok so I went into my dvd players setup, under subtitles it was off, so it had French, English, Spanish, Auto and OFF.

So i turn it on Auto, load in my disc and subs turn on first time. Awesome.
Load in Braveheart DVD (retail), subs are also on -- not good
Load in Old school (retail) no subs -- good
Load in Earthsea (retail) no subs -- good
Load in Waterworld (retail) subs -- not good

So I check for things in common here.

Waterworld + Braveheart have 2 things in common, going into the menu and turning subs off now doesnt turn them off, they are on. (havnt checked by remote). Waterworld has 2 sub tracks, I can only see the one on braveheart.
Plus they are both old movies.

So i put in pirated of the carribean(2 sub tracks) and subs are on automatically. Not good.

So now im stuck in what to do.

Is there no way of having a button do two things?
Button1 = Subtitle track1 + Play movie1??

any help would be appreciated.

DVD player is a cheapo one and so far has been amazing plays all formats ive thrown at it, but this is a weird problem

[Shadowmistress]

All right, so what you're saying is that when you set it to auto, it will play subs in a disc if the disc contains them. When you set it to off, you have to manually select turning subs on. So what's the problem?

You want all other dvds to have subs off unless you select them, but you want this particular disk to have subs on? All the time? Just this one disk?

If you can't get retail dvds to behave the way you want, why are you asking more from a dvdlab disk? In my opinion, you're asking too much of the disk when it's totally in the dvd players control. Sounds like the dvd settings are overriding the disk settings anyway.

If your movie is a foreign film and you do want subs always on, you can probably hard code them right into the frames and then author it after?

[Afterlife]

Well yes this disc is a foreign anime, so the subs need to be on. Instead of hard coding them in which I find to be messy I was hoping I could just FORCE them on.

Subs off in the dvd player by default is what I want. Auto turns on if it has them, and On is always on if it has them. But this is a DVD of anime that I made custom. I figured I could just force the dvd player to use subs for this one, but it seems on my dvd player it cant force it, most it works on, mine it doesnt.

So it seems I will just have to hard code them in. But for general knowledge, is there no way to make buttons do more than one command?

Like Button 1 turns on the sub track and also activates a movie?
Or for example say I had a french film and I wanted a "Play - French" and a "Play - English" buttons, each button would not only play the movie but set its audio track differently?

Thanks for all your help. Ill hard code the tracks.

[skeg64]

But for general knowledge, is there no way to make buttons do more than one command?

yes and no. The actual button can only have one command. But to get around this, you link the button to a dummy menu which has the multiple commands in its precommands, then links to the movie.

I'm just talking about dvd authoring in general, I don't use DVDlab. However, like I said before it could easily be added to the DVD after authoring by using PGCedit.

For all I know you could do this with DVDLab. In DVD Maestro it is the equivalent of linking to a "command sequence".

EDIT

As for your subtitle problem, instead of hard coding them, why don't you use forced subtitles. Surely your player would show these. In DVDLab there is an option "set this subtitle always on by default". You won't be able to turn them off, but you wouldn't be able to if they were hard coded either. The advantage being that you could always strip them out later and still have the video in its unaltered format. And you wouldn't have to re-encode it.

[Afterlife]

I used to use Maestro all the time, and recently switched to DVD-Lab pro because.

1. it looks and acts pretty much the same so was easy to work in immediatly
2. No need to demultiplex files
3. Newer and thus more supported (maestro is no longer made as you know)
4. Import PSD files for menus is starting to get handy
5. Menu flexibility is better as far as I have seen

What do you guys use? Do you know something better? Im not a pro but I consider myself to be an above average authorer, and even have a few guides (one for Maestro multiple subs/audio tracks with menu etc just sitting on my comp), and so far DVD-Lab pro seems to fit the bill.

And as for buttons not being able to link commands I think thats pretty stupid.

[Shadowmistress]

Buttons in dvdlab CAN link to commands. Right click on a button but choose "link> set GPRM and link" or "link> VM command". You can even create custom scripts by dropping a VM box into your connections window and setting a list of commands, then just link to it as you would to any movie. You can also edit the pre and post commands of a movie right from your connections window by right clicking on a movie and selecting "edit VM commands".... so dvdlab lets you do alot in terms of script writing.

But in this case you're asking it to override the idiosyncricies of a particular dvd player. Remember that it plays correctly on your other dvd players.

I have one last idea you could try though. Open your movie and bring up your subs window. On the top right there's a little box that says "set this subtitle always ON by default". Check it and then generate the sub stream again. Then set your dvd player to default and see what happens.

[Afterlife]

Thanks shadow, but I have already done that also.

Im just going to hardcode it, which is fine, just not something I generally like to do.

But at least this way im guaranteed to get the subs always showing up.

So am I right in sticking with DVDLab pro vs Maestro?

[Shadowmistress]

Dunno. I've never used Maestro and don't know the first thing about coding VM commands. (I just know that it can be done in dvdlab once I get off my butt and educate myself.)