My still menu w/ music doesn't work right in some players

[Radish]

Using DVDAuthorGUI, my still menu consists of a 2-frame m2v made from an imported bmp, a ~2 minute ac3 for background music, and 3 menu buttons for selecting the different titles on the disc. It is set to loop infinitely, with an arbitrarily chosen pause of 2 seconds between loops.

Authoring and burning the DVD, I find that though the menu picture and music always work fine, the menu buttons only behave properly on 2 of the DVD players in my home - one an old Toshiba, the other a fairly recent(ish?) Sony.

The first player it didn't work properly in (also the first I tried) - an Insignia home theater unit - would not show any menu buttons, and pressing the arrows or Enter (or most anything else DVD-related for that matter) on the remote made the player give its "operation not allowed" feedback.

The second player in which it didn't work properly - a Toshiba DVD-VCR-TV combo - did show the first menu button, but would not respond in anyway - not even with "operation not allowed" - to Enter or the arrows being pressed on the remote. Or at least, not until the music was finished and the menu entered its 2 second pause, anyway, at which point pressing Enter finally managed to start the first title. (I have not yet tried waiting for the music to finish in the Insignia to see if the same is true for it.)

Neither of the problem players have had any issues with professionally-made DVDs, so I have to assume my amateur effort is simply missing/screwing up something obvious. Though the only thing that I can think of is that I left both "spu begin" and "spu end" at 00:00:00,00 for the menu in question in DVDAuthorGUI. But I'd rather like to be sure beforehand that changing that would solve the problem, and/or that there isn't some way to fix the problem by editting my already-authored files instead (rather not have to re-do all the fancy coloring I gave my subtitles in DVDSubEdit).

[liquid217]

I would set your menu duration to be more than 2 frames. Try making it to be at least 30 seconds, (29.97fps x 30sec =~ 3600 frames).

[gadgetguy]

I've never experienced your problem, but the glaring difference is that your menu video should match the duration of the audio.

[Noahtuck]

What gadgetguy said!!

If it's NOT a motion menu why even make it 2 frames or 200 frames!!

Just use a still image and it will play as long as the audio track is.

[hech54]

Aren't menu items supposed to have mpeg audio....not AC3?
Or am I just dating myself?

[Noahtuck]

Aren't menu items supposed to have mpeg audio....not AC3?
Or am I just dating myself?

I'm not sure what you're doing :P

[Radish]

If it's NOT a motion menu why even make it 2 frames or 200 frames!!

Just use a still image and it will play as long as the audio track is.

I made it with 2 frames because the last DVD menu I made (like, years ago) had just 1 frame (though no music) and whatever player I used at the time did a hideously pixelated freeze-frame on it. I did not like that very much at all, and seeing the option in DVDAuthorGUI to create my m2v with more than one frame, I decided to try it.

But perhaps the ugly freeze-frame behavior (if it is common to all players) is averted just by adding audio to the menu, and thus giving the menu video more than one frame did nothing useful and only broke things? Should I in fact go down to one frame, or add considerably MORE to make the video the same length as the audio?

[gadgetguy]

I have always created the m2v video to match the audio length, but I gather from Noahtuck's post that it's possible to use an image file (probably jpg or bmp), but I don't think he means a single frame m2v. My personally untested assumption is that DVDAuthorGUI knows what to do to convert a image into a video that matches the audio length, but if you feed it a single frame video, it will just accept it as is. The video will "play" its one (or your current 2) frames then just display the last frame until the music ends, but because the video is no longer playing, the controls are not available.

[Noahtuck]

Yep, i do it ALL the time, if it's not a motion menu you don't need anything more than a still image.

Having a 1 second motion menu with a 1 minute audio track is certain to cause problems!!!!

[liquid217]

I'm basing my above post on what several users have reported to me. The issue that the OP described, i believe could be resolved by lengthening the m2v to more than just 2 frames (most users say at least 5 seconds worth will make it work with just about any player). I do agree that in all actuality, the m2v should be the same length as the audio file.

And just for the record, any length m2v can be muxed with any length ac3 with mplex. My gui doesn't really check the length of the files before continuing.