Active Buttons on DVD Menu

[dartmanx]

I find myself several days ahead on my editing work and can actually try to do something interesting. I am using Sony DVD Architect 5.0b.

I am editing a church video and have a submenu listing the songs for the services. This submenu then goes to a separate page describing the song. However, I'm not worried about those individual pages.

On the menu page with the titles of the songs, I want to do two things:
- On selecting the link (on the left side of the screen), I want a picture of the album cover to come up
- Also, on selecting the link, I want a short (< 10 seconds) sample of the song to play.

Right now, I'm more worried about feasibility than legality. I'll do my own research to ensure I'm doing the right thing legally, I just want to know if this is technically feasible.

Jason

[guns1inger]

Yes, it is feasible. The method is called "Switched Menus". They can be done in most better authoring tools, including DVD Architect.

Effectively, what you need to is duplicate the menu over and over for as many tracks you as you have. On each menu, alter the image and the background audio to represent the track.

At this point you have to make a choice. You can have the switch happen automatically as the user scrolls up and down the menu list, or you can have it happen when they select a song.

If you want the second option then you need to add an extra button to each menu to actually link to the video asset.

if you go with the first option then you need to start with the first menu. On button one, set the attributes so that it activates when it gets focus - i.e. when the user scrolls down onto it - and automatically calls the next menu (which has the album cover and background music), and sets the focus to the second button. On this menu, you set the first button to automatically switch back to the first menu, the third button to automatically switch to the next track menu, and the second button to go to the video asset if pressed. This means you only ever have three true buttons (at most) on these menus. The rest are dummies as they can never be reached,

The issue with switched menus created this was is that they can be slow to traverse. Each item you move the cursor down or up, you have to load a new menu. On older players this can be very slow. The only tool I have seen that can make this faster is DVD Lab Pro, which allows you to switch between cells in the same menu, but otherwise the amount of work required to build each menu is about the same.

So yes, it can certainly be done. It just takes time and planning.

The early official Looney Tunes DVDs did basically the same thing, but with short clips of the cartoon you were selecting.

This is using DVD Lab Pro, but will give you a fair idea of the concept : http://mediachance.com/dvdlab/tutorial/switchmenu.html