Playback controls;picture VCD; DVD player VCDEASY

[fredeis]

I am using a Panasonic DVD RV31 player
And made a picture VCD successfully usoing VCD EASY.
However, when i played the VCD i was only able to PAUSE or PLAY the VCD. I could not skip or FF or Rewind..or skip...
I used the default options on VCD EASY. BUt i would I have liked to be able to move around easily on the VCD..
Thanks a bunch.

[puertorican138]

You may need to insert headers in every GOP.You can use Panasonic MPEG Encoder but that doesn't insert regular sequence headers into the GOP. I hope that helps .

[fredeis]

Thank you for your response, but that is not the solution. The software you referenced doesn't do what you say it will do for. me.
Futher investigation on my part is showing that many off the shelf products do NOT have functionality that allows going forwards and backwards on stills that have been made for vcds.

Anyone know how to make vcd's out of stills that allow for going backwards and forwards on the DVD player.

Thanks.

[gonz0]

I have an RV31 also, and haven't had any skip forward or backward problems with stills or videos; or FF/RW problems with movies. (FF and RW isn't supposed to work with stills.) I also use VCDEasy to author and burn. A few questions:
How are you creating the picture show? Is it a movie or a sequence of stills?
Is it VCD 1.0 or 2.0?
Can you play the VCD on a PC DVD player such as WinDVD or PowerDVD?

On the RV31, you can disable PBC (playback control) by pressing the stop button twice while the VCD is playing (see the manual). If this is disabled you won't be able to skip through chapters and stills won't play.

Anyone know how to make vcd's out of stills that allow for going backwards and forwards on the DVD player.

I think you'd basically have to author 2 shows (on the same CD) - one that plays forward and one in reverse. You could create a simple menu that would instruct the viewer which one to play.

Finally, the "Interactivity" page allows you to define what actions will result by pressing certain buttons (next, previous, etc.), but the defaults generally work pretty well.

[vitualis]

Exactly.

You are not supposed to FFW or REW with still images and indeed you can't on a VCD.

To navigate between stills on a VCD, it depends on how you authored it. Generally, you can use the buttons "next", "previous", "default" and "return" (and the numerical key presses from 1-99) as user interaction.

If you are using VCDEasy, then do as gonz0 described above.

http://www.vcdimager.org/guides

Regards.

[fredeis]

Once again, thank you for your thoughtful responses.

A few things. First, I should warn you that I'm relatively new at making VCD's but I learn fast - so if I'm missing the jargon, please excuse me.

In answer to your question, I used VCDEASY to make a series of stills - and when doing that was unable to navigate within the VCD using the DVD player. Additionally, none of the MPEG's created from stills would be accepted as valid files in EZCD CREATOR. And from all the research I've been doing, it is not a trivial matter to be able to navigate stills in a VCD.

However, I came across a product online that seems to allow navigation. I haven't downloaded the full product, but the demonstration product seems to allow within VCD still navigation. You may want to look at
http://www.tvcdsupport.com/ - And if anyone does download the full product please let me know if you can use both alleged functionalities, the one that does the automatic playback and the one that does the manual playback. I am certain that the manual playback works. I have not been able to get the automatic playback to work. An interesting twist on the problem I think. The images created in this program are high quality for TV.

Also, I have been studying VIDEOPACK5 from roxio, and they allege in their documentation at least to be able to do navigation within still with full menu functionality. The street price is somewhere between $350 and $500, depending - but there seems to be alot of interest in this product. Any thoughts from anyone on this one?

Thanks.

[vitualis]

In answer to your question, I used VCDEASY to make a series of stills - and when doing that was unable to navigate within the VCD using the DVD player. Additionally, none of the MPEG's created from stills would be accepted as valid files in EZCD CREATOR. And from all the research I've been doing, it is not a trivial matter to be able to navigate stills in a VCD.

Just making the stills and putting them on a VCD is NOT ENOUGH! It would be like writing a set of HTML pages but not linking them together... Not surprisingly you are not able to go from one to the other.

After you make each still (which you can now encode with VCDEasy), you will have to "author" the VCD so that any one still will go to the next via the button presses. I suggest you have a look at gonz0's post just above.

Also, have a look at the "MPEG Stills" and "Simple menu" articles here: http://www.vcdimager.org/guides They may give you some insight into how VCDs work.

Easy CD Creator does not accept stills and is a terrible VCD authoring package in any case. I advice you stay clear from it.

As for navigating between stills on a VCD, it is definitely trivial... ... if you author the VCD correctly. If you make the menu system intuitively and obvious, all VCD compliant devices will be able to naviagate between stills in the expected manner.

The conceptually difficult bit is in the authoring.

VCDImager (and the GUIs of it such as VCDEasy and TSCV) is one of the most powerful, flexible and comprehensive S/VCD authoring packages in existence. It is also open source freeware...

VideoPack5 is a pretty good program but I will strongly disuade you from buying something that you don't know. In terms of S/VCD authoring (VideoPack5 also authors DVDs), VideoPack5 does little you can't do for free with VCDImager +/- GUI.

For an idea on what can be made with VCDImager (and an older version at that!) I suggest you try downloading the PAL/NTSC Demo VCD disc at: http://www.vcdimager.org/discs.phtml#demo

Regards.

[fredeis]

Once again, thank you for the continuing lively discussion on this matter.

There is some conflicting information in the posts here.

The latest post from Virtualis suggests that you are able to navigate between stills on VCD depending on the authoring techniques (e.g. fwd, backwards, skip fwd, skip fwd, pause, etc).

Earlier posts state that it is not possible to navigate between stills, unless has been suggested in another thread that you import stills into say, premiere, and make chapters, sequences that way (seems to me like a longer more convoluted type of process).

I'm studying the vcdimager website mentioned earlier for further information.

Any further thoughts?

Thanks.

Fred

[gonz0]

The latest post from Virtualis suggests that you are able to navigate between stills on VCD depending on the authoring techniques (e.g. fwd, backwards, skip fwd, skip fwd, pause, etc).

Earlier posts state that it is not possible to navigate between stills, unless has been suggested in another thread that you import stills into say, premiere, and make chapters, sequences that way (seems to me like a longer more convoluted type of process).

I didn't notice any conflicting posts here, but here's a summary of what actions you can use with a properly authored VCD:

STILLS:
skip forward (next)
skip backward (previous)
Play (default)
Return
Pause?
Stop
1-99

VIDEOS:
skip forward (next)
skip backward (previous)
Fast Forward
Rewind
Play (default)
Return
Pause
Stop
1-99