iauthor svcd menu (animated mpg) problems?

[kriskim]

i spent a while making an animated menu for one of my svcds, and the darned thing won't play back properly!

the audio plays, but the video doesn't, just a black screen. the menu works fine, ie, pushing the numbers work okay, and load the proper mpg. but it's really sucking that the menu won't display properly.

when i play the menu manually (ie. through file mode in powerdvd), it plays fine. it's in the segment directory (all the other mpgs are in the mpeg2 dir). it also doesn't work properly in windvd (same problem as with the standalone, audio, no video)

any thoughts as to why? the mpg is fine, it played perfectly when it was still on my comp. help!

[adam]

Are you sure it was compliant, either 480x480 or 480x576?

Just to be sure, you did convert to .mps first right? Maybe try mpgxmps to convert to .mps, it seems to get around alot of the I-Author multiplexor's bugs. Just do a web search for mpgxmps. You MUST multiplex in bbmpeg first though otherwise it wont be compliant.

Other than that I would have to guess that its a specific problem with your dvd player. All of my animated menu's work fine in both my standalone and in WinDvd.

[kriskim]

yea, it was 480 x 480 with 4:3 dar. and yep, i ran it through the iauthor muxer which has never given me problems... i have a sneaky feeling it's iauthor when making the svcd.

when you author the menu [being animated], do you ever make a start play item before that? like some sort of intro or something. myabe you can't have a start play item (Which is also an mpg) when you have a menu? i'm really reaching with that, i know....

could the problem be that the audio and video aren't "exactly" the same length? they're more or less the same length (around 55secs) but not exactly. does it matter? it plays fine when muxed tho...

[adam]

I've used an mpg as the start play item before with no problems. I also don't think different audio/video lengths should make a difference either. Usually the worst thing that happens when you do this is that the length of the entire mpg gets limited to the length of the audio and if the audio is longer than the video, you will get a black screen that plays until the audio ends. But this should not cause a black screen altogther.

Are you sure the bitrate isnt too high? I dont think you'd be getting a black screen and audio even if it were but I can't think of anything else. Just double check everything.

If your mpg track (the actual movie) plays ok then try taking a small clip of that and using it as the start play item. This should rule out any non-compliance issues. If it still doesnt play than I would have to say its a problem with your dvd player, maybe for whatever reason its not able to read mpg files from the segment dir? But then again that wouldnt explain why WinDvd didnt play it...Sorry I'm not sure whats going on here.

[kriskim]

i checked everything out, argh, this is getting crazy. i can't figure it out, the menu mpg plays perfectly by itself, even when played off of the cd, so i don't think it can be the mpg itself.

in iauthor, in the menu config screen, does the "wait" selection box do anything? for some reason, i was under the impression that this was for the length of the menu so i set it to 60s, but the more i think about it, the more i wonder if it could be that that's how long it's supposed to wait (?) before playing? i tried waiting that long in winDVD (and played it for about 3 minutes to be sure) and nothing happened, but i'm wondering if maybe windvd and standalones just don't like "wait". what do you usually put under the wait box?

thanks for all your help btw adam. really appreciate it.

[adam]

No the wait time specifies how long it waits before jumping to the next item after the current item ends. So for stills I always use infinite and for animated menus I use no wait, so that it loops. I'm fairly certain this isnt related to your problem.

Ok I think there must be a problem with your video stream. Even if you used compliant settings sometimes the encoder can mess up. This recently happened to me when the encoding process when smoothly but the resulting video stream was missing some I-Frames, making it impossible for me to mux it. There might be some corrupt data somewhere in your stream and I'm guessing that the I-Author multiplexor just didnt pick up on it. Try remuxing your mpg in bbmpeg. If there is any problem it will probably tell you. If the mux goes ok then use mpgxmps to convert your mpg to .mps and re-author in I-Author. If you get this far without any kind of error than I bet the final svcd will play just fine in your standalone and in WinDVD.

In the future you really should scrap the I-Author multiplexor altogether and mux with bbmpeg and use mpgxmps. I am not convinced that I-Authors multiplexor is compliant nor reliable, but I have complete confidence in bbmpeg. If there is any problem at all with your files it WILL tell you.

[kriskim]

yah, i think that's what i'll try from now on. bleh. thanks for all the input adam.