Multi-level menus

[dwills]

I have searched far and wide and can't find anything that addresses my needs. I use EZCD 5 Platinum. Works fine. I've made many VCD's, both with and without menu's.

However, I am interested in creating what I refer to as "You pick the story" vcd's. I'm sure most of you are familiar with these in book form. Read a chapter (or paragraph or whatever). At the end of the selection you are given some options. For example: To see Bob live, go to page 110. To see Bob die, go to page 120. To see Bob explode in a mass of blood and guts, go to page 135.

My general thought would be a intro clip that gets the ball rolling with a menu displayed at the end. Obviously I would need a whole bunch of menu's and they would all be different, each one refering to a couple of clips that would lead to a menu ....

I know that this (or certainly something similar) can be acheived on a DVD. I have the Disney Dinosaurs DVD and there is a little game in it that seems to follow this general idea. However, I can't find anything on VCD's that looks promising.

Does anyone have any ideas? Have I missed some resource that will help spell it out for me? Can this be done?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[hvr]

it is surely do-able with VCD2.0 or SVCD, by using PBC
(you have surely noticed the demovcd,
http://www.vcdhelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=48495&forum=1 )

the only problem will be the space limit of a 74/80 min CDR, and maybe the effort to design the storyboard...

[wildcatfan]

For VCD's Videopack might work, though I have had some issues with its menus. For SVCD's however I-Author should work great. It is very easy to use and should be able to do just what you want. Of course it is expensive, unless you get a **cough** "fixed" version.

Michael

[vitualis]

VCDImager is undeniable the best option...

It is the most stable proggy for designing large complex PBC structures and also probably the easiest to debug (and also open source freeware!!)

It is probably not the easiest to learn to use though as there is no GUI...

If you are willing to work with it, you will find VCDImager 0.7.x VERY rewarding for VCD authoring. Have a look at the demo VCD for some ideas!

If you are designing a "Choose your own adventure" type disc, be aware that you can only have 98 sequences (mpeg video tracks) per VCD. You could probably fit a few smaller clips as segment items.

You can fit about ?2000 still image "pages" though (as segment mpeg stills).

Regards,
Michael Tam

[RFontenot]

With all due respect to VCDImager, when it comes to designing VCDs with large complex PBC structures, nothing touches the Philips Video CD 2.0 Toolkit.

The Toolkit runs under Windows, has an easy to use drag and drop GUI, will do multi-level menus like dwills wants and it's FREE!

The VCD 2.0 Toolkit won't author SVCDs or XVCDs, but for VCD, I don't think it can be beat.

[hvr]

I've taken a fast look at it;
it comes with a GUI (not the sexiest one but functional), which means it may beat vcdimager from the user friendliness point of view.
and it has one thing I haven't implemented yet in vcdimager, CDDA tracks...

on the other hand, it creates images which must be transformed into more popular image formats... well.. and it doesn't seem to feature a (so far) only with vcdimager available function:
to un-master (aka disassemble) an existing VCD image.

I'm wondering whether it'd make sense to write a tool which converts the .prj file into VCDImagers' XML format...

anyway... would you recommend, that I should cede developing VCDImager, since finally there is a free-of-charge VCD2.0 authoring toolkit available, and vcdimager is of no use now...?