Return to MENU before next chapter point????

In short, it makes use of commands. For example if you're accessing a chapter from the chapter selection menu they probably added a command by which if you came from that menu then after the chapter has played you would be taken back to the chapter selection menu (or anything else, it could be anything actually)

If you look through this site http://www.dvd-replica.com
and you're willing to spend some time reading and trying you'll be able to do some really neat things.
Be warned that you will need an authoring software that will let you add commands though. DVD-lab pro comes to mind for example.

Yes, normally you can. What you can do is put a "cell command". That's a command that gets executed after the cell plays back. Chapters can include several cells, so if you put a cell command for the last one in the chapter, that tells the DVD to go back to the chapter menu, the DVD will play the chapter then go back to the menu.
Do that with PgcEdit (free). Find the PGC of your concert (the larger one), double click on it and you'll see how programs and cells are laid out. You will be able to preview (without sound alas) by clicking on the little arrow at the far right on each cell line.
For each cell, there's a small field that lets you enter a cell command number. For every last cell of each program, puy a 1 instead of the 0. Then close the panel.
Then add a cell command to the PGC by selecting the "***** Cell Commands" line on the right panel, and right-clicking "add after". This will put a "NOP" command that you can double-click to change it to what you want. This will pop up an editor. Select The menu "alphabetically" and select the command
CALLSS-VTSM. Then choose which menu you want to go back to (probably the chapter menu). Click OK, save the DVD and test in a soft player.

That should do it!
Post back if you run into problems.
Jeanl

Originally Posted by terje.oegema

jeanL, Thanx for the information. Very helpful.

I cant use separate titles, because they wont playback seamlessly.

wait, I'm not sure I'm following you: you don't really want them to play seamlessly since you want playback to return to the main menu after each chapter. Unless you actually mean something else:
"playback returns to main chapter if selected from the chapter menu. If selected through "Play movie", then all chapters execute in a row."
If that's what you mean, it's a bit more complicated because you have to make the jump in the cell command conditional. But it's still doable.

So I can author my DVD first using DVD Workshop 2, and THEN make these adjustments, right?
That would be nice.

Yes you can, that's what PgcEdit does. But make sure you can't do what you want in DVD Workshop 2. It's typically much easier to do these things in the authoring tool, rather than after the fact. Besides, imagine you want to change something and reauthor, you have to redo the trick in PgcEdit each time you change the DVD, another reason for trying to do it in the authoring tool.
So check whether DVD Workshop 2 lets you put "cell commands" at the end of programs, or something like that. If it doesn't then you'll have to do it after the fact (I can help you if you run into problems)...
Jeanl

I re-read your post, and indeed you want playback to return to the scene selection only if you selected the song through the scene selection. That makes sense now. Indeed, it's doable. The trick is to use a register (a memory the DVD makes available to you) to indicate whether you arrived at the song from the chapter menu or from a previous song. Then make the cell command execute conditional on the value of the register.

Maybe I'm losing you here, but trust me, it's really not hard in PgcEdit. If you confirm that's what you want, I'll give you step-by-step instructions.

Jeanl

Hi,
I'm away from my compter (on vacation), I"m downloading pgcedit at this point so I can give you useful instruction on how to do it...
more later....
Jeanl

...f or $5000 only...

terje.oegema,
merry christmas to you too...
Before you can do the DVD modification we're talking about, we need to know how the concert is setup in the DVD. I'm guessing it's one of two things:
A) 1 long PGC (program chain), with one "program" (with probably 1 cell per program) for each song.
B) A bunch of PGCs (one per song) chained together in the same titleset.

To find out which one it is, download PgcEdit, and open your DVD with it. Then look at the left-hand panel, this is a display of all the titlesets, with all the PGCs in the titlesets. Each PGC has a duration shown to its right between parentheses, if you see one that's very long, it's probably the PGC for the full concert. YOu can make sure by previewing the PGC: you select the PGC, and then you hit the "`" key (the key below the ESC key), this will pop up the preview window which shows you what's in the PGC.
If all you see is a bunch of PGCs that are a few minutes long, then we're probably in case B) above, with one PGC per song.
It does not matter which case we're in, we can still do what you want, but you won't do it the same way in case A) as in case B).

Case A) is probably the simpler case. All you need to do is duplicate (clone) the long PGC (which of course does not duplicate the video!). The original PGC will be used to play the concert as a whole, as normal. THe clone PGC will be used to play individual songs. You will simply modify the cloned PGC by adding 1 cell-command that returns to the chapter menu, and adding that cell command to every last cell of each song. I'll give you more detailed info if you can confirm that your DVD corresponds to case A) above.

Case B) is also not too hard to handle. I think the easiest way is to clone each song PGC. So if you have 10 songs, you'll end up with the 10 original PGCs, plus 10 clones. We'll then modify the cloned PGC to return to the chapter menu after playback, either with cell-commands as above, or with post-commands.

One question though: how familiar are you with the DVD structure? Do you know much about cells, programs, PGCs and commands?

Jeanl

P.S. I'm surprised that Sonic DVD Producer does not support that feature... For such an expensive product, that's surprising. Are you sure about that?

OK then, if case A) applies, it shouldn't be too difficult.
OPen the DVD with PgcEdit, and clone the concert PGC (the long one), by selecting it (clicking on it) and going to the "utilities" menu and choosing "Clone current PGC".
Then, select the new PGC, and add a cell command to it. To do that, go the right panel, click on the line that says "***** Cell commands " and right-click and choose add after (if there's already one or more cell commands (I doubt it), select the last one and choose add after). This will create a NOP instruction in the cell-commands area.
Next, change this instruction so it tells the DVD playback to go back to the chapter menu.
Normally, the chapter menu is in the same titleset, and is visible in PgcEdit as "chapter" ("chapter" shows on the same line as the PGC on the right). Easiest way is to copy the command below and paste it in PgcEdit to replace the NOP command (select the NOP command, right click and do "Paste replace").

[30 08 00 00 01 87 00 00] 1 (CallSS) Call the VTSM Chapter menu of the current VTS, resume cell 1

This instruction tells the DVD player to jump back to the chapter menu.
If you don't see a PGC named "chapter menu", you'll have to find which one it is by previewing all the PGC in the menu domain. It should be a PGC with a fairly large number of buttons (shown on the line). Once you find it, you'll have to make it a chapter menu (by right-clicking on it and selecting "Set menu type"). But I think the chapter menu will be very visible..

Now, we need to "attach" this command to the right cells in the cloned concert PGC. To do that, you double click on the cloned PGC. THis will show a large dialog where you can see all the programs, and all the cells that make up this PGC. Most likely, there will be one cell per program, and each cell will be a different song (you can check by previewing each cell individually, by clicking on the small arrow at the end of each cell line). All you have to do is put a "1" in the small "cell command" box, for the last cell of each song (probably each cell, as I'm guessing each song is just one cell).

This means that when the DVD finishes playing any of these cells (that have the cell-command 1 attached to them), it will jump back to the chapter menu.

The last thing we'll need to to will be to make it so when you select a song in the chapter menu, it goes to the cloned PGC rather than the original one.

But let's first make sure you can do all the steps above without any problem...

Post back to report your progress!!
Take care,
Jeanl

AH, you're funny! but I see what you mean!
To make it so when you select a song in the chapter menu it goes to the cloned PGC, you have to change things in the chapter menu PGC.
Exactly what will depend on how the DVD was authored. That's the thing with the DVD spec. There's usually 4 or 5 ways to do the same thing and this applies to the way chapter menus are designed. In the chapter menu PGC, you'll find buttons with button commands attached to them. A button can only have 1 command attached to it (like cells). Here's what I've seen so far:
A) The button command simply does a jump to a specific program in a specific PGC.
B) The button command sets a register and "link to tail" (exits the menu so the post-commands are then executed, and they will check the value of the register and jump to the right place).
C) The button command does nothing at all (!) (but the menu exits automatically, and the post-command area check which button is highlighted - there's a SPRM for that - to see which button was pressed).

There might be other ways too! Now what we do to change the behavior depends on which case we're in.
- In case A) you have to change the button command to jump to the right program in the cloned PGC instead of the original PGC. Unfortunately, at this time, PgcEdit can't change button commands (but I know r0lZ is working on it!). But all is not lost for that.
- In case B) and C), you have to change the post-command area of the chapter menu PGC so you jump to the right PGC depending either on the register set by the button, or on the last highlighted button. This is easily done in PgcEdit.

So case B) and C) are easier for you. For case A) we'll have to use another program (perhaps menuedit, but I'm not sure whether the un-registered free version lets you change button commands)...

Now, how's that for a cheap DVD novel!

Take care,
Jeanl

A agree with you guys, if you can do it at authoring time, it's much much better. The solution I was suggesting is probably much more complicated...
Jeanl

One question though, originally, terje.oegema wanted seamless playback when playing the whole movie (a concert in fact), which meant everything had to be in the same title. In addition, he wanted the chapter menu to go to a specific song then return to the menu at the end of the song.
Are you sure that Ulead DVD Workshop 2 can indeed do that?

Jeanl

p_l and wavne,
I think terje.oegema knew about "end actions" after a title, but I think he didn't want to break his movie into titles as that would have precluded seamless playback (I'm not even that sure that that's the case - that you can't have seamless playback from title to title, but that's another subject). His question was, how can I have seamless playback of the whole concert, with a chapter menu that only plays one song at a time.
Jeanl