Persistant audio between menus

dth122 wrote on 12/3/2009, 7:37 AM
Is there a way to continue an audio track across certain menu transitions, but cause it to change for others?

What I'm trying to do involves no video, it would all be in DVDA. I want to create a menu of different songs. When the user selects a particular song, it will begin playing the song and present a screen with the artist name and song title. While the song is still playing, the user should be able to exit from the "now playing" screen and go back to the main menu to select a different song. But the current song will continue to play until the user selects a new song from the menu.

Is that type of functionality possible? Or are audio tracks linked to specific menus so that they will stop or re-loop from the beginning when the user navigates away from that screen?

Thanks.
- Dave

Comments

jetdv wrote on 12/3/2009, 9:05 AM
Music cannot span menus. It's a DVD spec limitation.
musicvid10 wrote on 12/3/2009, 9:30 AM
What Edward is saying is that one menu or program must terminate completely (audio and visuals) before another can begin.
plekkie wrote on 12/3/2009, 9:52 AM
Though not exactly what you described, you may want to try with buttons over video. You can add a maximum of 18 buttons on each Title in a 16:9 DVD project, and 36 on a 4:3 DVD project. (In a Blu-ray project you can add max. 250).

So while one song is playing, buttons linked to other songs can appear over the video. When selected, the chosen song will start to play.

I guess this should be possible, if it is what you want.
Former user wrote on 12/3/2009, 10:21 AM
Dave,

To expand on what others have said. YOu could try a different approach. Make each DVD video a menu. When you choose a song, the background would change to the artist information, but the buttons for other songs could still be on the screen. choose another song, the background would change to that artist (by going to a different menu) and the buttons would still be active.

Dave T2
MPM wrote on 12/3/2009, 12:04 PM
If you mean DVD Audio [DVD-A], DVD Architect won't do it. It will handle it if you want to create a Video DVD with just music on it. As far as a Video DVD goes...

On a Video DVD audio is always tied to video. All of your content is also divided up into separate parts, like each menu, each title etc, & switching from one to another means new audio & video. And finally, remember that all menus are video, so the viewer can be in another part [domain] of the DVD, yet see what looks exactly like a menu.

Dave's suggestion:
>"Make each DVD video a menu. When you choose a song, the background would change to the artist information, but the buttons for other songs
>could still be on the screen. choose another song, the background would change"

might be the easiest route of all, but you'd have a menu always present. You *might* be able to get something working where you hid the buttons, & there are threads in the forum on that sort of technique -- basically the unselected button highlight covers up the button by matching the background. Otherwise you could have multiple menus each using part of the last song [the chorus?] that called it... it would be by no means seamless, but the *feel* might be close enough.

You could use title video rather than menus, with BOV [Button Over VIdeo]... What comes to mind at the moment is you could create each title twice using a [near] lossless codec, video-only avi matching song duration -- 1 avi duplicating your menu, & 1 with your song info. Then stack the videos with the menu as an additional angle using BOV. [everything will be rendered to mpg2, so you want higher quality than mpg2 on the timeline] A challenge will be I don't think you can have BOVs just with the angle... maybe you could set a variable when the angle is switched, & use that value as a condition for the buttons to work, or maybe have them auto-activate for certain values, switching focus back to the default button?... While there wouldn't be any visual sign that the buttons were there, someone playing with the remote might still select &/or activate them. You might also look at subtitles as a way to block off [hide] menu buttons... turn off most remote functions, & maybe when something like the enter key was pressed switch subs &/or angles etc.

An alternative might be to research [Google] resume & related script commands, variables etc. The player stores what was playing, & the position in that video when play was interupted [i.e. by pressing the menu, stop button etc on the remote]. There's not a lot of info easily available so it'll probably take some trial & error, but you might be able to resume play substituting another video in a menu or title. If you got this to work you'd probably have a dummy menu or video that automatically resumed play using your alternate video, so a gap or audio interruption might be noticeable, but you wouldn't have the multiple BOV problem, nor would you have always present menu selections.