Menus using VOBs for Images

shauntoole wrote on 12/21/2005, 10:12 AM

I am looking at a commercial DVD that uses a small VOB as background for its menus. I extracted the VOB, made an MPEG from it, and viewed it in Vegas. It has one image per frame, approximately. The DVD player goes into pause mode when it displays each frame, then the remote moves a cursor to the items on the menu. Selecting a menu item causes the player to display a different frame of the VOB file.

Can this be done with DVD Architect 3? Is there a primer or "how to" article about this somewhere?

Comments

ScottW wrote on 12/21/2005, 11:34 AM

Check the DVDA help, look for "auto-activate"

In a nutshell you create multiple menus that start out being pretty much identical (at least as far as your buttons are concerned). You set the action on every button but the currently selected button to be auto-activate - so basically what happens is when someone navigates away from the selected button to some other button, that button gets activated taking you to a new menu where the default selected button is the button they navigated too (and on this menu, that button does not have auto activate set, but instead has some other action specified for when they press enter).

--Scott

shauntoole wrote on 12/28/2005, 2:16 PM

Thanks, I think I understand this. So how do you make the player freeze on the new page rather than playing through the rest of the mpeg clip to the end?

ScottW wrote on 12/28/2005, 2:24 PM

The default action of the menu is to hold, so since you just have a still picture, the display doesn't change.

It almost sounds like your trying to use the VOB/MPEG stream to create your menu, and you can't, what you're looking at is the end result, not the beginning.

You can extract the individual images from that stream and then import those JPEGs into DCDA as the menu background for building your new menus.

--Scott

shauntoole wrote on 12/28/2005, 6:15 PM

Actually, I did extract the images from the stream and use them as background media. But the original DVD has a VOB that is about 4MB with several stills, including graphics, and these are the backgrounds for the menu. When each menu is displayed, the DVD player is in "pause" mode. Selecting a button on the menu causes the player to jump to another chapter, which displays another still and goes into pause again. I don't know why they would do it this way vs. having still graphics for the menus instead. When I extract these using Nero Recode, it creates a separate VOB for each of the still backgrounds in the 4MB VOB, as if they were separate titles.

ScottW wrote on 12/28/2005, 7:22 PM

You are confusing looking at the end result with the actual authoring.

When the original DVD was authored, all they had was still images for the backgrounds of the menus - the authoring program created a VOB file that contained all the backgrounds of the various menus as single frames of video in a single MPEG2 stream where the DVD player pauses on each individual picture.

--Scott

shauntoole wrote on 12/28/2005, 8:56 PM

AHA! Thanks for pointing that out.