HELP! Menu trans trouble

Rich Reilly wrote on 10/23/2007, 11:09 AM

Getting erratic display of buttons in looped menus.
The transition is at the head of the background movie and the loop begins about 2 seconds in, after the transition is done.
But I'm seeing sometimes, especially on computer players that the select overlay /buttons don't show until after one loop(30 seconds). It will show if you mouse over something on a computer but when it does this on a settop, you have to wait for a loop until the overlay is triggered.
What's going on?!!

Comments

ScottW wrote on 10/24/2007, 7:06 AM

Software players are notorious for this type of strange behavior and I don't think I've seen a single software player that 100% correctly emulates a physical DVD player; heck, even physical DVD players don't 100% implement the specs..

If you're only seeing this on software players, you've got 2, maybe 3 choices: 1) ignore it, 2) get rid of anything complex on your DVD or 3) complain to the software vendor and see if you can get them to fix.

--Scott

Rich Reilly wrote on 10/24/2007, 8:01 AM

I should update this. In some software players, the buttons never show(media player). .Sometimes they disappear after some navigation.
But I saw the display after loop on a hardware player. Other menus built the same way on the disc didn't do it. I rerendered the video, rebuilt the menu..still did it.
I should add that button movement was sometimes very sluggish when a menu had a movie.
I tried a movie menu to static menu workaround and saw how power DVD would stall after a few toggles.
Seems like a DVDA authored disc with a movie menu might be flake prone. I have not seen this behavior with hollywood titles.

MPM wrote on 10/24/2007, 9:15 AM

I've never seen this, so these are *really* guesses...

Have you experienced this using a test DVD written to hard drive? If it's only from DVD disc could be a reading problem. In that case the only way to compare to retail would be using a burned disc (I feel I have to add: which might not be legal).

Have you tried it without the intro video as part of the menu background, maybe using a separate intro or none at all -- just as a test.

I wouldn't worry excessively about WMplayer if that's where you're experiencing some problems -- it's never been a DVD player, but more a media player that can handle some VOBs & mpg2.

Have you tried disabling any special mouse software? Microsoft's Intellipoint for example has an extremely high rate of reporting/writing to the registry. This *might* be taking focus or interrupting focus on the video window, somehow interferring with normal player display?

Again those are guesses... If something doesn't work as planned I try to reduce it to a few simple tests to narrow down the cause. In this case I'd try to create as simple a DVD as possible, with just a couple minutes of title video & a couple of buttons -- maybe start with your project and after saving it as a new name, start deleting stuff. Then verify it was a problem, & then recreate it in something else and compare.

If deleting something causes the DVD to start behaving, then maybe there's a problem with whatever's been deleted?

DVDs themselves aren't all that complicated as a whole (it's designing/authoring them that makes it seem so), and where they are complicated it's caused by a lot of scripting. Displaying a menu, or an intro & menu, doesn't really involve any scripting (it's before and after). Menu button areas are button areas, and the sub-picture's a sub-picture. The background's mpg2 video. Maybe a hardware player's buffer is getting filled and needs to refresh, and that's causing problems? In that case, as Scott posted, reducing the number of buttons as a test might point to that as the cause.

Software players are a whole 'nuther ballgame... In many (most?) cases you're not just dealing with the player's code, but with Windows and sometimes whatever other software that's been installed. IMHO that's why developers targeting PCs don't go with DVDs but things like Director or DemoShield etc., and when using the DVD format, include the Interactual stuff set up to autorun.

Rich Reilly wrote on 10/25/2007, 9:36 PM

After making some changes, going for a play/hold approach to my transitions which end on static images anyway, the Cyberhome deck gets to said menu and won't display buttons period. No loop now so it won't come back to the head. You can hit enter and it takes you to the next screen which works fine. I've gone nearly crazy trying to suss this out what with redoing menus etc. I find it doesn't stall if I substitute a highlight mask from another screen. Yet..I can't discern ANY difference. I've even tied using the highlight screen that works as a template, literally retyping and arranging the text layer to fit the problematic screen. But it still stops at that point. It's like that screen has a virus, can't be seen.
In any case, it is the only protesting machine out of 4 DVD players and a couple computers with Power DVD.
It honestly has driven me nearly mad looking at Photshop files trying to see what the issue is. Of course, I want to believe it's the player since I don't see this issue anywhere else.