Read this to see what Cunhambebe is referring to.

Rob

Absolutely no such problems with 4.5 -- just my experience.

The same issue is there with every version of DVDA and I suspect with other authoring apps. The problem is that end actions determine what happens when a video file finishes playing. But it DOESN'T determine what happens if the user presses the NEXT button on the remote. Most DVD players interpret this as a command to go to the next titleset. But that then begs the question of "what determines the order of the titlesets?" In earlier (pre-4) versions of DVDA, this was determined by the order in which the videos appeared in the project list (left-hand part of the screen). Then, thank goodness, in DVDA4, Sony added the Order menu item (in the File menu) and this made life MUCH simpler.

I still think there may be some residual navigation issues connected with the order of the video assets in the project list, but I could be dead wrong about that. I certainly cannot give any example at the moment.

So, the solution is definitely to use the Order DVD Titles function.

"I still think there may be some residual navigation issues connected with the order of the video assets in the project list, but I could be dead wrong about that. I certainly cannot give any example at the moment."

I'm no coder - kind of like Maxwell Smart compared to James Bond - but as far as I can tell DVDA's boilerplate scripting loops back thru the beginning scripts quite often. Maybe a side effect, maybe designed to have free variables available for your added scripting, gprm's that DVDA's scripting depends on for almost everything don't seem to hold their value like I've seen on DVDs created with other products.

I think that what happens is as long as the DVD is operating off it's own internal links and such everything tends to work fine... It's a linear process where keeping track of where you are isn't that important because things only happen in sequence. But, when the DVD player processes an external command from the remote, you're no longer in that totally linear process, and have gprm values you can no longer depend on.

I'm probably not explaining it well -- put another way, I think that there aren't enough variables available, so the limited number you've got are constantly re-purposed... I *think* the result is that when a command comes in from the remote, under some circumstances, the DVD player's in effect lost it's place. It's like going down the street and swapping mailboxes as a prank - houses are still there, but the street numbers are all wrong.

That's my guess anyway.

Thanks to all who took time to respond and sorry for the late reply.
I agree with all of you in spite of my stupidity of not searching for "Order DVD Titles". This option (new feature in DVDA 4.0 - well no too new, since DVDA now is version 4.5) fixes an old issue we've seen in DVDA since its begining.

I guess most of you remember the workaround to have videos playing in a correct order (or at least the one we wanted) when we pressed the NEXT button. We had discussed this around here before. We had to oder all videos in a row. This way they should play following that same order when the NEXT button was hit. Now we have this feature (order DVD titles) but anyway, I see that the discussion remains... End actions are one thing, the next button is something different.
Cheers,
Mark

I don't know if it'll be of any interest Mark, but there were a couple of threads I think where we discussed adding dummy videos to better control program flow. DVDA & most other authoring apps make liberal use of dummy menus, & some include dummy videos too, so it's nothing out of the ordinary - shouldn't expect compatibility problems or anything.

In a nutshell, these dummies are just a place to park some lines of scripting, though you don't have to do any script writing or inserting yourself. In the case of the NEXT / PREV buttons, which can work erratically depending on the player, dummy videos send the viewer just where you want them to go - a kind of fail-safe to make sure everything happens the way *You* want it to.

I have black, 1 sec clips handy in both 4:3 & 16:9, so it doesn't take hardly any time to import, and you can add whatever end actions or more involved scripts you need. For these dummy clips you can disable whatever (or all) remote buttons, though the viewer will hardly have time to get into too much trouble during that very short duration.