Re: Here are the problems I encountered during my Encore Blu-ray project

Wow. There's so much misinformation in that post, I feel I must specifically address some of the "observations":

[Marc Brown] "2: Encore has difficulty importing menus saved from Photoshop, generally resulting in a crash, or, when import is successful, abnormalities tend to abound, such as buttons which are there but aren't.
A: Avoid importing menus modified in external software."

Encore has no difficulty in importing menus from Photoshop, and never has. That's Encore's main strength - full support for Photoshop file structure for menu creation. I've made literally thousands of menus in Photoshop (no exaggeration), and have never had a problem with them in Encore. There is no DVD authoring tool that has better support for Photoshop than Encore - because there's a Photoshop "engine" in Encore. Any crashing you saw in this error was likely a system problem of some kind, and not a common problem.

[Marc Brown] "4: Encore does not automatically turn off the text graphics layer upon conversion of text to button.
A: This must be done manually, once the Layers tab is located."

Why should Encore automatically turn off visibility when you convert a text layer to a button? I wouldn't want that. Your use case is one of dozens, and it shouldn't govern button creation behavior.

Your points 7, 8, 9, and 10 are all really the same thing - transcoding status. And I've never seen any of them.

[Marc Brown] "15: Encore seems to have difficulty accepting chapter points, even when the asset was transcoded by Encore with chapter points specified at the time. About half of the chapter points end up 15 frames too early. There also doesn't seem to be any means within Encore of identifying whether a given frame in a "transcoded" or "don't transcode" asset (say, for a chapter point) is an i-frame.
A: Too late and too tired to care anymore."

Wrong. As long as the asset is not MPEG-2 or H.264, you can set the chapter point anywhere and Encore will retain it as long as any previous and next chapter points are more than 1/2 second away. When Encore transcodes the file, the GOP will be created on the chapter point set.

If the asset is MPEG-2 or H.264, then the chapter has to be on a GOP. That could be up to 1/2 second away from where you set it, which is what you're describing.

[Marc Brown] "16: Encore's menu buttons frequently get lost; one is unable to click them for details.
A: Clicking the button routing ..button will bring them to the foreground, returning them to clickable status."

Wrong again. Buttons never "get lost". There are two different selection tools: one selects only buttons, and the other selects all other layers. You obviously were using the wrong selection tool. Your "answer" happens to be one of Encore's behaviors - it switches to the Button Select tool when you click the Button Routing button.

[Marc Brown] "17: Encore is very fond of undergoing a particular process called menu rendering. This process takes a long time, as it generates an MPEG2 version of one's motion menu, regardless of one's encode settings (AVC, for example). Encore unavoidably performs this process prior to any disc build. It is unknown whether this MPEG2 render is then utilized in some fashion in the disc build. "

Encore renders a motion menu only if there are visible layers and something changes in the menu (e.g., repositioned a layer, scaled, edited text, etc.). You obviously did one of these things to change the menu before building. All Encore motion menus are MPEG-2 - I think that's in Encore's documentation.

[Marc Brown] "18: Encore does not burn streams to disc in the order in which they appear in one's flowchart. Instead, it burns in the order in which the timelines / menus were created.
A: Care must be taken when importing assets. (Example: One may have an intro, prior to their menu, but if this intro was imported or created last, it will be burned last.) Or else, if the position of data on a disc is important, one may need to completely restart their project."

Encore burns streams in the order in which timelines were created, with the exception of the Main Timeline disc property, which will always be the first stream written to the disc. There's no need to restart your project if the streams aren't in the order you want. Instead, duplicate the timelines in the order you want them, and then delete the old timelines. You will of course have to relink your buttons and perhaps other objects, but that's a lot quicker than recreating your entire project.

There are certainly times when an author would like the stream order to match what's in the Flowchart, but again, that's not the only use case, and the Flowchart isn't the ideal method for this anyway, since DVD navigation hierarchy is not timeline-only.

Now, I didn't address all of your observations because I don't have time to check all of them at this time. Some of the unaddressed may be valid, and if so, specific to Blu-ray authoring. All of the obervations (excepting Flowchart issue 11, which is easy enough to work around and certainly does keep one from using the Flowchart as a feature) do not occur in DVD authoring from Encore.

So in the end, if the goal was accuracy for future users, then it's important that facts are presented - not newbie errors and misunderstandings that could have been avoided by reading the fine manual.

I hope this reply helps future users who stumble across your post.