Layered menu not working in DVD player
by Stuart Bruce
on
Aug 13, 2009 at 8:03:51 am
I've made a DVDSP4 project with a layered menu, from Photoshop, pointing to each of six different video clips. The Photoshop file has normal, highlighted and selected layers for each clip.
When I simulate the disc and play it in one of my DVD players, it works fine. Up, down, right, left, enter, all work the way I'd expect.
Then on the other DVD player, the menu is 'stuck'. Clip number one is permanently selected, and up down left and right make no difference to what appears on screen.
However it appears that the buttons are *working*, it's just the display that's not working, if that makes any sense. For example, if I put the disc in, and press right-right-enter, then clip 1 is still selected on screen, but it's clip 3 that plays. And if I start again and press right-right-right-right-enter, then again the display doesn't change but clip 5 will play (which it should).
I don't know whether this is a fault in my build or in the DVD player, but this is a disc I'll be doing many copies of so I don't want to send it out if this is going to happen on lots of players.
Any suggestions would be very gratefully received.
Re: Layered menu not working in DVD player by Stuart Bruce on Aug 13, 2009 at 3:25:39 pm
I've done this now, thanks.
I hadn't realised that layered menus were so non-standard, until I found this article:
http://www.tfdvd.com/public/123.cfm which made me realise that layered menus might look good but overlay was the way to go.
Re: Layered menu not working in DVD player by Michael Sacci on Aug 13, 2009 at 4:23:15 pm
there is a better way to do this, the old fashion way. It is still slow and has the same "problems" on computers. But you do it with a separate menu for each state, and then you auto-active the navigation buttons to jump to what appears to be the button above, below, left or right. This is what DVDSP is going but instead of jumping to another menu it jump to another frame of video it made of all the layer states. I would say it is this created movie file that some players go not like.
The best practice is to go back to the tried and true simple shapes of the overlays. There is a reason that you don't see too many Hollywood DVD using what you get with layered menus. The Seinfeld DVDs are probably the best know that used this method.
