burning a multimedia cd

spidey wrote on 1/17/2002, 12:15 AM

has anyone had any success using the burn multimedia cd capabilities in vv3? i've tried 3 discs: with and without the "web page" option, and i've tried both .asf and .wmv video formats.

the autorun only pops open the D: drive window, but nothing will actually auto-play. also, the autorun.inf file is identical on all 3 discs, such as:

[autorun]
label=video_test
shellexecute=\video_test.wmv

and that's it. the interesting thing is in the main vegas folder, you'll find a few .html "template" pages for the different video formats (go ahead, have a look :) but none of them appear to make it onto the burned cd.

can anyone give me any advice? is this a bug? i would not be opposed to editing the autorun & web pages myself, but i'm not sure what the autorun should look like...

thanks in advance!

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/17/2002, 4:13 PM

I did a bunch of searching at Microsoft's website for this very topic about
a week ago. Only in the newest versions of Windows, such as Win2K and
XP, (oddly enough referred to as versions 4.0a & b or something like)
will that autorun.inf file work. These newer versions of Windows will accept
a non-executable file as an argument to the shellexecute or shell
commands and find an appropriate player already installed on the
system to launch. Previous versions of windows can only accept an
executable program as an argument in the autorun.inf file (although you
may then follow that with the name of the media file to play).

If you look at most multimedia discs, you'll see that they execute a
program called launcher or player, which respectively open up a shell to
find the appropriate player or the specified player. Sonic Foundry's demo
& content CDs use a program called SFLAUNCH.exe. I was able to create
an autostarting CD by copying this file to the CD and and following what
they have in their autorun.inf file.

Now what we need is for Sonic Foundry to be really nice and provide us
with a small, free (or at least freely distributable) media player utility
that will run from a CD without being installed and play .wmv files! If
they want to charge the multimedia developer for it, they could always
have Vegas create a new copy of the player .exe file for each CD that
will only play from that CD. That way it could only be distributed by the
person who has the Vegas license.

Pretty please??? ;)

I think i'll go make a quick stop at the product suggestion page now.

kkolbo wrote on 1/17/2002, 8:17 PM

You already have it on your drives. mplayer2.exe in the C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player folder. Place that in your CD's root directory and call it with the file name after it.That is what it is made for. It goes and finds the dll's it needs to be windows media player.

As for launching an HTML file with an embeded player, you have to have a lauch utility to do that or call iexplore.exe

Keith

spidey wrote on 1/17/2002, 10:37 PM

thanks for your suggestions. i shall now experiment a bit. if i come up with anything, i'll post again.

in the meantime if anyone else has any ideas, feel free to share!