I know how to change the color of the selected or activated states but the "invisible" option is quite difficult to find.

You can't make the button graphic invisible, but you can fake it by hiding it behind highlighting. Note that the actual buttons on DVD menus are created by DVD Architect using a set of up to four colors. Those PNGs you added aren't really buttons -- they're just graphics that DVD Architect will incorporate into background image / video. Strictly speaking, they will be beneath the actual buttons (the highlighting).

Anyhow, scroll down to my last post in this thread. That does what I believe you're trying to achieve. It does, however, require that the menu background (at least the area immediately behind the buttons) be a solid color.

Rob

First off I'd suggest that hiding a button, while visually cool, might not be the most intuitive to the average viewer. That said...

Phil, a button is actually only a hot spot -- a set of rectangular coordinates -- and on a pc, clicking in that area, or with DVD player, selecting that area and hitting enter/play causes whatever button action to happen. Anyway, point of restating what you probably already know, is that buttons themselves have no image to start with - a thumbnail or text when used are just composited on the mpg2 video that DVDA creates for the menu background. Any images are just a visible hint to the viewer.

Button high-lights OTOH are like subs, contained in a graphic overlay on top of the video. 4 colors are possible, but one of those is normally reserved for transparency; normally one color represents the main graphic, and 2 others varying degrees of transparency for anti-aliasing or fading. However you can use 3 of the colors however you want, say for creating a text or graphic button.

So that would be one possibility for invisible buttons -- create your button coordinates wherever you want, and make the high-light itself the button graphic. Another is to cover up an existing area of your background until the button was selected.

The 1st method I believe is what George is suggesting... If you can get away with a one color graphic, using 2 for blending, it should be pretty straightforward. If you want to use all 3 colors, you can try to do it by varying the transparency in the png graphic, maybe playing with the red channel that DVDA uses. However to go beyond that you will I think have to go outside of DVDA, working on a rendered DVD on hdd.

While DVDA uses the red channel, it's perhaps more common to use 4 set colors for the mask, & these in turn allow your choice of colors to show thru, bearing in mind one is going to be used for transparency to let your menu background show. There's lots of info available online, as well as free & low-cost software you can use, though the learning curve is mainly going to involve replacing the button High-lights you created in DVDA... I'd start with DVDSubEdit

bStro I believe talks about the 2nd method... Where the downside of the 1st is limiting the complexity of graphics, hiding an existing area of the background means you have to match an area of solid color. Area is the key word -- you don't have to have everything one color -- just where your high-light is going to be.

Either method gives you some interesting options...

I often mis-understand what people are trying to do, so maybe the following doesn't address your problem at all.

However, I make invisible buttons all the time. I click on the button, and then click on the "Media" tab in the Button Properties section. I then set "Thumbnail Properties" and "Frame Properties" to None. The button is there, but invisible. I use this all the time in menus to let the user go to the next or previous menu simply by pressing the left or right arrow. I simply duplicate the visible buttons and move them off-screen. I then set the navigation logic for the visible buttons so the left or right arrow moves to the invisible button. On the invisible button I set the "Auto-Activate" action to Yes. Finally, I make the button invisible in the manner I noted above.

Interesting design john...

On next applicable project think I might try this:
Create a couple of empty buttons, or modify the existing next/prev ones that DVDA sticks in there. Set the button style to text, use the words next & prev, set the text color to 100% transparent, turn off shadow, set the high-light to text, though undecided whether I'd auto-activate or not.

Personally don't like to leave hints off -- know a lot of people who get confused by next buttons and the like [Really] -- but come close to detesting the look of the standard next/prev stuff.

Thanks!

Sorry for the delay, I was really busy at work. Thanks everyone for your time. I'm going to follow your advices and try your solutions and I let you know .

Phil