So . . . did the URL for new themes ever become a reality? I'm not really interested in building my own, but I'd love to see some more if others want to share what they've created.

The point is, while you can change the XML, WHAT you can change via the XML is next to useless.

Pick a current theme. Most have three placeholders for the thumbnails. Fine if you just want 3 chapters per page, but what if you want four or five, maybe eight? It all falls apart!

Pick a template then do a scene selection with five chapters. What happens to your theme? It shrinks all the objects. Now you probably want to resize it. Simple enough using the sizing tools, but what happens if you add another video or two or three? Again if they have only three chapters, you're pretty safe and your design won't look bad. Enter real world where each video likely will have a different number of chapters. Now the templates are useless because you'll need to resize each menu page to have them all the same size. If you don't then the project looks very unprofessional, even for home use with each video having a different size thumbnail design (if you don't change it) and perhaps the thumbnails need to be repositioned as well.

Since you can easily drop in a background without messing with templates and size and or change the borders and style of the thumbnails making a custom template is pointless and just time wasted in my opinion.

I know I've made a big deal about this because it IS a big deal. I don't know how it got out the door this crippled. The whole point of being able to make a custom template is to have a pattern THAT IS REPEATABLE. Since it is most likely each of your project will vary in the number of chapter points they contain, to not be able to create a template that sets the number and position of the thumbnails is, in my opinion a must-have feature, sadly its lacking along with several common navigation actions.

I'm glad I read this BillyBoy!

I thought I was a klutz or was missing some pages from the manual!

I can accept all the things DVDA doesn't do and its certainly rock solid BUT surely if I have two pages of thumbnails with 6 per page and the last one only has three I'd like them all the same size?

As a tool for reliably making DVDs for corporate clients its great, they don't need all the Hollywood extras but I'd expect not to have to fight it all the time just to make the menus look half decent.

I spent an hour convincing a dubbing house here that DVDA was the way to go for making basic DVDs, I told them about all the things that it will not do and that didn't worry them in the least. I'd forgotten about the issues you've raised and now I can see myself having to eat humble pie on this issue.