How to stop video starting automatically

Danny-Lawrence wrote on 5/5/2021, 10:21 AM

Until now I have used Movie Studio 12 and saved my completed video projects to DVDs and so been able to create menus as well as choose when to begin playing. I'm now using Movie Studio v.17 and have decided to now save my completed videos to an external hard drive and play the videos back through the USB port on my TV. I am reconciled to not being able to create menus, or transfer menus from my existing DVDs to the hard drive. However, deciding when you are sitting comfortably and ready to start watching is surely not something unreasonable to want to do. Any advice on how to do that would be appreciated - and please forgive me if this is something so straightforward that it ought to be obvious to me.

Comments

Former user wrote on 5/5/2021, 10:30 AM

Get a Media Player. Amazon carries many types that can play from USB drives and allow full remote, similar to DVD. No menus though.

Danny-Lawrence wrote on 5/5/2021, 12:09 PM

I do have a Blue Ray player and accept that its remote gives me more convenient control of the video than my TV remote. However, whether I use the media player or TV the video starts immediately I select it from the list of those available. What I hope to be able to do, after making the selection from the list, is go to an initial start screen and then use a play/start button at my leisure, as I can do with a DVD disc. I realised that in using files rather then DVDs I would lose the menus but I had hoped I would at least be able to have a simple start screen that I could tailor to suit the content of the video.

steve-quinney wrote on 5/5/2021, 1:23 PM

Hi Danny. I have also moved over to putting my videos on a 64Gb USB stick rather than DVD or Blu-ray as I found creating menus and then burning the disc (which often wasn't burned properly the first time) to be too time-consuming and frustrating. Each video obviously is shown in a menu when played on the TV ready to choose the one you want to watch. To overcome what I think is your problem, at the beginning of the video I put a "menu" screen which displays for about 5-10 seconds. If I don't want to start the video immediately, I just pause it whilst showing that first screen, ie. within 5-10 seconds of starting the video. I also put on that first screen, the time at which any important parts of the video begin so that if you wanted to start at a certain point you could fast-forward to the time that piece begins. Not as simple as a DVD menu, but I have found it a reasonable solution. Hope this helps.

Danny-Lawrence wrote on 5/5/2021, 3:36 PM

Thanks Steve. I've done something similar on my first two 'made for hard drive' videos. I start each with a visual 10 second countdown which, as you say, gives ample time to pause it. I was intending to have a background appropriate to the video with my next one but I hadn't thought of providing information in the way you suggest - so thank you very much for that suggestion. But, given the sophistication of today's hardware and software, it seems a very amateurish 'solution'. Given I had become quite adept at creating DVD menus it is definitely a backward step.