Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/15/2006, 10:05 AM
Try a different DVD player. All players will have some gap at this point. Some will be noticeably longer than others. About the best you can hope for is a player t hat holds the last frame on the screen while it starts the menu over again so you at least don't get a black screen. However, just because you find a player that does this doesn't mean anyone else you give your discs to will have one.
autopilot wrote on 7/15/2006, 10:15 AM
Can you fade in from black, then fade out to black at the end, so it looks like there's no gap?
ScottW wrote on 7/15/2006, 11:37 AM
1) accept the fact that you'll never get something totally seamless on absolutely every player - it's physics. When the laser reaches the end of the A/V stream that it's reading from the DVD, the player must reposition the laser to the beginning of the stream - this movement takes a finite amount of time.

2) here's a trick - if youve got the room on the DVD, create the loop yourself in VMS - that is, repeat your material 2 or 3 times (or more) on the timeline before you render it out for use in DVDAS. It's uncommon for anyone to spend longer than a minute (2 tops) on any given menu.. If your material is 30 seconds long, do 4 repetitions of it in VMS and you'll likely be covered for most cases.

--Scott
Chienworks wrote on 7/15/2006, 1:02 PM
That's something i don't understand. Maybe some engineer from an electronics manufacturer could chime in and explain this ... but it seems to me (disclaimer noted) that most DVD mechanisms can read from the disc much faster than the data needs to be read. Memory is dirt cheap. Why can't modern DVD players read ahead and cache a second or two and then play this back from RAM while the laser is being repositioned? Heck, the portable CD player i bought 12 years ago could do that for 20 seconds. Surely technology has advanced enough now to accomplish the same thing with a DVD playback stream.
ScottW wrote on 7/15/2006, 1:31 PM
Not in electronics manufacturing and I don't play one on TV, but...

Memory may be dirt cheap, but when you're talking about adding anything to the overall manufacturing process, it can kinda add up over the long run. Also, component pricing is only part of the picture - there's design that goes on behind all of this as well.

Since many manufacturers are in a race to the bottom (driven by big box stores like Wal Mart), even saving a couple of pennies per unit can really add up.

Read-ahead with caching can get complicated, just like it is in the computer world. To do it right you have to start adding in things like predictive branching, and then there's all the stuff with cache flushing and so forth, because after all, if you can loop seamlessly, then you should be able to select a menu option via the remote and have a seamless transition there as well, no?

Seriously, the only people I've ever seen worry about something like a pause during looping are the people that author the DVD - the general public probably doesn't notice or care.

--Scott
Chienworks wrote on 7/15/2006, 2:33 PM
Yeah, i suppose the pennies adding up does make a difference. At my old job we were designing a buzzer module for General Motors' dashboards. They wanted us to get the price from 47 cents down to 44 cents. They said that change would save them over $1 million per year (do they really make that many cars?) and get them under budget.