I make a lot of DVDs where the 'menu' is the thing, they're used for in store kiosks. The thing just sits there playing this clip with a menu so you can look at any item in detail if that takes your fancy.

My problem is the entire menu has to fit into 1 GB, no real drama. Given that DVDA has to encode the background video to add in the buttons there's actualy a downside to encoding to mpeg-2 outside of DVDA. Doing that means DVDA is decodeing the mpeg-2, compositing the buttons and encoding from that.
So I feed DVDA with an nice AVI for the menu background however you get very little control over how DVDA does the encode. This isn't oftenly too much of an issue excpet as the 'menu' gets longer I've got to use a lower bitrate and things are starting to look a tad woeful, particularly this text crawl I have at the bottom of the screen.

I know this is an unusual use for a DVD, but could something please be done to provide more control within DVDA of the encoding when it HAS to be done in DVDA.

Of course if anyone has a clue how to avoid doing the encode in DVDA I'll buy ya a beer.

Bob.

Oh and while I'm at it, how come you can only select 10 menu item in a DVD that DVDA creates using the number buttons?
My DVD remote will go to at least 19!