Although I agree "in general" with JSWTS' answer - well at least the first part...I'm going to differ on part two.

Although currently you can't assign an action to a buttion (would be nice though)...making the thumbnails isn't that much work. You would just have to edite each of your video's to make x-amount of smaller clips.

The sluggish part of playback....I don't see that being too much of a concern. I've created animated menu items and they all seem to run very smooth (it's not like playing on a P4 PC vs a P1).

What you need to be mindful of is that there is a finate amout of space you can use for menus in DVDA (I think it is a gig). So you would have to plan accordingly.

But...again...all this information is moot since you can't assign an action to the buttons (as such).

Maybe you could do a submenu for each that plays a preview and tells a little about the video. That's a thought.

kameronj,

I would agree that the way you are describing thumbnail creation and menus, would move reasonably quickly, but it does not emulate what the origianl poster was asking. The way I read his question was that with mouse over or with simple selection (not actual activation with the remote), the thumbnail that's highlighted (again not activated) will then animate. As the viewer mouse's over the other thumbnails, the new one will animate automatically, while the others remain 'dormant'. To achieve such an appearance, the option for auto-activation (ie the menu hot spot responds with simple viewing) is required from within the authoring application (or with a lot of after the fact manipulation with IfoEdit)--which DVD-A doesn't offer. You have to have multiple identical menus--each one having an animated thumbnail for one selection, and the rest 'still' images for each and every thumbnail. Each menu has to mapped correctly for it to work, and with 20 thumbnails, you're talking a lot of duplicate menus and linkages. When you mouse over one of the thumbnails, it will then auto-activate and go to the identical looking menu except for the thumbnail that was viewed will now be moving, and the rest 'still'. If the viewer clicks on the thumbnail now, they will be brought to that chapter. The transition from 'still' thumbnail to 'motion' thumbnail is what can be sluggish, and depends on the menu order and position of each menu to each other on the disc. The farther they are away from each other, the longer it might take the player to 'find' the next menu--and the slower that is, the less seamless the transition will look. Animated thumbnails in DVD-A are easy, but that really isn't what we are talking about here.

Jim

Interesting.

Although I totally grasp what the original question was - without additonal assistance to DVDA I was not aware that this feature can be done (as your post seems to indicate).

Or are you indicating that? Your first post says no - this last post seems to be saying that "...To achieve such an appearance, the option for auto-activation (ie the menu hot spot responds with simple viewing) is required from within the authoring application (or with a lot of after the fact manipulation with IfoEdit)--which DVD-A does offer.

Achieving the feature as you describe I could see the slugishness happining...but I'm confussed if you are saying DVDA can or can not do this.

My experience says it can't. Can it?.

Me bad!

I meant to say "which DVD-A DOESN'T offer". Sorry for the confusion. I fixed it.

Jim

Whew....thought I was going a little kookoo.

Thanks for that clarification.

As a general point - are mouse over actions within the DVD specs?

It's easy to do this in a CDRom, but I'm wondering if the idea of having a thumbnail remain inert until pointed at, then become animated, is possible in any DVD app?

Good news if it is ...