OT: Conversion to MM CD Rom

Jessariah67 wrote on 10/25/2004, 11:38 AM

Hey all,

I'm getting more and more clients wanting their stuff put on disc and was wondering if anyone knows of a good program that can put together a basic autorun interface with an embedded player that can work on both PC & Mac.

I've looked into Director, but that has a lot more bells & whistles than I need & HTML has more variables than I'd like to deal with.

Just picking brains. Thanks for any feedback.

Kevin

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 10/25/2004, 12:27 PM

If you need Cross-platform then director is pretty much what you want. Note that you won't be able to get a disc that autostarts on most macs since they disabled that feature a few OS's ago so a cross platform program just to start a video program is likd of pointless.

If you need something for just the PC then look into Multimedia Builder ....it's a great and very cheap app that I have been using for years and it works great.

Jessariah67 wrote on 10/25/2004, 1:54 PM

Thanks for that link. that looks like a great app. I'll check it out.

We usually setup autoruns with single MPEGs, but in this case, these clients want an interface and embedded player.

It would be an easier decision if Director wasn't $10Million...

PeterWright wrote on 10/25/2004, 9:27 PM

I use Mediator 7 Pro from www.matchware.net - an amazingly clever program, which achieves very sophisticated functions using mostly drag and drop icons.

It is PC only, though - when Mac people ask, I advise them to buy a PC.

Chanimal wrote on 10/25/2004, 10:18 PM

I have produced some fairly nice looking interfaces using PowerPoint and AutoRun Assistant from Typhoon Software.

Within PowerPoint I set it up so there are no backward or forward options, but controlled entirely by buttons. I save it as a PowerPoint Show (.pos) file and include the free PowerPoint player on the CD.

I save my video files as WMV . I then build my Powerpoint and embed the videos into the PowerPoint to run when the screen displayes. My Powerpoint interface screens are built in Photoshop (usually starting with images I got from Digital Juice's Editor's Toolkit) so they don't look like PowerPoint (the bitmaps are inserted into PowerPoint slides).

I include a "test" screen within PowerPoint where they can see if it plays video (a very short sample file). If not, they can click on a link to upload the latest Media Player. If they can, they click "yes" and are brought to the main menu. This menu is usually identical to the DVD version. They can click to watch the video, go to resources, etc.

I then setup Autorun so it starts when the CD is entered. The Autorun attempts to play the PowerPoint Show file. If it runs, it goes to the main menu. If it does not run, it then opens the installer for the PowerPoint Player, after which it then loads the PowerPoint menu. These options are easy to create within the cheap ($35?) Autorun application.

It actually works very well. I used this approach most recently with multiple CD-ROM's I produced for GE.

You can see a sample of what the screens look like for my latest video, "How to Finance a High-Tech Start-Up" here:

http://www.chanimal.com/html/screens.html

Aside from the scene selection, the CD-ROM and DVD look identical.

For Mac users, and folks who can't use WMV (not conntected to download the codec, other bugs), then the CD has a Quicktime file, without an interface or autorun. My target is corporate users, and Mac isn't mainstream for corporate except among designers so I don't need a Mac option, except a Quicktime file they can play.

Hope this helps.