Using playlists...

VU-1 wrote on 12/29/2005, 12:27 PM

I'm creating an intructional DVD that has 2 seperate view streams using the same material for both.

The first stream, uses all of the media contained on the DVD in the form of a playlist. I have it set up so that all someone needs to do is put the DVD in the player, push play and the entire program will play by itself.

The second stream utilizes multiple menus and lots of buttons so the user can jump around to any segment they wish to view.

Everything functions perfectly using DVD Arch Preview before burning.

When I use ULead DVD player on the computer to play the burned DVD:
The 2nd stream works as designed except that a few of the video clips and a jpg image or 2 won't play. The menu heirarchy works as designed.

The 1st (automatic) stream will not play the playlist at all. The playlist is invoked as a link from a timeout action on the second menu played (DVD in - push Play - Welcome menu displayed - at timeout, 2nd menu is displayed - at timeout, action links to playlist). The first item on the playlist is one of the video clips that won't play from its menu using the 2nd (menu) stream. I'm re-rendering it down now to see if that fixes it. As soon as it reaches the pont of starting the playlist, it simply stops and returns to its default menu - as if I hadn't even started the DVD yet. Same thing happens in the Menu-driven stream when I click on one of the videos or jpgs that won't play.

All videos are rendered as mpg2 files using the DVD Arch video stream method in Vegas6. All audio is AC3. All videos play fine in WMP. All videos are on an ext USB drive.

Clear as mud? Need more info?
Any ideas?
Thanks.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 12/29/2005, 7:30 PM

First off, I would see if you can repro this on a typical set top player. My experience has been that some of the software players available do a less than perfect job of playing back certain things.

--Scott

VU-1 wrote on 12/29/2005, 9:41 PM

Yep -
Played it on a "real" player and it works correctly.

But now I've got new problems:
- Most of the still images are jpeg files and once DVD Arch gets ahold of them and does its recompression thing, they come out kindof blurry. I tried creating an mpg2 file out of them in Vegas6 so DVD Arch wouldn't mess with them but that didn't come out any better (worse actually). These images look fine when viewed in a photo editor pgm. Project is 720x480 NTSC. Do they need to be re-scanned at higher res or is there something else that can be done to get clearer pics?

- Some of my menu items were off or nearly off the screen on the TV that I checked it on. Prepare said that many items were out of the work area but according to the workspace, no part of anything ever goes "out of bounds"... How can i be sure that everything will fit on any screen?

Thanks again....

ScottW wrote on 12/30/2005, 8:47 AM

Unfortunately, DVDA is going to recompress just about everything associated with a menu, and it must recompress if you place buttons on the menu. I've usually found the best results by feeding DVDA an uncompressed AVI file for the background. There's an option to help this in DVDA3, I think it's in the project settings, something like "render menus as interlaced" or something (don't have DVDA3 in front of me).

Workspace - I think it's under the View drop down, select title safe and action safe. This will produce 2 boxes in your workspace window showing you these areas. Generally, TV's can oversscan by up to 10% (sometimes more), so the outer box is your action safe area. Because of distortion at the edges of the screen, you also have an title safe area - so between the 2 you lose roughly about 20% of the screen real estate.

--Scott