Why does my background menu avi skip when looped?

ubernaut wrote on 7/11/2003, 10:50 PM
I have a VERY simple background avi that contains some simple text (the name of my short). When the avi reaches its end i have DVDA loop it so it will be on screen continuously. When DVDA loops the avi there is a tiny little skip. Is there anyway to by-pass this skip?

Thanks

Seth Peterson

Comments

jeffcrow wrote on 7/12/2003, 2:44 PM
Take any professionally produced DVD you have, like a Hollywood movie, and put it into your set top DVD player, goto its main menu, and sit and watch. At some point the menu will loop, and it will skip too! You may have to wait 30 to 60 seconds before you see it loop. This is something they all do. The DVD player's head has to be moved backward to the begining of the clip to play it again. During this time you get no sound, and either a freeze frame or no video. The key to making pro DVDs is to hide this as much as possible. By carefully designing your background graphics or video you can make the pause less visible. By careful timing and fading, you can minimize the impact on the audio. Make your loop a little longer, like they do for movie DVDs, and the user may select a button before the menu has to loop.

One annoying flaw in this loop, since DVDA does not give you button flow controls, when the menu loops, it forgets what button you had highlighted, and starts over with the first button highlighted, very annoying. Better to make your menus longer so the user makes a selection before the loop, until this matter gets fixed in a future version.