Creating Menus with Sub Menus ...

This has perhaps been answered before. I did a serach or 2 but couldn't really find exactly what i was after .. so here it goes.. I'm doing an SVCD with some rips of "extras" from selected DVD's. I'd like to create a menu for the SVCD. It will be one single SVCD, i will have extras from 2 possibly 3 movies and each movie would have say 4 items... I would ultimately like to create a title menu with a selection to goto the selction of Movie1 or Movie2 from that moves into a sub menu with the thumbnails of each avialable movie. Is this possible wihtout going to great expense ? I have time up my sleeve for fiddling, just looking for a push in the right direction regarding software to use for creation of the menus etc.

Try this free program. I haven't used it myself, it looks fairly complicated, but the site has a number of guides. The program uses the same backend as VCDEasy, VCDImager. Another option is to use VCDImager directly by learning how to write the xml files that it uses to generate the SVCD image.

Thanks for that. Will give it a go!

I think i'm in way over my head with all this. fark. Thanks for your time.

dont worry! we were all over our heads at some point. I know your aim is to create your own original menus but my guide (in my sig) may give you some kind of insights (its for copying the menus off the dvd instead of making them yourself.. I know, I'm such a lazy moocher :p ) I also HIGHLY reccomend reading the guides on about VCD menu structures, they'll give you a clearer picture on the whole deal. Good luck, and don't get discouraged.

Thanks RadicalEd .. while i've been debating on both sides to say give up and just burn the dammed thing without menus ... or to keep persisting .. i did a few hours in photoshop on the menus ... at the moment i've been reading thru this guide Which i feel seems to be good. Using animated icons is a good idea, probably starting off with the really hard stuff.. the part i'm confused about is in Step 6, making the tumbnail videos .. i have a lot of small MPEG's that are to be executed by each menu. These are full SVCD resolution ... The way i understand it is that seeing as my videos are all separate i don't need to have the videos chopped up, however, i highly doubt that the DVD player will resize the thumbnail videos on the fly, so i assume that i have to re-encode my "thumbnails" to a smaller size ... is this right ?? I would rip the selections off the DVD's, but they are each from difference sections on the DVD and don't really ahve a very good icon to rip (in this case..) anyways .. so i'll skip using the DVD menu's for now (thanks for the link tho, into the bookmarks it goes..)

OK .. well i've done the 3 menus (1 main 2 sub menus) but haven't cut the spaces yet .. so i'm glad i didn't get that far !! I'm still a little confused on half the stuff which will i think take way too much time to bother explaining. The Actual application of the script is one of the things that i've got no idea about ... like what the hell am i suppsed to do with it? You mentioned that your example has a moving background and stills in the foreground correct? I am looking to do the reverse, so i assume that i convert the background to an MPG? using say, TMPGenc, do i have to mux the 15 seconds of audio that i want to use on that menu with the background file ? For hte thumbnails, obviously they are going to be 15 seconds long too, when i rip them out of the MPG's that they are in at the moment, should i resize the video (somehow) or is that done by the script... sorry for all the questions, i highly appreciate the help, everyone's situation is different so its hard reading a heap of guides on this stuff and have them all saying conflicting things and using different proggie to seemingly do the same thing.

Thanks for you time, but i'm just wasting mine trying to piece this all together. bah. another project and 40 hours of encode time scrapped.

I got an error both times on both scripts. Using yours and the other one that i posted the link to. Using both TMPGenc and CCE 2.50. TMPGenc gave: Unregonized exception in line 1 ... so i dunno what i did ... below are the changes i made. I changed nothing except the path and the "DirectShowSource" section. ------------ clip0=DirectShowSource("D:\MPEGs\For The Birds.mpg") clip1=DirectShowSource("D:\MPEGs\Company Play.mpg") clip2=DirectShowSource("D:\MPEGs\Mikes New Car.mpg") clip3=DirectShowSource("D:\MPEGs\bloopers.mpg") clip4=DirectShowSource("D:\MPEGs\Gone Nutty.mpg") clip0.BicubicResize(480,480) Layer(clip1.BicubicResize(100,100),"add",255, 50,40) Layer(clip2.BicubicResize(100,100),"add",255,190,40) Layer(clip3.BicubicResize(100,100),"add",255,330,40) Layer(clip4.BicubicResize(100,100),"add",255,50,170) return last --------- CCE came up each time with "Frame Size 736x56 is not supported. Supported Frame size is up to 720x576" the only reason i can think for that is that my menus were made @768x576 to ensure proper aspect ratio when encoded. I also added the ResampleAudio(44100) to the CCE version of the script as you suggested. I edited the other script that i posted a link to and got the exact same error in CCE and a similar error, except on a different line. SW

I tryied too, and doesn't work. I don't think you can use directshowsource so many times. I thought you extracted your thumbnails as avi. It would work with avisource. You can have your menu as mpg. but I think you have to extract the thumbnails with vdub as avis, like the guide says. If you are willing to do that(it's not a big deal), I can be of assistance if needed. I allways use the d2v file created by dvd2avi to get my thumbnails. After that, it's very easy to do this. Well, I don't think there's another way. Except using tscv. It's up to you what you want to do next.