The_cranky_hermit
31st January 2008, 05:24
Using DVDShrink, I have made a VIDEO_TS folder containing 24 titles and no menus. Each title represents a complete but very short movie - all of them are silent shorts in the public domain. All of the titles use Dolby Digital 2.0 for audio, are non-anamorphic, and none have any subtitles or closed captioning. A few of them have French commentary tracks, which I intend to get rid of before finalizing the disc, partly because the intended audience (including myself) is English-speaking, and partly because the commentary is not in the public domain.
Currently, if you were to make a physical DVD of this and stick it in a DVD player, it would play the movies in chronological order.
Here's how I picture my ideal DVD menu setup. For the sake of simplicity, let's pretend that 6 of the 24 movies were made by the Lumiere Brothers, 6 were made by Georges Melies, 6 were made by Thomas Edison, and 6 were made by DW Griffith. As soon as you play the DVD, you would get a menu with these five options:
Lumiere
Melies
Edison
Griffith
Play all movies in chronological order
The fifth option would do exactly what it sounds like. If you select one of the first four, you get a sub-menu. Each sub-menu would have eight options - six for the six movies, one to play all six in chronological order, and one to go back to the main menu. For example, the Melies sub-menu would look like this:
Play "The Four Troublesome Heads (1898)
Play "Bluebeard" (1901)
Play "The Man with the Rubber Head" (1901)
Play "A Trip to the Moon" (1902)
Play "The Music Lover" (1903)
Play "The Impossible Voyage" (1904)
Play all Melies movies in chronological order
Back
..and the other three menus would be along similar lines.
I don't really care if the menu is crude-looking, as long as it functions the way I envision it.
So, what would you recommend I use in order to achieve this? In the Newbies board, I was given a general recommendation of TMPGEnc DVD Author, but that costs money. If it's really the most ideal tool for my project and there isn't anything comparable for free, then I'll buy it. But if there's something else that would work better or as well for free, I'll use that instead.
Currently, if you were to make a physical DVD of this and stick it in a DVD player, it would play the movies in chronological order.
Here's how I picture my ideal DVD menu setup. For the sake of simplicity, let's pretend that 6 of the 24 movies were made by the Lumiere Brothers, 6 were made by Georges Melies, 6 were made by Thomas Edison, and 6 were made by DW Griffith. As soon as you play the DVD, you would get a menu with these five options:
Lumiere
Melies
Edison
Griffith
Play all movies in chronological order
The fifth option would do exactly what it sounds like. If you select one of the first four, you get a sub-menu. Each sub-menu would have eight options - six for the six movies, one to play all six in chronological order, and one to go back to the main menu. For example, the Melies sub-menu would look like this:
Play "The Four Troublesome Heads (1898)
Play "Bluebeard" (1901)
Play "The Man with the Rubber Head" (1901)
Play "A Trip to the Moon" (1902)
Play "The Music Lover" (1903)
Play "The Impossible Voyage" (1904)
Play all Melies movies in chronological order
Back
..and the other three menus would be along similar lines.
I don't really care if the menu is crude-looking, as long as it functions the way I envision it.
So, what would you recommend I use in order to achieve this? In the Newbies board, I was given a general recommendation of TMPGEnc DVD Author, but that costs money. If it's really the most ideal tool for my project and there isn't anything comparable for free, then I'll buy it. But if there's something else that would work better or as well for free, I'll use that instead.