Buttons Over Video Disappear

[The Evil mariachi]

Hey Everyone,

I have been having issues with buttons over video on a choreography dvd I'm putting together (the buttons are used to switch from a front video angle, to a back angle and so forth) with dvd studio pro.

When a user fast forwards or rewinds, the buttons disappear. I have been told by both Apple and Sonic that this is just a limitation of the spec, but we have found a DVD that does work exactly as we need it to.

Does anyone know of a workaround to this issue? Is there a way to see what the other title did to make it work?

Thanks in advance.

[bigotti5]

Repeat your subpicture and highlight every second, so it is restarted after ff or rew...

http://members.aon.at/video.digital/scen.png

[The Evil mariachi]

Hey Bigotti5,

Thank you for your reply.

That was one of the things I asked the Sonic rep if I could do, and he told me it might introduce problems and confuse some players...although he didn't go into detail as to what exactly those problems would be...

I'm new to the game, so forgive me if this seems obvious, but is there a file in the structure that I could compare that could tell me what exactly they did differently to make it work?

Thanks again.

[Eric69]

What is the name of the title that works the way you want? Subtitles cannot appear during FF or RW.:script:

[The Evil mariachi]

Hey Eric,

It's not the fact that they disappear when they ff/rw, it's that they don't come back when the user finishes the ff/rw. The buttons are still there, you can still click on them, they are just not visible.

The title was a fitness dvd that was made for my company when they were in partnership with an outside production company. I tried contacting the company they sub-contracted to author the dvd, but, understandably, they would not tell me how they did it. All I could get out of them was that they used a software developed by Toshiba, which was not available commercially. Anyone know anything about this special software?

[bigotti5]

Can you post 10-20 seconds of such a VOB?

[The Evil mariachi]

Bigotti,

I'm not sure how to extract a vob with the buttons, etc. Could we see what's different by looking at the IFO files?

[rik1138]

All I could get out of them was that they used a software developed by Toshiba, which was not available commercially. Anyone know anything about this special software?

It's just Toshiba's DVD authoring system. It's a high-end system that was only made available to certain studios and their authoring partners, so he is right about you not being able to get it... I think WB is the only studio still using it almost exclusively (although they do use Scenarist too).

But, with the possible exception of seamless branching, there's nothing it can do that Scenarist can't... I'm sure the trick mentioned above would solve the problem. I've never seen a player that really has a problem with that technique, and most likely if it did, it would just be the same problem you are seeing now. So fix it on 90%+ of players, and let the others suffer. :) I've done the exact thing shown above on a few game DVDs, and never had a problem with playback (granted, FF was locked out, but the programming would jump you into random parts of the video, and selecting the buttons would add values to GPRMs, so the buttons still had to be refreshed all the time).

If you want guaranteed player compatibility, you'd have to lock out FF/REW... I believe there's a couple players that just will not recover buttons after FF no matter what you do (until it actually jumps to a new Title (i.e., end of video start of the next video)). Hopefully no one using the disc will have those players (they are probably first gen players anyway, so there's a good chance they aren't in use anymore...).

If you really want to figure it out, get a program called DVD Re-Author, it will take the existing DVD and create a Scenarist script for it that you can load up and see what they did. Doesn't matter what authoring system they used originally...

[Eric69]

Could be a player issues. Ive done several titles like this on both DVDSP and Scenarist without issues.

[The Evil mariachi]

Hey Rik, thanks for the info! I will look into dvd reauthor.

I guess the thing to do now is to try out the trick mentioned, burn, and test.

Eric, have you been able to automate the process in dvdsp? Putting up markers every few seconds is tedious, but what the heck--it's replacing the buttons themselves every time a button highlight marker splits the subtitle track--at least that's what happens when I do it. Any tips?

Thanks again to all that have contributed.

Regards.

[bigotti5]

No need to extract - just a piece of the VOB - you can use DGSplit (http://neuron2.org/dgsplit/dgsplit11.zip)