BD-J Menu?

[srfscenar]

Hi all,

I am a BD author who unfortunately never had the opportunity to work with BD-J menus and since I am unable to create one, I was wondering if there is anyone willing to give a BD-J menu ready to be imported to Scenarist just for learning purposes.

Thanks.

[lutinor]

It will be nice to get this kind of thing but who will do it ? ^^ I always use 'normal' menu cause i have a decent practice on it but i don't know a single thing about pop up menu.

Notheless there is some tutorial about that

[rik1138]

Scenarist doesn't do anything with BD-J menus other than copy the JAR folder into the project, and create the BDJO (which can also simply be imported if you already have it)... You can take the JAR folder from any commercial Blu-ray and try that... It might make reference to specific playlists, and those will be automatically created when you import the BDJO and JAR.

BD-J programming is done completely independently of the authoring system, and simply dropped in at the end. You can even build the entire disc, do a mux, and just copy the JAR folder into the mux and it will work (for the most part, sometimes there's a little extra tweaking... but that's specific to how the JAR is programmed). The JAR will expect video in the PlayLists it creates (and probably in other as well). Look at the disc it came from to get an idea of what PlayLists might be required... (Yeah, this is more like hacking I suppose.)

I think Scenarist comes with a BD-J application, but it's probably just a Java environment like Eclipse. If you don't know Java programming, it probably won't help much.

But you can take the BD-J menu off any blu-ray and import it into Scenarist. You will need the CERTIFICATE folder as well.

[srfscenar]

Thanks rik!

So you mean that all the authoring is done outside of Scenarist?
It is done in Eclipse and then just import what you programed into scenarist?
If so, it's totally different than HDMV right?

[rik1138]

Yep, that's correct. No menu authoring is done in Scenarist for BD-J. Just setting up the video/audio/subtitles, and then making the final disc image for replication. You don't even need titles for BD-J (well, just one Java title to hold the JAR), Java programming can access the PlayLists directly, HDMV titles are not usually used.

There's several tools out there to make BD-J programming easier for non-programmers. DoStudio is one (although I think it can also build the whole disc for you), I've used one called Kaleidoscope (sofatronic.com) which isn't too hard to learn, at least for basic menus. It's just menu programming, you need Scenarist (or something) to build the rest of the disc.

Most of the major studios have their own custom Java code that allows new graphics to be plugged into it via scripts. So people that don't have Java experience can still 'program' the menus by modifying scripts that tell the code what features are on the discs, where the graphics are and where they should sit on the screen. These can sometimes be modified to use on your own personal discs if you can figure out the scripting (which is usually just text files included in the JAR folders somewhere). Obviously, you can't put their code on a disc for any kind of distribution though...

But all of the menu programming (either by a Java experienced programmer or the script-editing method) can all be done by someone that never sees the authoring software.

[srfscenar]

rik, thank you very much.
Its all clear now...need to learn Java...!!! :)

[DenisRodman]

Hello everybody.

Does anyone have a sample project for Kaleidoscope? Any working project is necessary.

[rik1138]

Do you have Kaleidoscope? What version?

[DenisRodman]

I have v1.1.2. I need any working project for development.

[rik1138]

Here's the tutorial files that Sofatronic used to have on their website for download:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/gfhugv
It includes all the PSDs and a tutorial walk through for building an entire project (I think there's even a Scenarist project archive to use with it to build a fully functioning disc image. Very small videos though, just for testing).
In the '...with bookmarks' folder I think there's a pre-built Kaleidoscope project you can just import and examine.

[DenisRodman]

rik, thank you very much :thanks: .

I have a question. How to see the picture of the boundaries of the screen?

I opened the screen and can not see beyond the image http://sl.uploads.im/t/TQAWP.png (http://uploads.im/TQAWP.png) .
In manual, these pictures can be seen beyond the borders of the screen http://sl.uploads.im/t/o8wGA.png (http://uploads.im/o8wGA.png) .
Can I see them, or an imitation of the developers?

[rik1138]

That might just be a mock-up example for the manual... I don't remember ever seeing the program display anything beyond the active screen itself...

But I never really went through the tutorial either. :)

[DenisRodman]

I too so thought. This is an imitation or a complete menu layout.

Such a moment. How to find out key codes?

The manual says that the command "onKeyPress" called for a key code. But the list of key codes in the manual no.
I know the codes only for the colored buttons is 403 - 406, and for the others where to take?

[rik1138]

I never had a need to use KeyCodes... I think even the colored buttons can just be referenced as 'btn_Blue' or something like that...
But write some code that captures the onKeyPress, and then print the variable you store it in to the debug console. Just go through and write them down if you need them... I think the values themselves are set in the Blu-ray spec, they aren't specific to Kaleidoscope.

[DenisRodman]

It's clear.

Such a moment. How to add the project from Blu-print?

I downloaded the driver JDBC from here (https://jdbc.postgresql.org/download.html) but how to install I did not understand.
Attempts have been made to specify the path to the .jar file but when I point out that the project file .bproj Kaleidoscope reports an error.

Maybe I'm doing wrong.

[rik1138]

Never used Blu-Print, so can't really help on that one...
But you don't use the .bproj file on the final disc image. There's a 'create blu-ray disc image' option in Kaleidoscope, you use that to output a JAR and BDJO folder. You can sign the JAR in Kaleidoscope if you have the signing keys, or you can sign it afterwards if need be (that's how I always did it, never used Kaleidoscope for signing, the client I worked with had their own signing tool).

In theory, you can build your entire disc in Blu-Print or Scenarist, do a layout, and then just copy the JAR and BDJO from Kaleidoscope into the layout folder and test there. If you are going to replication, then you need to import the BDJO, JAR and CERTIFICATE folders into the authoring software so it can make a final disc image.

[DenisRodman]

It's clear.

The last question that is interesting to me. What is a module 'triviaTrask'? By the way do you have this module?
I think it's written collection of games but I could be wrong.

[rik1138]

It's a module (I believe) for creating a trivia track, basically something like a graphic coming up at a certain time with a trivia question about the scene. I've never used it, so I don't know exactly how it worked, but it may have allowed a question with multiple answers, and kept score.

It's one of the included modules with 1.1.2 I believe, along with the Menu module, RSS Reader, Timed Event Track, Twitter and Virtual Keyboard. (I've only used Menu and Timed Event Track, so can only guess what the others do...)

[DenisRodman]

All optional modules been available for download through the Portal Developer. So in my version includes only basic modules.

rik, thank you for your help and many thanks for the sample project :thanks: .