Menu Looping (again)

[Slug123]

Menu looping seems to be the bane of my life with DVD-Maestro at the moment but here is yet another question that I am having trouble answering with my own trials and tests :-

Some movies appear to use a single VOB file for all the navigational menu's for example the SPIDERMAN DVD has one large VOB which starts of with an excellent intro movie which then brings up the menu options and loops with a movie of spiderman swinging on his web through the city. The vob also contains all the other transitional video's and menu's :-

So my question is how do you use this vob file to play the intro part of the vob but then stop playing before the next menu and loop between those two points? I have managed to extract the intro movie and loop segments from the vob and this works to a point BUT I would like to know how it is done properly, an extension to this question would be after achieving the intro and menu loop how would you then, after selecting a menu item, play a segment of movie from the vob file?

Slug

ps when I say vob file I probably actually mean demuxed m2v/ac3 file

[sw3d]

Basically you have to re-author the whole DVD...
There are a lot of threads concerning down sizing the main movie, so it fits on a 4.7GB DVD, but keeping the original menus... (ifoEdit etc.)
Looks a little complicated to me, and for sure it's not that foolproof.
I usually skip the menus and just play the movie. It's much more simple to do, plus you have more space on the DVD. Rather a Directors commentary than a menu, right?!
I just build menus for my own DVD's. The looping issue is a lot easier there, because I can create exactly the menu loops I need.
If you want to create your Spiderman DVD from scratch you'll have to take the VOBs apart. First you can demux the VOB into Cell files using VobEdit, than you can extract the m2v and ac3. The same thing you do with the movie VOBs (Demux complete title set). Once you have all the menu and movie parts separate, you can put everything back together in Maestro. If the movie is too big you can recompress it with CEE or similar.
The problem with the loops is (check thread menu loop with start sequence (problem)) that the looping function in Maestro apparently doesn't work right... (at least with PowerDVD)
That means, that you can't exactly use the original cells you've got from your original DVD, because they are authored probably for Scenarist which works a little different.

[Slug123]

MMmmm I was happy with just ripping the films and creating simple menu's with a single play button but for some reason (forgotten why now) I thought it would be a good idea to understand how the pro's do it...

The only option I can see is like you mentioned ripping each menu segment to individual m2v and ac3 files and then spending the time to put the whole lot together again.. possibly more pain for very little return.

How much harder is scenarist to use than maestro?

Slug

[sw3d]

You don't have to create any menus in Maestro...
You can just assign the movie as 'First Play'. When you put
the DVD in the Player the movie starts playing right away.
Most easy solution.

On the other hand, you can design quite complex menus in Maestro.
The only problem, again, is the loop. You can cheat it, by making two different sequences. The first one has the 'startup' plus some loop, the second one has just the loop. By doing this, you don't have a break between the 'startup' and the loop and you can link to the second one after the first one is done playing (so you don't see the 'startup' again). It's just some waste of resources (disk space).

I think Scenarist is not as intuitive as Maestro. Maestro does a lot of small things, kind of automatically. In Scenarist you have to
define everything yourself. The advantages I see till now, are a correct working looping function, and color indexed buttons for menus over video.