PSR8 - how to use it? Any way to jump to same time in different title in HDMV?

[Lyris]

Imagine this situation: a disc of silent movies with a variety of audio tracks (piano scores performed by different musicians, plus a commentary).

The differing scores mean that different opening credits are required depending on the audio track that gets selected (via seamless branching). For that reason, the audio button on the remote is locked out (so that users can't "mix and match" the wrong combination of audio tracks and credits).

It'd be good to add a popup menu that let users change score on the fly, jumping to a different title in the process. Is there any way, without using BD-J, to store the current playback time, and start playing another title from that same time?

I notice that PSR8 is Presentation Time (asked also here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135152 ) but I'm not sure how to get anything meaningful from this - and even if I do, how I would then jump into that same time in a MovieObject. Is this possible?

[rik1138]

I don't think you can do that in HDMV exactly they way you want to... Obviously you could jump to the nearest chapter, but I don't think you can jump straight to a time in a video (otherwise there'd be more HDMV discs that permanently remembered where you were in the film while you were looking through bonus features and such...) You could also put a bunch of 'invisible chapters' in the title (mark points) so you can jump closer to the 'current time'.

Another possibility might to be use mulit-angle instead of branching if the opening credits are at least the same length, as the angle can be changed on the fly with the audio track (via a pop-up menu button, not audio surfing though). The Angle change isn't always instant, so that may not be a perfect solution, but might be something to look into...

[Lyris]

Thanks Rik. I did consider using some script to automate the process of putting as many EntryMarks as I was allowed and then jumping to the nearest one.

Do you know how to get anything usable out of PSR8?

The multiangle solution is a better one, though... If the opening credits didn't need fades, I'd just recreate them as Presentation Graphics.

[rik1138]

You can actually create fades in presentation graphics, but the quality of it depends on the player, so it's probably not optimal... :)

PSR8 is useful in HDMV if you need to know exactly where someone came from when they left a feature for some reason (like if you were making an interactive piece and they had to hit 'top menu' or something at a certain time)... Never actually needed to do that in HDMV, but it's an option. :)

I've used it a lot in Java programming for doing basically exactly what you are trying to do, storing the point you are at in persistent storage so the movie resumes when the disc is re-inserted, and for games/interactive pieces for all sorts of things... I've had to build whole arrays of timecodes for the programming to compare against so it knows to do certain things at certain times... If the video is in the first 5 seconds, do this... 5-8 seconds, change this graphic, if the user presses 'up' between 10 and 15 seconds, play this other piece of video... Loads of fun QCing that kind of thing.

[Lyris]

You can actually create fades in presentation graphics, but the quality of it depends on the player, so it's probably not optimal...
That's my fear, yeah. Especially because the window size would be large (nearly a full screen of text, less overscan area) I can see that ending badly!