background music while navigating

[FreQi]

Is it possible to define some background music loop that'll play no matter what menu's you navigate to? I doubt very musch that you can, but I'd like to make a disc that plays a song in the background that continues to play even after you've selected another menu (I have developed a sort of "tabbed browsing" method of navigation thatwould make it seem very weird to have the audio restart all the time). I use Scenarist.

[burnttoast]

This probably will be possible if you use somekinda multiangle thing.The way it's setup will be a little freaky though.

With still type menus it'll look pretty good,but if your menus are video and you have more than 3 of them it might look not so good.Multiangle video have to have certian bitrate and gop setting in order for them to work right.I'm pretty sure you can only have 9 different angles in scenarist.That means only 9 of same audio looping type menus.If your menus are the static kind and not video kind this is how you might set it up.

Your going to have to encode your menus to m2v files because scenarist won't make a multiangle with bmp or psd files.Make them the same length as your audio.Do that however you do that type of thing.

Your subpicture for your buttons are going to be a little tricky because your going to have to have all your buttons for all your menus in one subpicture.You can only have one subpicture for one video even if it has more than one angle.You said your working on some kind of tab like interface.I'm guessing the tabs are in the same spots on all the menus.That should work out to be a plus.You should have your menus set up so that none of the other buttons are in same spot as a button on another menu.You can't have button 6 change the audio to spanish on menu 2 and have it jump to chaper 6 on menu 3.You might be able to but.....

Import all your things into scenarist.Make you track with however many angle/menus you need.The one audio and one subpicture.Drag it into the scenario editor and drop it into title 1.Scenarist will complain if you try to drop it into a language folder.

Now to make the buttons.Open the simulation window and draw out all your buttons.Do not auto link them.Your going to have to connect them manualy.I would make all the buttons for the tabs first.This way they'll be 1,2,3.Make the buttons for menu 1 next,and so on.In the button and highlight part of the simulation window set the force selected button to noexistant.The buttons for the tabs that change to the different menus,i would set these to auto action.It'll keep the being able to select invisible buttons down to a minimum.Connect all the tab type menu buttons with the side to side navigation arrows.Connect these to the buttons that do stuff on the menu with the up and down navigation arrows.This is going to limit the arrows you can use on your remote but should keep you from navigating to buttons that are on a different angle/menu.For the tab buttons that link to the different angle/menu i would set the command to set subpicture 1,angle X.X is the menu/angle.Set your other buttons up normaly.

you might want to put a blank in the languge folder and make it the root that links to the title seeing how this won't be consider a menu by you dvd player.

A problem that might happen is with those menu tabs.If your in menu 2 and select menu 2 there is a command.It won't do anything because the command was already carried out when you highlighted the button.I've had a dvd player freeze with this type of thing.You might want to test it out on a dvd rw with as many players as you can find.

[FreQi]

Thanks burnttoast ;]

I've never worked with multiangle before, but that does sound like my best bet for being able to keep an audio loop. I've made one other menu (http://freqi.net/forums/dvdmenu-jake.jpg) that was tab driven, and it seemed to work pretty well, and I am working on another one tonight (http://freqi.net/forums/dvdmenu-spiderman.jpg) that I am still fighting with scenarist over. The nice thing about these tab driven menus is there only needs to be as meny menus as there are episodes on the dvd. My first dvd project had about 3 menus per episode (1 for the synopsis, one for the chapter select and one for the episode groupings). So there was a lot of prefabrication work, although now the settings in Scenarist for these tabbed menus is a bit more complex and frustrating atm, so I dunno if I am really saving any time/effort, heh.

[burnttoast]

Those are some pretty nice looking menus.The main problem with using the multiangle for something like this is with the amount of menus per episode + the number of episodes.Being able to have a total of 9 angles will limit you a bit on what you can do.I've never thought of scenarist as one of those time saving apps but if it's too easy it might not be as much fun.:p