Music with a still image

[dash80]

Hi guys. I've been trying to take some of my music and build custom DVDs which let you select songs from a main menu. I'd love to be able to have a single picture show up while the song plays. The problem I have is that I can only make the menu play a video stream. The video stream itself is quite memory intensive since all I want is a still image while music plays. Is there a way to save all that disc space and just have it display a static bitmap while playing an AC3 soundtrack selectable from a menu?

Thanks
DASH-80

[dash80]

Oh I forgot to add, I only have TMPGEnc and DVDAuthor.

[maa]

There are quite a few disscusions on this from time to time on various forums.
A slide show with music is a normal suggestion although I believe you can't navigate within each song (>>ff <<fb)
Preparing a low bitrate single picture video first and using that to author is another method.
I'll be watching this thread tosee if anyone has a really good method....

[dash80]

I did come up with something...

I did the add each song as AC3 to an added slideshow bitmap in scenarist. I then created a VOB from that track only. Interestingly enough, as I created the VOB on my laptop, each VOB played just fine in media player. When I copied the VOB's to my desktop computer, which has the DVD burner, it was unable to play any of the VOB's except the first file. In any case, I was able to successfully create VOB's of each music track using Scenarist. So, the goal of creating sound tracks without wasting huge amounts of disc space on video of a still image, has been accomplished.

I then added each VOB into TMPGenc DVD Author. It correctly loaded the bitmap and reported an associated AC3 track. So far so good. I then burned the DVD but the DVD player isn't playing the AC3 track! One DVD player plays the slideshow at the right time without sound, but another DVD player plays each bitmap with a duration of about 1 per second, without the AC3 soundtrack. So it didn't work.

Right now, I'm trying it again but instead, I manually added an AC3 track to each VOB within DVD Author. Hopefully this makes it work.

Anyone else have further ideas?

[dash80]

Update:

I tried manually specifying an AC3 audio track for each VOB but it still played through the different tracks like a slideshow and most importantly, without any AC3 audio :-(

[TerraForce1]

Hi,

I have a working method. I use Adobe Encore DVD to compile.

1. Use Mp3Gain to normalize all the mp3's you are going to use.
2. Make 48 khz Pcm wav files with Adobe Audition.
3. Use Softencode to transcode them in ac3 streams.
4. Use a program called FileMerger to merge all the ac3 streams.
5. You now have one big AC3 chunk of audio.
6. Create a timeline within Adobe Encore DVD.
7. Place the Ac3 audio at the timeline.
8. Make a picture for your artist including the tracks which you have with you favorite Grapic Editor.
9. For example if you have The Eagles with California Hotel's normal radio version and the acoustic version. Highlight for example for first the radio version text or use a text effect that shows that at the moment the radio version is selected.
10. Enter this picture at the timeline at the videopart. Make sure that the picture starts and ends according to the song. When the 2nd song is starting enter a chapter point for the next song.
So it is all about entering chapter points. For each chapter point you can enter another picture. For example for chapter 2 you insert the same graphics file only this time the acoustic version text is highlighted.
12. You can enter 99 chapter points.
13. Use a menu that redirects the user to the chapter points.

For your information.