Two dvds on one, keeping menus intact

[massive88]

What I would like to do is make one dvd backing up two Aqua Teen Hunger Force dvds. Since there are only 7 15 minute episodes on each, Id rather recompress and stick them both on one. I can shrink the dvds down to size alright, but what I would like to do is have a menu when you put in the dvd that basically lets you choose which dvd you would like to go to. Then after selecting, it would be as if you put that first original dvd in.

I could do this the hard way by ripping menus as videos and just reconstructing the dvd building my own menus, but surely there has to be an easier way to work with the original dvd structure?

-m88

[fisix]

i second this. i have a similar issue. basically what i want to do is create a very simple text menu as the main menu that would allow a regular dvd player to access the 2 (or 3) dvds i've backed up to a single dvd.

-fiz

[Malcolm]

i would like to have this too! I can imagine that PGCEdit could be used for this. Search for it on the forum.

Greetings,
Malcolm

[Dimmer]

Originally posted by massive88
I could do this the hard way by ripping menus as videos and just reconstructing the dvd building my own menus, but surely there has to be an easier way to work with the original dvd structure? Alas, there is no easy way to do this. DVD standard doesn't accommodate such situations. For now, until someone creative comes up with a program to automate this task, all you can do is re-author all the original DVDs into a brand new one with any menus you'd like.

[fisix]

well, mine didn't really need anything big, so i just used dvdshrink in reauthor mode to grab the titles i wanted from three disks, then shrunk them all into a new dvd, then used the pgcedit utility to at least allow someone to cycle to the next title with either the title or chapter remote buttons. both software worked very well.

is there an easy way to create a generic top menu that lists and allows jumping to any of the separate titles in the dvd? i didn't really need any of the original menus that came with the dvds, i just wanted a list of the titles (by number at least, if not by editable text) that showed up when the dvd was popped in.

so if i was designing a tool for this, it would take a dvdshrink result dvd (in file form) and auto generate a top menu that was just a selectable text list of the titles. then i suppose pgcedit or infoedit could be used to just edit the text of the list of titles to customize the menu, if desired.

so, basically, you'd be able to make a semi slick compilation disk of movies that would work in a generic dvd player. like making compliation audio cds..

did i not read through enough of the guides to find the tool that already does this? all i've really seen like this so far is a forum guide that has you go through what looked like a tortuous rout of grabbing a menu from a movie, customizing it, then using that as a generic menu for compilations, but each compilation requires mucho infoedit work.

thanks for any further help

[Malcolm]

Why don't you use DVDLab?? You can author a DVD in 2 minutes that looks like your description. if you take 5 minutes to author, then you have a graphical selection, chapters and scene-selection menues! it's a wonderful easy, quick and yet powerful authoring app!

Greetings,
Malcolm

[fisix]

doesn't dvdlab cost money?

[Malcolm]

Originally posted by fisix
doesn't dvdlab cast money?
Yes, that's true. but you can test it for 30 days.

Greetings,
Malcolm

[Malcolm]

@fisix:
funny - i just discovered a program that does exactly what you want: TitleWriter1.6beta Dvd_Text Add Menus >>reauthored dvd (http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?threadid=37608&highlight=titleset)

Greetings,
Malcolm

[fisix]

well, not 'exactly', but pretty close. thanks, i'll keep checking on it and maybe post over there to the author.