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DVD Maker - Customize Disc Menu Style page

  • Article

Welcome to the Customize Disc Menu Style page.

This page is used to customize the style of the DVD menu. Like the menu text page, this page has two previews on the right side. The top one is the main DVD menu preview that you've seen before. The bottom one, however, is a preview of the scenes menu on the DVD.

The scenes menu page(s) allow the viewer to navigate to different sections of the content, and there are either one or two menu pages. How they are set up depends on the content, with the following basic rules:

  • If there is a single video (or a slideshow), two pages of buttons link into 12 separate spots in the video. I think that they are equidistant, but they might be on scene break points.
  • If there are multiple videos, there is one scene button per video.

We played around with a bunch of different options here, but it turned out that the simple approach worked best. On to the customizations:

The font ones are the same as those on the menu text page.

Foreground and background video allow you to override these values in the style that your using. The usages of foreground and background video vary from style to style, and some styles don't use the background video. If you don't specify anything here, the default is to use your content for both the foreground and background. And if you want to use a picture here instead of a video, you can do that as well.

The menu audio allows you to change the background audio during the menu introduction (the time between when the menu starts to play and it's done playing). If not, we'll use the audio from the foreground video

Menu motion determines whether the buttons on the scenes menu show moving video, or whether they are still images.

Finally, the scenes button combo allows you to choose a different style button for the scenes menu. This will default to the appropriate shape for the style you have chosen.

If you've customized the menu in a way that you'd like to use again, you can choose "Save as new style", enter a name, and you can then use your style.

And preview lets you see an interactive preview of the DVD.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2006
    Hey Eric,

    I've been playing with your creation in the latest drop of vista.  I've got 2 questions:

    1. Is there any way you guys can add the ability to add short captions to the scenes?  (Not a mandatory step, just provide the option to do it if you want)

    2. When you burn the dvd, can you provide the option to save the encoded files just in case there is an error while buring the disc?  Encoding takes the most time.

    Other than that, I'm very impressed with the product so far.  I think you've accomplished your design goals.  It is very easy to use and you don't have more than a few clicks to make a DVD.

    Thanks again!
  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2006
    John,

    I added your questions to the FAQ:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/ericgu/archive/2006/01/09/510833.aspx

    Thanks for your comments

    Eric
  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2006
    Thank you for responding Eric.  I really like what you've done so far and those were my only gripes, if you want to even call them that.  I look forward to seeing the final release.