DVD Menu

[jeffphilips]

Anyone know what would cause the menu navigation to not work properly? I have made many dvd menus and the navigation has always worked fine in the past. I have the films lined up in the order that I want. It works perfectly in the "All" preview mode in Arabesk. But once I burn the dvd, it isn't even close to what I want as far as the order. I have tried this on 3 dvd players thinking that might have been the problem. But no luck. It also works fine when I put the actual dvd in the rene and playback. I have version 3.1a

[jimmeeker]

Hello Jeff,

Yes, I have run into this problem in the past. What happens is the order of the "Films" in the "Film, Chapter Menus" page are not lined up with the Icons on the main menu.....so that when you click on what you think is film number one it actually takes you to film number three and so forth.

I found that some times in my quest to make a nice menu and to move things around, what I think is one film has actually been moved to bring up a totally different film. This can always be traced back to me changing something and assigning the wrong button to the film I wanted to play.

To check this out when creating the menu if you click on each menu icon or button, it will show what actual film it is pointing to in the button just to the right of the Start Movie or go the to chapter menu message. That button is labeled just "Film" and it shows the name or number that you have given to that particular film. So if you have six different films and you click on the dotted box on the screen for each film, it will show you in that Film button area, what the name or number is of the film that it is associated with.

When I first started to use Arabesk, I tried to erase the names of the films in the "FILMS" list so they wouldn't show up in the menu when I was working on it because I usually wanted to call them by different names at that point. But this lead me to getting them all mixed up so that the icons in the menu would bring up the wrong film most of the time......until I realzed that I had to be sure I was associating them with the correct film in the first place.

Just click each on-screen icon and see what it points to and it should solve the problem. You can then move the icons around to match the films. or you can rearrange the film's order to match the icons.

[jeffphilips]

Jim,
Thanks for your response, but this is not the problem. I had renamed my films after I added them so I would know which ones were which. So there is no confusion of picking the wrong one. Just to be sure, I went back and checked after reading your response. All is ok there. In addition, the correct film does play when I click on my film button regardless of what dvd player I use. Only The navigation is out of order when played in other dvd players. Like I said in the post, the dvd plays perfectly in the reno +.

[TimKennelly]

I use to run into this when I would customize the placement of the buttons.

The system seemed to "see" buttons a bit left to right so positioning them can be critical.

I found using the up/down cursor keys to check them made it foolproof.

Cursor down from the top and then back up and if they advance in highlighting the buttons in the proper order you should be good to go, if not, tweak until they do.

Even some DVDs created by MSUS itself work out of order like that, specifically one year the DVD of winners from their video contest would scroll out of order.

[jeffphilips]

Tim,
I assume you mean to use the cursor buttons on my reno keyboard verses the cursor buttons that I can click on in the arabesk menu?
I just did that and they work just as they did when I used the buttons I can click on (perfectly). I am now burning a new dvd to see if anything changed.
To help understand how the menu is set up, I have the films set up on the menu vertically. Not sure if this is crucial info to know, but to actually scroll down, I need to press the right cursor arrow to scroll, versus the down cursor arrow

[jeffphilips]

No change

[TimKennelly]

Jeff,

Yes, I meant the keyboard cursor keys and that is when I ran into the problems when I would customize the buttons for say six to eight vertically.

I found they had to be placed not just high to low, but also each successive one needed to be somewhat more to the right of the preceeding one usually.

Also, they had to scroll through in succession correctly both forward and backwards using the up and down cursor keys to work in a player correctly.

[jeffphilips]

That is strange. I will try it, but it totally ruin the look of the menu. Bummer

[jeffphilips]

Ok, that worked! Thanks a million!

[TimKennelly]

Weird, heh?

You shouldn't have to do that, but it's a known shortcoming I think rather than bug and you can work around it as you now know.

I always preferred to make the buttons invisible and use the button label as the visible trigger and felt the subtle left to right descending diagonal looked sophisticated when done right.