Any one know of any DVD software (preferably PC based) that will allow a menu to be created that when a button is rolled over the background image (or part of the background image0 changes and a drop-down list of options appear? :confused:
Many thanks in anticipation................
No but to clarify,
you want it to look like a pC menu?
You can't "rollover" on a TV, because there is no cursor. You can only highlight a button (with the remote's cursor keys) before selection - so you might have to change your requirements.
Hi
Rollover buttons in a menu are not possible within the DVD-Video specification.
Because when DVD players were first built internal memory was too expensive for more than a few bytes to be built in - and there was therefore no memory space in which to buffer the rollover image states.
And the 'DVD-Video Standard' has remained standard - unaltered.
So for the menu screen to change graphically - roll-overs or drop-downs - the player has to read a different set of sectors of the DVD.
As most (cheap) DVD-authoring software doesn't allow tinkering with the DVD's video sector order, this means that it may take several moments for the DVD read-head to navigate physically on the disc to the section where the new graphic elements are located.
By which time a hasty button-pressing viewer will have probably pressed many other buttons on their remote control......
Resulting is a totally inefficient viewing experience.
So although DVD authoring programs like Apple's DVD Studio Pro allow roll-overs and drop-downs (by creating a new menu page for each different graphical state), the slow speed of navigation between these dozens of menu pages is so un-user-friendly that NO ONE EVER DOES IT.
In DVD-A you can sort of have a roll over button, on that the icon changes when it is highlighted.
...the icon changes when it is highlighted.
Hi
Yes, that is permitted, in that the unselected button is part of the (full colour) background image. The normally-invisible 'selected' button icon when selected to be visible can be any shape as long as it doesn't overlap any other 'selected' button icon.
But only 4 different pixel-colours are permitted for this overlay-selected button, not a multi-colour graphic, with no anti-aliasing (unless the 4 colours are used to create the anti-aliasing on the edges of what then becomes a single-colour overlay). A different set of 4 colours can be applied to the button once it is activated.
And as Mooblie wrote, as there is no cursor there can be no roll-over behaviour, just selected or de-selected.
If you have the ability to create motion menus can you cheat so that you generate a second page with the roll over effect after you click the button, or am I on that different planet?
Hi
Doesn't need a motion menu - that's just a movie background to a menu, and doesn't add anything to the interactive experience per se.
You're talking about linked menus to simulate the drop-down interactivity, and that's subject to the same user-unfriendly latency (or worse, because of the number of DVD sectors taken up by the 'motion' mpeg-2 data).