I'm having a difficult time creating WinOnCD menus for my VCD movie. I was hoping that someone could post or e-mail me an brief example of a VCD menu with, say, two video clips. Someone simple just to put me on the right track.

For instance, I assume that with this kind of template, I'll just need to change the file name associated with the menu options. Right?

I'd be eternally grateful if someone could help me out with this! Thanks!

-- T Strauss (ThumperStrauss@hotmail.com), January 30, 2001

Answers

Someone posted a link a while back on exactly how to create menus in WOCD or Video pack 4. Do some searching to find it, but it was an excellent resource on how to do this.

Tygrus

-- tygrus (tygrus2000@hotmail.com), January 30, 2001.

When WinOnCD or VideoPack or whatever talks about and is asking for a menu to include in the layout, the first thing you have to do is create a *.bmp or *.jpg with the appropriate resolution (always 4:3, for example 640x480 or 800x600). This picture file can be as fancy or as simple as you like and you include text on it indicating the choices the VCD user will have. Take a look at some of those karaoke VCDs and note their menus: these fancy pictures and fonts didn't come by accident--it's a whole art unto itself. The authoring app doesn't really care what you put into these pictures: they are for the user, and so should point to correct playback choices when appropriate buttons are pressed on the remote, sort of hyperlinks on a webpage that point to intended websites. In your case, for instance, you can create a, say, blue background 800x600 file and name it blue.jpg. You do this with apps like Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint, etc. Then you add bold yellow text to this plain background like 1. choice 1 2. choice 2, etc and center them nicely on the page. Save this blue.jpg file; in WinOnCD/VideoPack, you simply drag this file into the menu node, make this node the starting point, and choose for this node to have two choices that lead to your two clips. After VCD creation, when playing it back, the first thing that now appears on TV is this picture file with those two choices and pressing either 1 or 2 on the remote now makes the appropriate track play. It doesn't take much to deduce you can now make your imagination run wild and put your own scanned pix, etc and create fabulous-looking *.jpgs for just as fabulously-looking menus. The menus are still MPEG files that VideoPack/WinOnCD created from your *.jpg and *.bmp files; it is the one area of VideoCD 2.0 spec that caters for 704x480/576 resolution that's why they can rival DVD menu pages for quality. I exclusively use this instead of 352x240/288.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), January 31, 2001.