Some Adobe Encore questions

[Mr_Freakybig]

Hiya all.

Does anyone Author their discs with Encore by any chance?
Doesn't matter if its 1.5 or 2. I have been authoring my discs with it and so far its been good to me,
even though I know how many authors (authori? lol)
see Encore as a pile of dog sh*t.

I would like to know if there is any trick or way around the following prob:

I have about 3 video time lines. One has the main movie in it (+ chapterpoints) ,
2 others have, lets say: trailers and copyright/warning info. The copyright info
time-lines all have user operations set to 'none' so you can't skip them.
3 menus exist, 1 main, 2 chapter menus. I have used
the 'Return to Last menu' command on the main movie time-line. So far
when you play back the disc it does what it says. You return to last menu with the button highlighted.
The main movie time-line has prohibited user operations too, such as
chapter searching and changing the presentation mode 'off'.
Even though I used it in the properties the following happens:
When you skip back from chapter 1, you all of a sudden find yourself
in the time-line of the trailer or the copyright time-line. At the end
nothing happens it just goes back to the main menu. The only way I got around it myself at the
moment is by making EVERYTHING in menus with moving backgrounds, except for the main feature which is still in a time-line.
It isn't very convenient though, because you are not able to 'fast-forward' anything else but the main feature.
Also, the menu button has now lost it's 'resume playback' feature and can only resume the film by pressing the resume button.

I would like to know if this is a bug in Encore, and if not, if there
is a way to Author this so both 'menu button resume' and
'prohibit first and last chapter skip' will work together.

Thanks in advance

Freakybig

[Mr_Freakybig]

Okay I think I know what the problem is. (yay!) Checked it in PGCedit.
Seems Encore does not define PREV and NEXT PGCN. Nor does it give a PGCN nr to your PGCNs.
The PGCN nr of the VTS in any title is set as a number 0 automatically when Encore poops out a VIDEO_TS.
Also, whatever type of user prohibition you tick 'on' in Encore, (like the title searching) it just turns
them off again when you build your project, and then you are free to do anything you want.

So basically it can search at random for any chapter in any title, because everything is defined as 0.

Solution = Define your Title PGCN's as 1, and put previous and next PGCN into
1 as well, and voila: No more random title skipping.

Also: PGCEdit seems to have better User Prohibition options, I was
able to do lots more of 'denying of users to do anything' heheheh

Of course, if anyone knows how to do this from Encore itself,
I would still like to know how

[r0lZ]

Thanks for your appreciation of PgcEdit!

I don't use Encore, but seems you have found the solution yourself. You have probably authored all your videos in one single title. If you create several titles, they should be independent of each other.

Also, you can't resume from a menu. (Even if your extra titles in the menus look like real titles, without buttons, they are still technically menus.) Note also that it is impossible to use the Go to time option of the players (or the seek bar of a software player) in a menu.

Take care also. Normally, the Next and PrevPGC links are supposed to be 0 in a normal title (although setting them to the same number than the current PGC is probably legal. This point is still unclear.)

[Mr_Freakybig]

You have probably authored all your videos in one single title. If you create several titles, they should be independent of each other.

Thats the thing hehe. When you look at them in PCGedit, I have 3 titles.
They are actually separate from each other, yet it is still possible
to just randomly skip from one to the other. (like movie into trailer when
the end and previous action of the movie is pointed to a menu.)
I think Encore just makes a shambles out of it, because it
actually doesn't happen when you look at it in software preview.

[r0lZ]

So, it's probably caused by the navigation commands. Use PgcEdit to trace through the DVD, and you should be able to understand what's happening.