Command buttons "dead"

[VRYK]

Tracing through a DVD-9 video in PgcEdit, the command buttons in the Main menu work fine. However, in both VLC and MPC players none of the buttons respond to clicks.

Can something be done to “activate” the buttons ?

[blutach]

In MPC in particular, the buttons are sometimes tricky to get working - I have found that you need to click a little above the highlight. I know of no such issues with VLC.

Regards

[VRYK]

Many thanks for your reply.

The menu had been processed earlier in MenuShrink to convert it from animated to still and to remove the sound. Perhaps this could have introduced a complication fo the players.

Best wishes.

[r0lZ]

AFAIK, MenuShrink works perfectly. But be sure to tick the 'Remove "stop" in subpics' and 'Inf. still times (no audio)' advanced options.

[VRYK]

Many thanks for your reply.

Following the recommendation in the MenuShrink User Guide, I left the "Inf. still times (no audio)" option unticked. I shall try ticking it.

Incidentally, the command buttons appear in the VLC player as thin lines. Is there any way to enlarge them ?

Best wishes.

[r0lZ]

There are different things: the look of the buttons, the "hot area" and the highlights.

The look of the button is hardcoded in the background image. For example, it might be a big button with the word "Chapters". Of course, the image of the button is just a background, and therefore has only an informative goal.

The "hot area" is the rectangle that define the area where you can click to activate the button, and where the highlight of the button appears.

The highlight image is defined in the subpic stream, its color index and its opacity in the nav pack of the VOB files, and the color table in the IFO. Note that only the part of the subpic that is inside the hot area is taken into account to draw the highlight.

The hot area should be as big as the button background, so that clicking anywhere on the button background activates it, but unfortunately, in many commercial DVDs, it is just large enough to cover the highlight, and not the whole button. If, for example, the highlight is just a little arrow or dot to the left of the word "Chapters", or a thin line to underline it, the hot area may be just large enough to contain that arrow, dot or line. That's not a problem if you use a remote to select the button, as you don't have to know exactly where is the hot area, but of course, it is difficult to click on a tiny area like that, and that's not intuitive, as the user tries usually to click on the button background.

Open your menu in the menu viewer of PgcEdit, and have a look at the hot area. If it doesn't cover the whole button, you can try to enlarge it with the editor. Take care however to not cover a part of the highlight of another button. That should be sufficient to fix your problem (although if the look of the highlight is different in VLC and in the other players, that could also mean that VLC has a bug or that it cannot decode the subpic stream correctly.)

[VRYK]

Many thanks for your reply.

I have now processed all the buttons to enlarge the “hot” areas which surround the background images. Opacity has been re-set from 0 to 6 to activate highlighting. While the majority of buttons are highlighting when selected, others are not. When you state that: < Note that only the part of the subpic that is inside the hot area is taken into account to draw the highlight.> I presume this is my problem. How can I fix this.?

Best wishes.

[r0lZ]

You can use DVDSubEdit to examine the subpic used for the button highlights. It shows you the hot areas just like PgcEdit, but it shows also the subpic content of a button at a time. Tick the "Ignore transparency" checkbox to display all highlights at the same time, or type Control-N or Control-P to display the highlight of the next or previous button. Each button highlight should be completely enclosed in its hot area.

You can even export the subpic of the current menu as a BMP, edit it with a paint program, and re-import it. (Keep your edits as simple as possible, as DVDSubEdit has to replace the subpic in the original VOB size without modifying its size, and if your compressed subpic is too large and requires more packs, it will not fit in the VOB and DVDSubEdit will refuse it.)

You can also change the opacity value of the color used for the background of the button (usually completely transparent) by editing the color scheme of the button with PgcEdit. This way, the user will have a way to see the whole hot area of the current button. This technique is very simple, but produces an ugly effect, unless your buttons are rectangular.

[VRYK]

Many thanks for your reply.

I have opened the menus in DVDSubEdit, but am really confused. Clicking Ignore Transparency” revealed red lines just below the hot areas in all cases – whether the highlighting was working or not. Do these red lines represent the subpics ?

Slides adjust for vertical and horizontal positions, but not for height, which suggests that a subpic cannot be made larger to cover entirely a button’s “hot” area. After trying a number of vertical adjustments on individual buttons, I am unable to get the highlighting to cover entirely all buttons. The first button (top row far left)) has no highlighting at all. With Ignore Transparency ticked, the highlight appears as a black band about the width of a button; this can be vertically adjusted to partially cover both the upper and lower rows so that these can be highlighted partially (the red lines mentioned earlier have now disappeared).

Best wishes.

[r0lZ]

Yes, I suppose the red lines are the highlights, but I can't be sure without seeing them.

In PgcEdit, the X and Width or Y and Height sliders are disabled when the pseudo-group "All" is selected, because the position of those sliders must be different in the different groups. The sliders that are enabled can share the same value in all groups. Therefore, to use the disabled sliders, you have to select a specific group. Don't forget to do the same edits in the other group, and to go back to "All" as soon as possible, as otherwise your other edits will be applied only to the current group.

BTW, the next version of PgcEdit will have an editor where all position sliders will be enabled, including in the All mode. PgcEdit will compute automatically the right values for the non-current group(s), according to the values of the current group.

Anyway, it is always possible to cover the whole button with the hot area, as you can even cover the whole background picture with a single button.

[VRYK]

Many thanks for your reply.

My problem with the sliders concerns subpics in DVDSubEdit, not PgcEdit. Anyhow, as indicated in my message the highlight subpic appears now as a single black band which, since I am unable to increase its height, partially covers the upper and lower button rows. I might end up simply dropping the highlighting since the hot areas cover the whole ofthe buttons now.

In this same video,: 2 VTSs have been corrupted. Is it possible to replace these with clean back-up versions which I have.

Bes wishes

[r0lZ]

If you have made regular incremental backups with PgcEdit, restore them with PgcEdit, but do not try to restore them manually. Otherwise, you have to start over, as it is usually IMPOSSIBLE to restore some parts of a DVD without restoring everything. You cannot simply copy the VOB files over the damaged ones, as the IFOs must match the VOBs.

However, if the problem has been caused by your edits with DVDSubEdit ONLY, you can probably overwrite the damaged VOBs with the backups, as DVDSubEdit doesn't change the overall structure of the DVD.

Anyway, be careful!

[VRYK]

Many thanks for your message. I may have to go back to the drawing board!

Re my highlighting problem, I find it strange that a line can be termed “subpic” which latter I have always associated with text. Also, how could a line highlight the whole of a button (which covers a significantly greater area) ?

Best wishes.

[blutach]

The button picture shape is contained in a subpic pack and can be anything, including a line, various blobs, circles, etc. You can see the placement, shape and colours of the subpic in DVDSubEdit, as r0lZ has said. The line (or whatever) is contained within the rectangluar area, as displayed in PgcEdit.

Regards

[r0lZ]

There is a slight difference between "subpic" and "subtitle". Subpic is the technical term used in the DVD world to designate the pictures that are displayed over the video background. They are stored in subpic streams in the VOBs, and they include the subtitles and the button (and BOV) highlights.

A button highlight can have any shape. It is the responsibility of the author to decide which shape it must have. If he decides that the current button must be underlined, the subpic for that button will be a simple line. As long as there is something visible and clearly associated with the button, that's OK. If you want to cover the whole button with a translucent rectangle, you can do it, but it's not necessarily the finest way to highlight a button. As I have explained, the rectangle that you can edit in PgcEdit is the area where you can click and where the highlight appears. It must therefore cover completely the highlight, and it should also cover the button background itself, although that's not necessary from a technical point of view.

[EDIT] Blu was faster than me.