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Hi everyone. Has anyone experienced DVD players which can't show the pictures used as background menus?

I have just finished a project, where my clients in Greenland and South Africa can't "see" menus and buttons on the DVD played on their DVD players. First play, links, films and slideshow still works - if you know where they are!! But you are navigating blind on certain DVD players. I have now found a player here which does the same thing, so I have been able to do some testing myself...

What's the story here? Is there a standard I have to follow if I want the DVD to play world wide? I am not talking about NTSC-PAL problems here, but plain build up of your navigating menus. Am I using the wrong build up process?

My graphic menus are designed in Photoshop, flattened, and then saved in JPEG. Then I import them in DVDSP 3.0, then insert them in each menu as a BACKGROUND picture, then add buttons.. Why does this method work on some players, and others not? Should I use a different method than creating BACKGROUND pictures?

Any help here is much appriciated, as I am about to send the DVD's off, thanks!!

Esben Hardt / Ace & Ace
www.acephotos.dk

Personally, I would use .PICT files for the background rather than JPEG, since they are not a compressed format and should give a better result.

The other issue here is that you are adding template items to a background image - which should work just fine... however, if you create your menus as standard overlay styles and don't rely on the template items from within DVDSP you should have few (if any) problems getting them to 'show'.

I don't see why the menu images are not currently working for you, but it could be worth testing your discs with .PICT images instead and see if that does the job.

I DID test it with PICT files, TIFF, and Photoshop with empty layers above - none of it made any difference..

Then out of despair I tried to rebuild my project in a totally new project, using some of the same pictures and films, and NOW my "faulty" player can show the menus and buttons...! How weird is that?

For me this is great news, as it suggests the problem derives from some authoring error within the program, and not a replication vs duplication issue, but what it could be is a wild guess? In fact it was Alonso´s reply in a totally other issue, that got me thinking.. If it indeed was a duplication problem, then I shouldn't be able to play ANY of my previous productions on this "faulty" player. But all of them played fine, which led me to conclude that it could only be something in the authoring, thus started from fresh to see if that helped, and voila!

Do you have any ides what could be wrong in the first project?

I suspect it could have something to do with the fact that I opened an old existing project, saved it as a new name, and just started modifying it, to the project I have now.

Has anyone ever heard of this problem before?

About your other theory "you are adding template items to a background image"... I am not quite sure what you mean, but I created my buttons by dragging a square box, then writing text in the middle, centered the text to the box, then checked the "Include text in Highlight", then changed the color set 1 of the overlay colors, and that's it. I didn't drag a button from the template section.

Thanks for your reply, Hal (and thanks to Alonso). I was starting to worry that everybody was already on holiday...haha

Esben Hardt / Ace & Ace
www.acephotos.dk