#7 dvd-menu create menu over video (animated menus)

[stuporglue]

I'd LOVE to be able to use dvd-menu to build a menu over a pre-created (or concurrently created) mpg/vob file.

Currently I use dir2slideshow to create the vob file, then create the hover/normal/selected button files with the Gimp and use spumux manually to achieve this.

It works, but is a bit painful :-)

Thanks!

Michael Moore
public@byu.edu

[Scott Dylewski]

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Can you describe this in more detail? You mean have a menu with a animated background, or just animated buttons? This would work for "simple" animated background loops of probably 10-30 seconds, but long videos would have to be written to disk frame-by-frame...

[stuporglue]

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Can you describe this in more detail? You mean have a menu with a
animated background, or just animated buttons?

Menu with an animated background. I prepare 5-20 images using imagemagick so that they are all resized and have text in the same place. I then use dir2slideshow to create a slideshow video of those pictures, using crossfade, with about a 2 second crossfade and pausing for 3 seconds on each image. That video then becomes the background for the menu. Since the pictures are crossfading and the text is in the same place, the text appears static and the images fade from one to the next.

I then take a blank PNG with the same menu text and open it in Gimp to produce the appropriate menu input files for spumux. (I use the text for hover and click decoration positioning, then erase the text itself). I mux the indexed png files into the menu video using spumux, and then use that video as my menu.

Then I use dir2slideshow to create the actual movie slideshow, and put them together with dvdauthor.

I now have this process automated with a Ruby script. I could post it here, if my description is unclear.