This has been an interesting week. For nearly three years I have wondered about how to reliably make GPRM based button jumps in DVD studio pro. For one reason or another they have never worked reliably and so I have avoided using them. Worse, I have advised others to avoid them, too.
This week, thanks largely to Jake Russell, we might have finally sorted out the GPRM based jumps. I created a simple project that makes use of two menus accessing the same track in DVDSP and set up several different ways to sort out which to return to after the track plays (depending on where you came from).
Every time I used a pre-script on a menu to identify it the GPRM based button jumps wouldn’t work. Actually, it was Jake that put two and two together… To cut a long story short we used a different method to identify the parent menu and not use pre-scripts.
That’s the first time it has worked reliably, so perhaps it can now be used in a real project…
For what it’s worth, the final project can be downloaded from here
Look for a file called GPRMBasedButton.zip which contains the scripts and the project file, plus a build that works.
Hello, good site
Thanks Bob – glad you like it 🙂
Hi, can you put up a tutorial or instructions on how to write a script that reads the DVD player’s aspect ratio setting (SPRM 14 I believe), which determines if the viewer sees a 16:9 menu or full-screen 4:3 menu instead?
Hi Tom… yes, I’ll happily do so, but do be warned that simply detecting the player’s setting in no way accounts for the TV setting. The two may be at odds, depending on how good the user is at setting it up.
In essence, you’d script this to detect the setting and send the disc into a set of menus appropriately. You can also use pan scan/letterbox to make sure it is as it should be wihtout scripting.
For example, develop the disc as 16:9 and set it to pan scan/letterbox and what you get is a 16:9 playback which fills the screen if it is set to that, or adds letterboxing on a 4:3 display so that it appears 16:9 on those. I would suggest this is a better way than writing a script.
Keep an eye here, but also at http://www.dvdstudiopro.co.uk where I’ll post the fuull tutorial when I get a chance to!