Menus in an MP4 file – possible???

[Dave Haynie]

There is no standard format that embeds DVD-style navigation.

The DivX company has a proprietary format (they use some standard building blocks like AVI and maybe Matroska file wrappers, but the menus are not standard) that does this, when using their player. You need to spend a little money to get the authoring tools. The result probably plays on media players — they’ve been pretty aggressive about this. But not may will support the menus.

If this is really important, this is the only such solution I know about.

-Dave

[Steve Rhoden]

Dont know of any method to get that happening.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956

[Phil Peacock]

Hmmm. My conclusion so far too. Odd though, when you think about it, not having the convenience of skipping around in a video compilation (like ‘scene selection’ or even ‘extras’) especially when hyperlinks are so prevalent elsewhere.

Maybe something I need to invent! But buckleys of that happening, ha ha.

Thanks anyways guys.

[Jim Greene]

You can do this (sort of) with a video posted to Vimeo. In the comments, place the timecode start time for each “chapter”, like 10:15, and Vimeo will make this a hyperlink to the timecode in the video player. But you do need to wait for file to load up to the actual marker for it to work.

-Jim.

[Phil Peacock]

Thanks Jim. Interesting although not quite what I am thinking of.
Cheers, Phil

[Dave Haynie]

[Phil Peacock] “Hmmm. My conclusion so far too. Odd though, when you think about it, not having the convenience of skipping around in a video compilation (like ‘scene selection’ or even ‘extras’) especially when hyperlinks are so prevalent elsewhere.”

You have this, but only in formal delivery formats. MPEG-4 isn’t a formal deliver format, it’s Yet Another Motion Picture Experts Group media format, which really just concentrates on building useful pieces that other people will use to build on top of. So we have AVCHD, Blu-ray, DivX, and maybe a few other formats that offer some degree of DVD-like navigation, all based on MPEG-4 standards, but building beyond that. MPEG-4 also drives satellite TV here in the states, and second-generation digital TV in Europe… neither of which have any need for navigation…. they do non-interactive broadcast streaming.

I might have expected something more along these lines from Microsoft, given they had all their own standards. But they mimiced the MPEG folks… they actually did release an interactive film format based on WMV, dubbed WMV/HD (very creative name), which was high definition, usually 720p, on red laser DVDs. They used HTML and Javascript to author the disc — they assumed a player that knew how to respond to track offsets being sent.

-Dave

[Phil Peacock]

Interesting reading Dave, thanks. I have just been checking out DivX and also WMV/HD which I had never heard of.