Playlists?

[Tim Kurkoski]

Hi Mark,

Encore 1.5’s “playlists” are just a easy-to-use implementation of the “play one or play all” type of structure (somewhere on the Cow there’s a tutorial I wrote for 1.0 about manually setting that up).

What it comes down to is that playlists only set up a series of end actions and overrides. They don’t combine your timelines into a single bigger one, if that was the impression you had.

The behavior you describe about the Next and Prev. Chapter buttons has been much discussed before. There is no rule in the DVD specification that says what a player should do when the Next button is pressed, but there’s no chapters left in the given timeline. Many DVD players will skip to the end of the timeline (which will then cause the end action to occur), but some just do nothing. As for the Prev Chapter button, that simply won’t work to go back to a previous timeline. DVD players don’t keep track of what timeline they came from.

For more info on end actions and overrides, see Daniel Brown’s video tutorial:
https://www.adobeevangelists.com/movies/overridetogo.wmv

[Mark Weaver]

Timothy,
Thanks for this clarification about the playlists. Like
you suggest I was hoping that this would be an easier way
to make multiple timeline work together. As it stands I’ve
done it both ways (one long timeline with chapters and one
with many short timelines with a playlist).
Its frustrating that we have such a cool little tool
in the playlists, but that they are missing some very
important usability functions. Oh well.

Thanks

Mark Weaver

[Geo Cohn]

The standard workaround is to put a gratuitous chapter point at the end of each timeline, so that hitting next will cause it to go there and then immediately do the end action. Doesn’t work for previous however.

geo.

[Mark Weaver]

Geo,
Yeah, I tried this, but as you said the previous
doesn’t work. Glad to hear that it wasn’t just me
doing something stupid. (at least in this case 🙂

Mark Weaver