-
Touch Screen Button Active Area
Hello –
I am trying to create an interactive presentation for a touch screen DVD system using Encore menus only (no actual video clips or timelines in this one). The first level of menus contains 5 linked menus selectable from the button on the left hand side. The first 4 of these just contain images and text like the one in the upper left of this screen cap.
The fifth button on the left menu links to the lower left screen, which in turn has buttons to link to the upper right screen (x6), which in turn has buttons to link to the lower right screen (x60).
I using Encore CS3, a Pioneer DVD-V8000, and a Cybertouch O3200 (AKA NEC MultiSync LCD3215). The button command area on the touch screen does not match the area I have defined for the button in Encore. The farther the button is from the upper right corner the worse the correlation becomes. I’ve tried changing the resolution of the project, eliminating eveything from the button I can like layer effects and text blocks, and even creating buttons underneath the image that would match where I think the touch screen would activate correctly.
The instructions from the vendor that sold us the equipment are only 1.5 pages. The only relevent thing there states “The sub menu overlay defines the active area of the button on the display. For a touch screen activated button this is defining the touch screen coordinates which will activate the visual button. The most critical part of the menu development is creating the sub menu overlay such that the active area of the button registers exactly beneath the visual button. The touch screen reports coordinates as 740×480 with 0,0 in the upper left corner.”I have tried authoring the whole project at 740×480 with no effect, and that doesn’t make sense anyway since the resolution specs are listed as 1366×768 for this monitor, which isn’t an option in Encore. I can’t find a single reference anywhere online to “sub menu overlay” in Encore except to pull up this same instruction sheet.
HELP!! What am I missing here?
Thanks,
Kim -
2 Replies
-
UPDATE:
Got a couple of sugglestions over on the Adobe forum. I tried reauthoring at 740×480, and in 0.9, 1.2, and for the heck of it, 1.0 par too. No effect there. I’ve been trying to author at the highest possible quality since the screen claims a max res of 1366×768, and the player is able to output 1260×780. The way the language reads in my documentation, it looks like the 740×480 only refers to the coordinates of the touch sensitive aspect of the screen. But I’m not seeing any noticeable quality difference by scaling back to standard definition.There is no change with scaling or not scaling the image on the settings, and the core resolution isn’t adjustable with the built in menus. Presumably it would be if I were hooking it up to a CPU, but not in this instance. Scaling back the output from the DVD player to 740 x 480 did have some effect, but it just made the buttons misregister in slightly different locations.
I also contacted Cybertron, who said that this is a known issue that they got a lot of complaints about when they first released the product. However, that’s been several years ago and “they’re really just hardware people.” At least I know I’m not crazy, but I’m getting there quick! I suspect I’ll have to create “button covers” so that the user is at least touching where the system wants, even if it’s not the area I really intended. It’s tedious, and I know it’s not the right way to do it, but I’m running out of ideas and time.
One more odd bug that I’ve found is that I’ve set all of the menus to return to my “Home” screen after 5 minutes, and the player just doesn’t see that command at all.
-
A standard def DVD menu is 720×480 maximum (NTSC) – we recently were in a similar situation – the client wanted to use the DVD in a touch-screen display. When you start a DVD, either in Windows Media Player, VLC or whatever, you first have to maximize the player, which is difficult with a touch screen given the tiny size of the maximize icon in the window’s upper right corner. Then we could easily navigate the oversized buttons on menus, however once a video would play, there was no way without a mouse to get any pause or return to menu functionality.
So we decided to author in Flash, with a custom interface designed to work with the limitations of finger control on a touch screen. Much better result. This comes down to using the right tool for the job. Sure, Encore authoring is easy, but there are limitations.
Mike Cohen
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up