Why does Encore create (and play) two different menu streams?

[Joe Bowden]

Are you authoring to DVD or Blu-ray?

[Marc Brown]

This is Blu-ray. Although the two are effectively interchangeable in Encore. The DVD format certainly doesn’t exclusively possess the rudimentary capability of delaying the activation of buttons.

[Larry Applegate]

I can confirm this is exactly what happens with Blu-ray.

Regards,

Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com

[Marc Brown]

> I can confirm this is exactly what happens with Blu-ray.

I’m going to tentatively conclude that this means the menu button / loop point issue is an undocumented limitation of Encore’s Blu-ray implementation, and that there is no workaround.

If that’s the case, then color me astonished. Does nobody create menus for their Blu-ray projects? This problem would pop up the first time anyone used a loop point for any reason whatsoever. The menu pauses and the player starts a new video, with all the unwanted consequences that entails. It would be difficult to fail to notice such a phenomenon, particularly since anyone working with Blu-ray is probably giving image quality / integrity a high priority.

What makes this episode particularly disgusting – besides the fact that there is literally no way, in this particular case, for me to rework my menu to rescue all that effort – is that anyone who knows about this rather sad hidden limitation could save some disc space by changing their flowchart:

Full menu -> chapter 1

to

Menu intro -> rest of menu -> chapter 1

The stupid pause between “menu intro” and “rest of menu” would still be there, but at least Encore would not wastefully render almost the entire menu twice and then use only the first bit of one of those streams on the actual disc.

[Larry Applegate]

Hi Marc,

Actually if you did this, you might not notice the pause because the disc would not have to seek past the unwanted duplicate video.

Regards,

Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com

[Joe Bowden]

[Marc Brown] “This is Blu-ray. Although the two are effectively interchangeable in Encore.”

That may be the view from the application user interface, but beneath the hood, the formats are of course quite different.

This doesn’t happen when authoring a DVD from Encore, so it would appear to be a limitation of Encore’s current Blu-ray implementation.

Your workaround is probably the preferred workflow, until this is addressed by Adobe. I’d recommend you call Tech Support or go to Adobe’s web site and enter a bug in their support section.

[Larry Applegate]

Joe, I must apologize, I misinterpreted what was right in front of me. My example project plays the full menu all the way through, and then linked to the second menu thereafter. So I did not see what Marc was describing, and the additional space was probably worth it to avoid a possible pause.

Marc, if you could mail me your BDMV folder or a similar sample, I would be very interested in examining the navigation.

Regards,

Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com

[Joe Bowden]

Thanks for the update, Larry…I haven’t worked with Blu-ray recently, so I haven’t had a chance to confirm anything regarding motion menus.

I hope to jump back into Blu-ray authoring soon.

[Marc Brown]

Okay. Currently scrambling to finish up the new iteration of the movie based on the recommendation to go ahead and split the menu into two chunks (I’ll need it in-hand tomorrow), but once I’ve got that working, I’ll reconstruct a project with a menu that gets split and played badly.

I may also try some experimentation. For example, what will Encore do if I devise a menu using an asset it flags as “don’t transcode”? This one has already made me curious. You see, I’ve created a disc build using menu assets that I told Encore to “transcode now” prior to the build. So when Encore ultimately creates its two menu streams, what is it doing in order to create the shorter stream? Re-transcoding the already-transcoded video? Or is it referencing the raw original? Perhaps if Encore doesn’t have the option of referencing a raw original, it will give me a disc which plays the menu fully once, as your experience happily (and frustratingly) suggests.

[Marc Brown]

By the way, I just wanted to clarify a point.

You say it plays the full menu before switching to the shortened version. It may be that my discs are doing this also; it’s impossible for me to know for certain without doing something like burning a BD-R which is missing the shorter menu stream, to see what happens. But it is still a fact that once my menu reaches the loop point these two things happen: It pauses for about a second, and once it finishes pausing, the “play” triangle (indicating the start of a new video, on the PS3) appears in the lower left. To me, these two phenomena clearly indicate a switch from the full menu stream to the shortened one.

So I guess what I’m wondering is whether or not you see any pauses or other things when your menu reaches the loop point, regardless of whether it’s apparently still playing the main menu stream.