[Roadkill]

You can use different pixel aspect ratios in Photoshop CS. What is it that you want to do by changing the PAR?

[Roadkill]

The marquee encloses everything that is in the subpicture highlighting layer(s). If there are any stray pixels there, then these could cause it to be larger than expected.

[Roadkill]

[Mike_S] “Am I missing something obvious here, or is this “normal”.”

This is normal. Software DVD players do not support the “auto activated” function of buttons when the viewer uses the mouse to make a selection.

[Roadkill]

Yes, the advice still applies. No, probably not glitchy software, but incorrect use of the override command.

What you are describing sounds like the override used in the wrong place. If I understand correctly, you want 3 buttons that each play a timeline once and 1 button that plays all three timelines forever. One option to set this up is like this:

• Set the end action of each timeline to link to the next. Timeline A, links to B, B links to C and C links to A. There should be no override set in the Properties of any of the timelines.
• Link the “loop all” button to timeline A.
• Set the override in the Properties of the “play A once” button to link back to the menu and link the button to timeline A. Do the same for the remaining two buttons.

If you are using Encore 1.5 you could also use the playlist feature instead of the override:

• First make sure that there are no overrides set anywhere.
• Set the end actions of all three timelines to return to the menu.
• Link the three “play once” buttons to their timelines. No overrides.
• Create a playlist D and add timelines A, B and C to it.
• Create an empty playlist E.
• Set the end action of playlist D to playlist E. Set the end action of E to link to D.
• Link the “loop all” button to playlist D.

[Roadkill]

External burners are internal burners in a box. 🙂 Pioneer makes good burners and so do Plextor and Nec.

Image quality is determined by the quality of the source video and the MPEG encoder. If you are having problems with playback then apart from the burner itself, the burner’s firmware, quality of the DVD-R media and the burn speed are important factors.

[Roadkill]

Check the websites of Sony and Lite-On for available updates for the specific models you are using. There will be information, either on the site itself or in the download, how to perform the update.

[Roadkill]

I would suggest PCM (AIFF) audio, 48KHz, 16 bit. Also keep the maximum level below -6dB.

[Roadkill]

Encore allows a maximum of 99 timelines in a project because each timeline ends up as a Video Title Set (VTS) on the DVD. And the DVD spec allows max 99 VTSs per DVD-Video disc.

There is no absolute maximum on the number of menus. The DVD spec sets a maximum of 1GB of menu content per disc. With still menus without audio it will be hardly possible to reach this, but with motion menus you can run out of space with somewhere in the region of 15 to 20 minutes.

A practical limitation can be that Encore may get sluggish if your projects contains several hundreds of menus.

[Roadkill]

A very common cause for inverted (“upside down”) video in Encore is the presence of DivX and similar codecs on your computer. Uninstalling such codecs may help, but if they were originally installed as part of a so-called “codec pack”, more drastic measures (like going back to a restore point or re-installing Windows) may be needed to get rid of them.

[Roadkill]

John,

Could you upload a short MPEG-2 clip?