[MPlayer-users] DVD menus

[rcooley]

On Mon, 10 May 2004 17:08:31 -0400
"Tate Austin" <tate.austin at graysail.com> wrote:

>  I don't understand what it terms as"titles".  

A title is like a track on a CD.  Chapters are points within a title.

> I realize it may simply be that without an understanding of menus,
> factoring the content of a DVD is kind of shooting blindly. 

No, not really.  The problem is that some companies that layout DVDs are
really quite stupid...  They use some horiffic layout on the DVD, then
use DVD menus as a crutch.  Since most people use the menus, not many
notice the problem.  

I've seen some awful layouts.  Lexx DVDs tend to have 60 titles of
the same 3 second video, over and over again...  Not to mention that
each individual episode is duplicated identically on two different
titles.

The Man Show(and a few others) have one title with multiple TV episodes
in them, and each chapter is the starting point for the next episode.
There's an EOF at the end of each chapter, so if you start playing at
chapter 1, you'll never get to chapter 2.  You have to start at chapter
2 to play chapter 2, et al.

Personally, I hate DVD menus.  They're always a nasty, poorly designed,
inconsistent interface that you have to figure out every time you put in
each movie.  I would be much happier if there was a program that
understood DVD menus just enough that it could list the names of each
title/chapter, and let you manually choose.  In other words, I would
like DVD menus to be mostly just like VCD menus.