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From: comet16 on 15 Apr 2008 05:18
I work on a project that will be used both on DVD Players and PCs.
The DVD content is ready and working on standard DVD players.

Unfortunately, when I put the content into Director, the menus are not much
like they should be.
All chapters are played just fine, structure and navigation is kept as well.
When you click the area where menu buttons are located a proper action is
triggered.

The problem is that the buttons are not displayed at all. There are no
normal/hilighted/selected buttons visible, and no cursor changes when you roll
over the active area, so the user is left guessing what is a button and what is
only a background.

It's just the same in Director and running the projector after publishing.
The problem occurs not only with my "low level" compiled DVD content, but also
with DVDs created by Encore.

What am I missing here?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. I work in Director MX 2004, PC, Windows XP Professional in case that
matters.

From: AlinedGif on 15 Apr 2008 07:44
Hi Comet16. This is not going to solve your problem, but I thought it might
help you peruse other more direct methods of getting to the bottom of it with
Adobe, or finding another way round.

1. I still have no solution to this problem that I have found myself.
2. I did receive an email from macromedia (can't remember wether I emailed
them, or they noticed this thread), firstly telling me that they had noted this
and that they where passing on to their senior programmers for investigation,
and secondly an email to tell me that this was indeed a bug, and that they had
noted it! (or some such response)
3. I have not seen whether this has been fixed in latter versions of Director.
(it was to late for me :o(
4. If you put a commercially authored DVD into the computer and play your
projector it has the same problems. Highlights don't appear or are in the
incorrect position. (which is proof that it's not a badly authored disk)

There seems to me three things you can do:
1. A work around (as you have authored the DVD yourself), would be to include
a bitmap visualization of your buttons as part of each menu background when you
author the DVD, WITHOUT using any, normal/highlighted/activated states at all.
This way at least the user would know where to click? (this would of course
mean less interactivity on a standard DVD playing device.) Or make the
highlights minim so that they are not missed so much in the DVD-ROM world.
2. add a 'highlighted button state' menu after a CLICK and not a ROLLOVER.
This means vastly more menu complexity, and an non standard way of selecting a
button (clicking rather than rolling over), but it might get you out of a tight
jam. I've seen this on a few DVD's, and users get used to it after a short
while.
3. re-build the entire menu in director-land within your projector, and let it
call upon the video and chapters when needed. (this would no menus in a
standard DVD player if you excluded them from the authoring stage, or you would
have to find a way of stopping an installed DVD program auto-playing on the PC)
I get the impression that at this sage with MX2004 that's all they intended you
to do with DVD-ROMs: Use video from the disk in your own projectors, or
webpages.

After working with a programmer who knew a lot more than me on this problem,
we did have to admit that in all the literature and guides from MX2004 it's
never suggested that you can run fully functional DVD video and Menus from a
professionally authored DVD. More that you can call upon video parts of an
authored disk as part of a director presentation or webpage. They don't say you
can't do it! They only guide you on how to call the parts you need and create
controls ect.
Just an observation. If I'd worked this out before I'd started I'd have gone
about it this way. Never tried it though yet.
Sorry this doesn't offer you a solution.

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