In order to describe the proper usage of Menus within BatchMux, some reference samples have been generated.

These samples contains all of the assets needed for the building of simple menus based on the BatchMux program.

First decision to take when building a BatchMux Menu is the one related to the TV Standard (PAL or NTSC). BatchMux fully supports both standards.

Then the number and the function of each button should be defined. For single page menus many buttons for title play and one optional button for the "PlayAll" function can be generated. For multipage menus, each page may have also navigation buttons, to move among the menu pages. For the moment all of the menu pages are at the same hierarchical level.

DVD menus can be built for the 4:3 and for the 16:9 aspect ratios. BatchMux supports the production of DVD for all possible aspect ratios (each menu may have one, two or three groups of buttons).


Finally it should be decided if the menu to build is a static menu, e.g. a menu based on a backgroung static bmp and no audio, or a motion menu, which is a menu based on a background static bmp + one audio track or just on a motion video as background.

The simplest menus are the ones based on 4:3 AR.

For the static menus, assets needed are:
- one background image (.bmp)
- one menu description file (PgcEdit format for exported menus)
- one hilight asset (compiled, in the ifoedit sup format, or in the Scenarist sst format)

For the motion menus, assets needed are:
- one background image (.bmp) or one DVD compliant video clip (.m2v)
- one audio stream (.ac3 or other formats supported by MuxMan). The audio stream is mandatory if the background is a bmp, otherwise it is optional
- one menu description file (PgcEdit format for exported menus)
- one hilight asset (compiled, in the ifoedit sup format, or in the Scenarist sst format)

Caveat. Concerning the hilight streams, please note that the sst examples contains absolute references (the directory statement) that should be changed depending on the actual path of the samples in the filesystem. The usage of the sup files (that are independent from the path) is an alternative supported option, but provides less flexibility, since these are not as easy to modify as the sst assets.

Menues built for the 16:9 aspec ratios are (a little bit) more complex, since in this case three possibilities exist, depending on the display mode that should be adopted when the 16:9 menu is played on a 4:3 system. In other terms a wide screen menu should support at least one between the pan&scan or letterbox display alternatives or both of them. So, different possibilities exist for the production of DVD compilations with BatchMux. In the provided samples, all of the DVD are based on 16:9 menus. 4:3 menus look not too bad on 16:9 displays, and are always a practical solution to keep at the minimum the complexity of the DVD project. One sample (1 page, 3 buttons) is provided based on 16:9 menus with ws + lb presentation modes. This choice of using two groups of buttons is the minimum acceptable solution for 16:9 menus; all of the other examples are based on 16:9 menus with ws + lb + ps presentation modes; with three different groups the complexity (and the number) of the assets is the maximum, but the support for all possible configurations is the most complete.

Two fundamental readings are suggested in order to learn the proper usage of menus within DVDs:

The How Menu Work articles from the mpucoder site (requires membership):
http://www.mpucoder.com/guides/menu1.html

The goonix guide in the doom9 forum (How to make a new menu or modify the background image of a menu):
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=99306

In synthesis, in order to use menus within BatchMux, the following decisions should be taken:
- PAL or NTSC system
- single page or multipage
- the number of buttons in each page of the menu leading to titles
- the number of buttons in each page of the menu leading to other pages
- the AR of the menu (4:3, or 16:9 + LB, or 16:9 + PS, or 16:9 + LB + PS)
- the related assets should be selected from the sample library or prepared externally

One important aspect to underline is that BatchMux is just a middleware program (support application) for building an mxp script for MuxMan. So no graphical manipulation support is provided in order to create the proper assets for the menus.

In the actual release (1.2) of BatchMux, the whole assets for each page of the menu should be added in the argument list as last segments (after all of the title segments). Then the proper video, audio and hilight assets should be included in the script, together with the description file for each page (the .mnu asset) in the PgcEdit format. Finally one navigation configuration file (.hcn) should be prepared in order to create an hardcoded navigation for supporting the different types of menus.

The following (quite simple) example shows how to build a PAL static menu to select just one title in a DVD. The actual implementation (of the navigation part) of the BatchMux program have no limitations on the number of buttons leading to titles, apart the basic limitations of the DVD standard: up to 36 buttons in total, to be shared among all of the groups. Human Factor experts suggest to limit the total number of buttons per page to 7 or 9. 12 buttons can be used if the menu page contains 3 groups.

Please note in the example below, the usage of the SEG2 arguments, that are all related to the menu segment.


#
# Sample -arglist file for BatchMux
# lines like this are comments...
# also leading spaces and newlines are skipped...
#

"-d" "E:\Test DVD\Out"
-norun
-muxman "E:\BatchMux Plugin\BatchMux\Release"
-l "Test DVD\BatchMux.log"
-mxp "Test DVD\BatchMux.mxp"
-preparer "Sir Didymus"
-palette "Test DVD\dvd_palette.txt"
-v "Test DVD\VTS_01_1_cut1.m2v"
-v_2 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1_cut2.m2v"
-v_3 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1_cut3.m2v"
-v_4 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1_cut4.m2v"
-a1 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1.80_cut1.ac3"
-a1_2 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1.80_cut2.ac3"
-a1_3 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1.80_cut3.ac3"
-a1lang it
-a2lang ja
-a2 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1.81_cut1.ac3"
-a2_2 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1.81_cut2.ac3"
-a2_3 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1.81_cut3.ac3"
-s1 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1.20.sup"
-s2 "Test DVD\VTS_01_1.21.sup"
-s1lang it
-s2lang it
-s1dmode WIDE_LB
-s2dmode WIDE_LB
-cellfr "E:\Test Split\Celltimes_VTS1.txt"
-SEG2v "Test DVD\Pal_ws_1but_bckgnd.bmp"
-SEG2vidmode LB
-SEG2s1 "Test DVD\Pal_ws_1but_hilight.sst"
-SEG2s1dmode WIDE
-SEG2s2 "Test DVD\Pal_lb_1but_hilight.sst"
-SEG2s2dmode LB
-SEG2hlmnu "Test DVD\ws_lb.mnu"
-SEG2hlcsm "Test DVD\color_scheme.csm"
-hcn "Test DVD\dvd_navigation.hcn"
