Ordering Off The Menu

It took a bit of fiddling, but I finally have DVD menus working for the TV shows I’m capturing. There are tools available for putting together the menus interactively, but I wanted something a bit more automated, and it’s not like I’m going to spend a lot of time carefully painting beautiful pictures for each one.

Now I can finally start burning TV episodes, since I didn’t want to have them all as one big stream where you’d have to fast-forward or rewind to the right starting point…

In order to get menus working, you need a few different things:

• A background image

  For this I used a simple blue-to-black gradient, though if I want to get fancy I could use a more show-specific image, too.

• Button masks

  This one was a little tougher, since it’s going to vary from disc to disc. You need three PNG images with only the graphics for each button, in three different states: normal, highlighted, and selected. The graphics have to include any text you want to display on the screen (e.g., title names) as part of the image.

  Normally this is where the DVD authoring guides say “Oh just open The GIMP and create a blank image 720×480 and draw…”, but that’s what I want to avoid having to do for every disc. Fortunately there was some help available here; the tovid utilities include a script called ‘makemenu’ which generates menu images.

  Unfortunately the images it generates weren’t directly usable with the rest of the menuing tools… In particular it only generates one mask image, without any bounding boxes for ‘spumux’ to latch onto for button autodetection. However, looking through the script gave me some ideas about how I could do it myself, and after a little while I had written a script that would generate my own menu image files.

Then, I just had to feed all of these images through the rest of the authoring utilities, much like described here except with the NTSC options, set up the dvdauthor XML file to use the menu file, and run the dvdauthor stage.

Anyone who really cares about the specific steps and setup can look at this archive for a set of template files and instructions, including the menu image generation script.