Overview

For Authoring I like to use DVD-lab, it has everything I need. You can add background pictures, and music to your menu, while having complete control over the design of your menu - what more could you ask for?

Section 1 - Importing your assets

Start up DVD-lab, and select the video&audio tab at the bottom. We need to import two things into this group. The first is the episodes you encoded, the second is some nice background music for your DVD menu. When you import your episodes it will take a few minutes because DVD-lab demultiplexes them (Separates them into separate video, and audio streams). When you first run DVD-lab and do this a popup window should appear asking you if you want to do this. I recommend you let the program demultiplex them.

Now that all you episodes are loaded, load your track that you want for your menu music from the video&audio tab. For the menu audio I usually leave it in wav form since I usually have a 100 MB's, or so to spare, and the track is usually between 2 - 5 minute.

Now go to the background tab, and load up your background image (just do a search for wallpapers on that series, and maybe edit it a bit in Photoshop to get rid of website names, or urls (patch, clone stamp, and healing brush tools own that stuff : ). Once your backgrounds to your liking load it up, or if that's too difficult use on of DVD-labs backgrounds (there already loaded).

Now that we have everything we need loaded it's time to get this menu made. First we need to create a movie folder for each episode.

Section 2 - Dragging lots of Files

By default, if you look at the middle left of your screen you'll notice a Movies folder. Double-click on the movie folder, and it will bring up a window on the right side of your screen that is divided in to three layers. The first layer deals with chapters, the middle layer is for the movie stream, and the third layer is the audio stream. Each of your episodes has 1 video, and 1 audio stream, so you need to drag the video stream to the middle layer, and the audio stream to the layer beneath it. That takes care of one episode, you now have to make a separate movie folder for each episode, and drag the video, and audio streams in to each one. Just think of each movie folder as an empty episode shell, so you need to add the video, and audio to each episode.

Once that's done double click the menu folder (under movie folders), and it will pop up with your menu display (top right) now drag your background picture right in to the menu display, do the same for your the menu music track. After this give your menu a title, and make the menu selection (I just use numbers corresponding to the episode, it's up to you). Once you have the menu how you like it, right click on each of your menu items you made, and select link, and choose the appropriate movie you want to link to. Do that for all of them. Now select your first menu item, and right click on it, and select "set as first button" (When you return to the root menu, or load up a DVD the link that has "set as first button" will be highlighted").

Almost done, now click on the connections button (above movie folders), notice how this graph comes up displaying what you have. You should have a Root menu, and movie icon for each episode displaying. Select the + icon, and click on the first movie picture and drag to the second movie thing (This makes it so when an episode finishes it will go right to the next one instead of the menu) now do this for the other ones except the very last movie thing (nothing to connect to anyway :) The last movie picture has a symbol that looks like the symbol for males, it just means return to menu, so when your last episode has finished it returns to the menu. Now on you Root menu picture in the graph (+ icon still selected) click on the small grey circle on the middle right of it and drag it back to the blue arrow tip (this makes it so your menu music loops, so it keeps playing over, and over.

Now you're ready to compile. Go to Project -> Compile, and select an output folder (make sure you choose a drive with enough space) , and click the start button. This usually takes me 5 - 10 minutes. Once that's completed you should now have a folder with AUDIO_TS, and VIDEO_TS to test out your DVD on computer, and make sure everything is working use PowerDVD, or any program that can play DVD's on your computer and load up the VIDEO_TS folder (Just need to load the folder not open it). Check to see if your menu links go to where you want them.