I just got a home-made DVD working with menus, multiple selectable subtitles, and multiple selectable audio tracks! With proper language indications yet! And it works in my DVD player! w00t!
I’ve had the trial version of Adobe’s Encore DVD-authoring software for a week, and I have some AVIs and MPEG files from home videos that I shot when I was in Europe (Legoland, specifically; I finally made the Great Pilgrimage to Billund–but that’s another thread).
I’d been tinkering with various software–Microsoft MovieMaker2, DVD-lab, TMPG’s stuff, etc, and, though many offered simple pre-configured setups for home video, none supported subtitles or multiple audio tracks. I spent quite a bit of time with various standalone programs for subtitle creation, but these required manual steps to mix the subtitles into the MPEG-2 file, and subtitle use remained awkward, especially when linking to menu buttons.
Encore comes a lot closer. Buttons can be easily linked to actions such as selecting a language, as well as being linked to a location in a video file. Menus are much more customisable. Subtitle support is still difficult though: Encore accepts only a specific file format for text subtitles. It is possible to edit the text subtitles inside the program, but I was unable to do this because of an error message (see this thread in the Adobe User-to-User support forums).
Each video file has a “timeline” in which one can add multiple audio and subtitle tracks. The order of these tracks is not changeable though.
The program found my DVD drive and wrote to it no problem, warning of a non-blank DVD-RW and asking to confirm erasure.
Next step: exploring the mysteries of the custom menu button…
