Titles vs. Chapters in Ulead DVD Workshop
 

Got the program installed, got a few questions.

1. Chapters vs. Titles

Every m2v clip I import onto a DVD becomes a Title vs. a Chapter. Is this a problem, will my DVD player seamlessly transition between each Title, or will a set top DVD player pause and reseek to the next Title? If it reseeks, is there a way to layout a DVD with one master title and each m2v file as a chapter?

2.Disc Playback Behavior

By default the menu wizard sets each Title to return to the main menu after playing. I would like it to proceed to the next Title by default. Do I need to setup the playlist as follows?

(assume disc has 5 Titles named clipx)

Title 1 playlist:
clip1
clip2
clip3
clip4
clip5
MENU

Title 2 playlist:
clip2
clip3
clip4
clip5
MENU

as so on.

3. Bugs in program

When I go to finalize the DVD, DVDWS2 complains that the bitrate of my tracks are too high. My m2v source files are VBR with 9500kbps max bit rate. My target audio is 256kbps AC3, BUT I am having DVDWS2 handle the AC3 conversion. Perhaps its seeing the WAV files and adding that to the bitrate count instead of calculating it with the AC3 bitrate. Either way, it seems to create a disc that plays fine in my set top DVD player. I have confirmed with VLC that it is properly creating the 256kbps AC3 audio tracks and thankfully there are no sync issues.

Oh, and the video looks fabulous.

DVDWS2 makes new titles when specs of the MPEG files don't match. That's part of the DVD specs, actually, that each different resolution must be housed in a new VTS (title, titleset). When I make "episode" DVDs, for example, all of the videos end up in the same VTS once authored.

It sounds like you're worried about playlisting.

Did you watch my video? http://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/show...-dvd-1506.html
How to Author with Ulead DVD Workshop 2 [VIDEO GUIDE]

It shows how to add titles to the playlist, so they'll pay one after another.

Playlists are technically separate functionality of DVD navigation, but some authoring program hide that from you, which may be why you've gotten wrapped up in chapters vs titles.

There may be some delays, on some players, so it's best to use a single video track for continuous movies, and simply add chapters. When you make chapters in DVDWS, it creates a filmstrip on the right side of the page, and you can drag those chapters onto menus just as you can do with whole titles. So there's no reason to split a large title, simply to create menu entries.

There were some posts with forum member Superstar last year, that covered this exact thing.

Yep, you've got it. :)

Looks like I got the navigation figured out. Seems redundant, but from a programming perspective, makes complete sense. I split the raw video files into clips to ease organizing the DVDs, I wasn't familiar with how authoring software would handle it. I also figured that dividing the clips up guaranteed that a chapter boundary would have an I-frame, good thing I divided them at footage cuts, so no random pausing in the middle of scenes.

I'll deal with the slight pause between titles on some players for now, mostly because I'm in a time crunch and don't feel like re-compressing 17 hours worth of video. Its odd it even happens, the whole disc is being built into one VTS by DVDWS2, only dividing the VOBs to keep below the 1GB limit.

Almost all MPEG encoders insert new I-frames on scene changes. Many of them have settings, while others simply do it automatically. There's really no need to split the file to simply force a new I-frame.

Don't re-encode. Just join all the files again. I would use Womble MPEG Video Wizard, but it can also be done in TMPGEnc Plus (MPEG Tools, under File menu). It's not a complete guide written for this specific task, but you can get the gist of what's going on from the Editing with TMPGEnc Plus guide, as it discusses a very related task.