How To Make a Still Pictures VideoCD With Menu (part 1)

• Introduction
• Photoshop's Part of the Work
• VCDEasy's Part of the Work

About

This guide explains how to make advanced VideoCDs with still pictures and menu(s). For simpler and faster way to store your photos on a VideoCD you can follow the How To Make a Still Picture VideoCD guide, which I recommend anyway since some VCDEasy options are explained in more details. One VideoCD can store up to 1980 pictures in DVD quality (704x480 for NTSC or 704x576 for PAL).

You can also store the image's originals on the same VCD.

In the second part of this guide, which will be published later, advanced users will learn how to make more cool menus with small video thumbnails or menu items in motion.

Some explanations

In this guide we are going to create a sample VideoCD with one menu (we can call it top menu or main menu). In fact the menu itself is also a picture, created with image editing program. Once the VideoCD is loaded in the home player this "menu picture" will be the first thing to appear on the screen and it will stay there until the user makes a choice and presses a key on the remote control. Some of the VCDEasy steps to create this VideoCD will be similar as for a Still Pictures VideoCD Without Menu (explained in the How To Make a Still Picture VideoCD guide). A more complex VCDEasy step will be the VCDEasy Interactivity setup.

In this guide we are going to use Adobe Photoshop for the creation of the menu pictrure. Photoshop is probably the most popular image-editing program and it's really a great piece of software. If you don't have this program you can download a trial from Adobe site. Of course if you are familiar or you prefer another image-editing software you can use it instead of Photoshop, I am sure that most of the menu image creation steps can be made with some other programs as well.

If you want to do even more complicated stuff on your VideoCD like menus and submenus you can just repeat the following steps, explained in this guide, for the main menu and each of the submenus. However keep in mind that the "VCDEasy Interactivity setup" step will be more complicated and it will require your maximum concentration. It is possible to make a mistake.

Better burn your VCD with menu first on a CD-RW, test it on you player - enter in every menu/submenu, select each menu item, press on every possible button. In the next versions of the VCDEasy you'll have the possibility to load/save projects. This great feature will allow you to create VCD with menus, test it with a CD-RW, then make some changes in the VCD settings if necessary and finally burn the VCD on a CD-R once everything is OK.

Before you begin

You should make sure that your home DVD player supports VideoCDs and particularly the VCD 2.0 specification, which allows you to have "Playback control". Almost every DVD player today that supports VCD and SVCD has this feature, without it there is no point to continue to create a menu-enabled VideoCD. On some players the "Playback control" might be disabled - to watch your Still Pictures VideoCD With Menu you have to enable it.

Choose correctly your color system: PAL or NTSC. For those who are not sure - NTSC is used in USA and Japan; PAL is used in the rest of the World, for example in Europe. In this guide we are going to create a PAL VideoCD. Keep in mind that the Still Picture's size supported by the specifications is different for PAL or NTSC. The best initial size for your menu picture is 640x480 for NTSC and 768x576 for PAL (when TV is 4/3)

You should know that making a VideoCD with a menu is somehow a time consuming process, mostly for beginners, but you can quickly learn and after 1 or 2 VCDs the creation process will become easier. You'll remember most of the things to do and to avoid; you'll save your menu templates and probably re-use them for other CDs.

However: Please note that for the creation of the menu picture some basic Photoshop skills are required. I don't ask you to be a Photoshop Guru, but some knowledge of this product will avoid you to loose time to understand the image manipulations (the menu picture creation phase). Please, don't send some e-mails to me or to delphi stuff with questions about Photoshop like "How do I change the background color?" or "What is a Layer?". From my part in this guide I'll try to give as much explanations as possible.

Required Software

For a Still Pictures VideoCD With Menu you just need the following software:

• Adobe Photoshop, for this guide I used version 7.0. If you don't have Photoshop - download a trial version (use the "Downloads->Free Photoshop Tryout" link on Photoshop's home page).
  
• VCDEasy - I recommend the latest version.

Our Final Goal

This guide's final goal is to achieve a menu similar to this one:

Every time the user loads the Still Pictures VideoCD in his player this main menu appears and will allow to choose pictures among the proposed 4 categories. For example to see the pictures in "Weekend in Villier-sur-Mer" category, the user has to press on the button "2" of the remote control's keypad. Once all the pictures are seen this menu screen will appear again.

So in this guide you'll first learn to create such menu in Photoshop and then how to configure VCDEasy in order to enable the functionalities of this menu on your VideoCD.

First Steps

First of all you should carefully consider the layout of you menu, position and size of picture thumbnails, number of menu items. I recommend you strongly to take a paper and pen and draw out your menu layout.

1. Choose the number of menu items
2. Choose the pictures (thumbnails) that you are going to put as menu items
3. Choose a background picture (or just a background color)

Here is my menu drawing for the current example used in this guide. In this case I chose to have one big title on top, 4 menu items composed by a picture thumbnail and some text below it, and one full-size background picture. So this is the "menu picture" that will be created in Photoshop (in a one single picture file).

Tips:

• - The best initial size for your menu picture file is 768x576 (for PAL VideoCD, NTSC correct size is 640x480). VCDEasy will later correctly resize this to 704x576.
• - Do not put too much menu items, usually 4 to 6 is OK, if you put more, you have to reduce too much the size of the thumbnails.
• - Do not put too much text - you'll be forced to reduce the font size and probably your menu will not be so easily readable.
• - Mind that almost every TV crops a few percents (ofter between 3% to 5%) of the image around its borders. This means that a small part of the menu picture will not be visible on the screen. The cropping percentage can vary for each model/brand of TV-set. On the Figure 2 above the cropped part of the menu picture is colored in gray.

So because of the cropping do not consider putting menu items to close to the borders, there should be at least 20 to 40 pixels free around the borders.

In this guide we will consider that the TV set crops 4% around the borders. For a PAL Still Pictures VideoCD 4% means about 28 pixels from left and right and 22 pixels from the top and bottom.

Next Step - Calculations

In this step you are going to determine the exact position of each thumbnail. Do not underestimate this step, it is very important. The calculations will allow you to create a good menu template (we can call it also a "mask"). You'll create this mask only once for this menu layout (4 items menu items in 2x2 configuration). and use it again when you want to create another VideoCD with the same type of menu (same menu layout).

If you don't calculate correctly the distances in mask - your menu items will be badly placed and not symmetric.

Let me remind that the size of our menu picture is 768x576 pixels (once again - this is for PAL VideoCD, NTSC uses 640x480).

Choose the size of the picture thumbnail (same size for all). In this guide we'll use 200x150 pixels - note that the size ratio is 4:3, same as the ratio of every digital picture (except some rare camera models that can do also 3:2). This will allow us just to resize the pictures (actually photos) that we are going to use as thumbnails without changing the image proportions.

Lets begin the calculations for the first menu item, or to be more precise - the first thumbnail. On the figure 2 above it is the one having number 1, placed in the upper left part of the screen:

1. 1) Calculate x (see fig. 3 below): 2*200 + 2*28 + 3x = 768; => x = 100 pixels
2. 2) Calculate y (see fig. 3 below): 2*150 + 2*22 + 4x = 576; => y = 58 pixels (we put 2y at the top to leave double space for the title)
3. 3) So the coordinates of the upper left corner of thumbnail number 1 are:
4. X: 28 + x = 128 pixels from the left border
5. Y: 22 + 2y = 238 pixels from the upper border

The coordinates in pixels of all 4 thumbnails (their upper left corner) are:

1. 1. (X:128, Y:138)
2. 2. (X:428, Y:138)
3. 3. (X:128, Y:346)
4. 4. (X:428, Y:346)

Of course, this is only an example. It gives you an idea of the methodology you can use to create your templates (masks). If you don't like the position of the menu items in this example you can place them in other way, but keep in mind the tips.

Next Step - Create the menu template

Now let's finally get to the real stuff - create the menu template (mask) in Photoshop. Now many of you can ask "Why the hell I need this mask, why don't we put directly our image thumbnails?". The answer is that this mask helps you a lot to place easily your thumbnails on the menu. You can reuse later this mask for another VideoCD and the work will be done much faster. This mask can be also very useful if you create animated (moving) menu items or if you use small videos as menu items (this advanced menus will be discussed later in the second part of this guide).

So the creation of this mask is not mandatory, but it's highly recommended.

Photoshop's Toolbar

During our manipulations with Photoshop we'll use some features from the "Toolbar". While creating our menu picture the most frequently used features will be:

1. 1) The Move Tool (used to move an object/layer)
2. 2) Set Foreground/Background Color (used to select color and to switch between foreground and background)
3. 3) Zoom Tool (used to zoom)
4. 4) Horizontal Type Tool (used to type some text)

And now lets do the work:

1. Create a new file in Photoshop ("File->New..." command in the menu bar) with the following parameters: Image size - width: 768 pixels, height: 576 pixels, with "White" contents.

2. Save this file as "Mask.psd".

3. Choose black as background color (Click on the background color on the Toolbox and select black). This black background color will be used for the creation of the next file.

4. Create a new file with the following parameters: Image size - width: 200 pixels, height: 150 pixels, and select "Background Color" for the contents. The new file that you have created is just a small black rectangle.

5. You can now copy the black rectangle into "Mask.psd" file. While the new file's window is active make a "Select All" and Copy. Use "Ctrl+A" or "Select->All" command in the menu bar; then copy using Ctrl+C or "Edit->Copy" command in the menu bar.

6. Paste the selection (which is actually just a black rectangle 200x150 pixels) 4 times consecutively in the first file "Mask.psd". You'll create one Photoshop image with one white background and 4 new layers. Mind that on the screen you'll see only one black rectangle - this is because the 4 new layers are superimposed. Verify the layer presence in the layers window (if this window is not enabled, click F7 to display it):

7. Rename each of the layers to MenuItem1, MenuItem2, MenuItem3 and MenuItem4. To do this, in the Layers Window click on a layer to make it active, then right click on the layer's name, choose "Layer Properties" and change the Layer's name.

8. Move each of the newly created layers to its approximate position. In order to move a layer it has to be active. Only one layer can be active at one time, so you can move only one black rectange. To move a layer, use the "Move Tool" from the Toolbox.

9. To exactly position each layer use the "Zoom Tool" (Step 1 on the figure 6 below) and the Info window (press F8 to display it). In the Info Window the mouse's X and Y coordinates in pixels are displayed in real time. Using the "Zoom Tool" zoom to the upper left corner of MenuItem1 (click 3-4 times to have a better zoom). In the Info window verify the X and Y coordinates are in pixels. To do that click on the small "+" sign near X and Y and choose pixels.

10. Activate the MenuItem1 layer. Choose again the "Move Tool" (Step 2 on the figure 6 below) and click on the upper left corner of MenuItem1 (displayed with a small red point on the figure below). Then move slowly the mouse and look at the X and Y coordinates in the "Info Window", try to place the item at coordinates X: 128, Y: 138 (Step 3 on the figure 6 below):

11. Repeat the previous step (10) for each of the black rectangles and place each of them on the exact positions calculated earlier.

At the end your menu template/mask should look like that:

Next Step - Create The Menu

Next you'll have to place your real thumbnails on over the black rectangles.

1. Save a copy of "Mask.psd" file and call it "Menu.psd". From now on, work with "Menu.psd" file.

2. Open the first thumbnail-source file (in this example it is file "Img_0816.jpg").

3. Reduce its size to 200x150 pixels. This is done using "Image -> Image size" command from Photoshop's menu bar).

4. Select All, then Copy.

5. Paste it in "Menu.psd" file.

6. Close the original thumbnail file. Warning !!! - Don't save the changes to the original thumbnail-source image file! Otherwise you'll save the resized small image and you'll loose the high-quality original.

7. Move the new layer (using the "Move Tool") over the black rectangle until there are no black borders around it (so that the new layer completely covers the MenuItem1 layer). Stop moving the new layer once there aren't even thin black lines around any of the image's borders (steps 1 and 2 on the figure 8 below).

8. Then rename the new Layer to Item1 (do that in the Layer Window)

9. Right click on Layer's name (in the Layer Window) and select the "Layer blending options".

10. The Layer Style Dialog Box appear (see figure 9 below). Add "Drop Shadow" and "Inner Glow" filters using the default parameter setting (steps 1 and 3 on figure 9 below). Change only one parameter value - the Drop Shadow's "Distance" parameter. (step 2 on figure 10 below). Set this parameter to 8px (the default is 5px) Of course you can choose your own custom setting for parameters values or add an additional blending filter. For example a good effect can be achieved with the "Bevel and Emboss" filter.

11. Repeat the same procedure (Steps 2 to 10 described above) for the rest of the menu item thumbnails. If a newly pasted layer is staying "behind" some of the black rectangles you must bring this layer to front (this layer has to be on top of all others). Select "Layer ->Arrange-> Bring to front" command from the Photoshop's menu bar.

At the end you should have an almost ready menu with all the 4 image thumbnails:

Next Step - Add the Background Image

Next we are going to add the Menu Background image. This step is optional, if you love the menu like that - with a white background and without any background image, just skip this step. Or you can also choose another color for the background.

1. The file that you have selected for the background has to be resized to 768x576 (I remind for the n-th time that this resolution is for PAL VideoCD, for NTSC use 640x480). Open the image file for the background and resize it.

2. In order to focus more on the menu items it is recommended to make some changes on the background image - to make it more blured, out of focus. Usually this is done with Photoshop filters. For this example from the Photoshop menu bar select "Filters->Blur->Blur More" and then "Filters->Pixelate-> Cryistallize..." set the "Cell size" value to 4 or 5. Of course you can select your own filters to change the background image appearance.

3. You can also increase the Image's brightness and contrast (in the menu bar select "Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast").

4. Paste the new image in "Menu.psd" file. It will appear as top layer.

5. Close the Background Image original file and don't save the changes when you are asked to.

6. Set the new layer (containing the background image) as the most underlying. Use the "Layer->Arrange->Send To Back" command from Photoshop's menu bar. Rename the layer to "MenuBackground".

Next Step - Add Titles

We are almost done with our menu image. We have just to add a title and some text for each Menu Item (under each thumbnail). This is done using the Photoshop "Text tool".

1. Select the "Text tool" from the Toolbar (step 1 on the figure 12 below), click on the Image at the approximate desired position for the text (step 2 on the figure 12 below) and type some text. For example: "Escape in Park Saint Cloud".

2. Choose the font color, set it to black (step 3 on the figure 12 below), set font type (step 4 on the figure 12 below), set font size to 24pt (step 5 on the figure 12 below) and set the font's anti-aliasing to smooth (step 6 on the figure 12 below).

3. The text is placed on the image as new Layer. If you want to change its position it can be later moved using the "Move Tool".

4. Don't forget to add a number in the beginning of the textarea for each menu item. This number will be used later by the DVD user to select the given menu item.

5. Optionally you can add some shadow for the text using the text layer's style/blending setting (as described earlier).

6. Repeat Steps 1 to 5 for each of the thumbnail items and for the main title. Better choose font size bigger than 30pt for the main title, in my nice example above I used a "handwrite style" font called "John Handy LET" (it doesn't exist by default on Windows), the size is 56pt.

At the end

This is it ! We have now a beautiful picture that we're going to use for our menu. If everything is OK, you should have now an image file, similar to the one, displayed earlier in this guide in figure 1. Save this file as JPEG file (with "Maximum" quality) and close Photoshop.

Put some order in your files

At this stage you should probably say: "Well it is about time to see VCDEasy in this guide!". OK, it's true, but before that - just a last annoying thing to do: correctly arrange your picture files. If your computer has a lot of directories some of them with strange names (like for example "109CANON") with plenty of files inside (again with strange names like "IMG_0913.JPG") it can be very difficult to determine which file is for "Holidays in South Africa" section of the VideoCD and which one is for "Holidays in Bulgaria".

So the solution to that problem is to put in order your image files before you begin the Still Picture VideoCD creation. The best way to arrange you images is to create a separate directory (folder) for each of your menu items.

So create a new folder, call it "New_VCD" and create 4 subfolders in it, each of them related to one menu item. In our example I've created folders "1_Park", "2_VsurM", "3_Africa" and "4_Bul". Copy (or Move) all the picture files that you want to include in the VideoCD in the corresponding subfolder. Once you do this make sure to add also the Menu file ("menu.jpg") that you have created with Photoshop.

Tip: Create your folders with short names that have a meaning, you can add a number (as 1, 2, 3 or 4) in the beginning of the folder's name.

Note for French or other European users: please don't create folders with some names containing special characters like: é, è, ç, à etc... VCDEasy won't accept such folder names.

Then in each folder edit the names of the first and the last picture file. In the filename add something that will help you to easily understand that the file is first one or last one in the given folder. For example I renamed "IMG_0804.JPG" to "IMG_0804_1_FIRST.JPG", where 1 stands for menuitem1 and FIRST means that this is the first file in this menu item category. This step will help you later to set up the VCDEasy Interactivity page easier.

Convert the files with Mpeg Stills Tool

The way the DVD players work with Still Picture VideoCDs require to convert each of the pictures into a specific format called Mpeg Still. You can consider an "Mpeg Still" just as a very short MPEG video that contains only the still picture. So the first thing to do is to prepare all the photos/images that you are planning to put on the VideoCD and set VCDEasy to convert them into Mpeg Stills.

The following steps will be necessary in order to create your Mpeg Stills (Each step bellow correspond to one numbered red circle on the figure 15):

Step 1. Now start VCDEasy. On the VCDEasyBar select "Tools" and go to "Mpeg Stills" Page.

Check out the Mpeg Stills conversion settings:

Step 2. In "Mpeg Still Type" section choose "VCD 2.0", PAL, "High" resolution. American guys - select NTSC color system. Note: Once you create the VideoCD, if it doesn't work it means that probably your DVD player doesn't support "High" resolution Mpeg Stills - you should try then with "Low" resolution.

Step 3. Make sure the "Resize Filter" is set to "Spline". Spline algorithm gives the best result for most of the pictures.

Step 4. Make sure that the "TV Aspect Ratio Correction" checkbox is selected; otherwise your pictures may appear with some distortion on the TV. Depending on you TV screen type select 4/3 or 16/9.

Step 5. Set up the TV cropping. We have already talked about that in the beginning of this guide (see figure 3). Set a value, which is the most appropriate for your TV set. The most frequent values are between 3% and 5%. If you don't like the default black background color, you can change it.

Step 6. Make sure the "Mpeg Size (Quality)" is set to its Maximum (220kb).

Step 7. Check the "Delete Temporary Files" and "On error, continue without asking" checkboxes.

Now you are ready to generate the MPEG Stills:

Step 8. Make sure the "Include Subfolders" checkbox is checked. Since you are going to convert a lot of pictures (in a "Batch" mode) click on the "Folder" button and select your main folder "New_VCD" (the one that contains all 4 menu-subfolders and menu.jpg file). VCDEasy will detect all pictures in this folder and in all subfolders and will generate automatically all Mpeg Stills.

Once the job is done, you'll get a message:

If you want to generate an additional single MPEG Still file, don't use the "Folder" button. In that case to select s single file use the Input Image's "Browse" button (step 9 on the figure 15 above). This time, since you are converting only one single picture you have to press the "Generate" button (step 10 on the figure 15 above) in order to produce the Mpeg Still.

At the end of this phase you should finish with all of your MPEG Stills ready. In our example it means all image files in the 4 folders (that correspond to a menu item) plus the main menu picture file. Browse this folders to verify the presence of the MPEG Still files - the generated files have the same filename with different extension: "*.mpg".

Adding the Files to the VideoCD

Go back to VCDEasy's "Main" screen.

The following steps will be necessary in order to add your still pictures (Each step bellow correspond to one numbered red circle on the figure 18):

Step 2. Make sure to check your CD Writer setting. The "Burn" checkbox must be checked. If instead of CD-RW media you use an ordinary CD-R the "Simulate" checkbox must be also checked. Finally verify your ASPI settings. By default VCDEasy uses Adaptec (if is installed on your machine). Some VCDEasy users have reported troubles while burning; a typical example of such problem is the "Buffer Underrun" error. Usually this problem can be resolved by changing the ASPI setting. If you have software like "Nero Burning Rom" you can set VCDEasy to use Nero's ASPI. This change usually resolves the problem. Personally I prefer Nero ASPI.

Step 3. Type a label for you CD (it will appear in the file explorer when you read the VideoCD on a PC).

Step 4. VCDEasy requires some space on the disk to save the CD "image" before it is burned. Select a drive, which has enough disk space.

Step 5. Add your still pictures (Mpeg Stills) using the "Add files" button. First select the "menu.mpg" file, then add files from the 4 subfolders (you'll have to do this operation for each subfolder, when you click on "Add files", enter in the given folder and select all files). Start with the first folder and end with the last one (the fourth) otherwize you'll have to rearrange manually the file order.

Step 6. Verify the presence and the order of the still pictures. You can drag and move files in this list to change their order of appearance if you have to.

Setting Some VideoCD options

Now go to VCDEasy's "Options" screen.

Step1. Set the "Time to wait after each Sequence/Segment by default". This is the display duration time (in seconds) of each still picture, when you play the VideoCD. This value applies to all pictures, later (in the "Interactivity" screen) you can manually override it for some particular pictures. Usually here I put 10 seconds, don't forget that you can skip a picture and go to the next one even before the end of these 10 seconds - you have to press the "Next" button.

Storing The Picture Originals (Optional)

It is a good practice to store the picture original files on the same VideoCD. You can use them later to create another VCD, to print some of them on photopaper or just to watch them on a PC with a photo viewing software such as ACDSee. For accessing the files on a PC you'll only have to put the VideoCD on you computer's CD/DVD reader drive and browse the CD with the File Explorer. In the "ISO Files" screen you can tell VCDEasy how to store your originals:

Step 1. Create a new folder "Pictures" on the VideoCD - type the name and hit the "Create" button.

Step 2. VCDEasy creates the new folder and it appears in the tree on the screen. Click on the folder name to make it active.

Step 3. Now you can add your original files (Jpeg or any other image format) using the "Add Files" button. As alternative you can use Drag and Drop to add your picture files.

Step 4. VCDEasy shows you the Approximate CD size - but be careful - this is only the size of the files that you have added, to see the Total CD size - go to the "Main" screen.

Set Up Interactivity

This is a VERY important stage. Here you are going to set up the interactivity of your main menu. You are going to explain to VCDEasy how to set up the VideoCD, so that the "menu.mpg" picture acts as a real menu!

If you are tired of reading this guide - it is a good moment to have a couple of minutes break - take a hot cup of coffee :)

I will not explain here every feature of VCDEasy's "Interactivity" screen, which is really powerful and allows you to make a lot of things. I will concentrate on the Step-by-Step setup of the VideoCDs menu.

VCDEasy has set up for you a "default" Interactivity behavior of your VideoCD. This default behavior can be summarized easily - when you press "Next" - the player shows the next picture (if it is the last, the VCD just ends), when you press "Previous" the player shows the previous picture. If you don't press any key the "Next" picture is automatically displayed after 10 seconds. We can use this default behavior and override it only for a few "Key" pictures - the "Menu" picture and each picture that has "FIRST" or "LAST" in it's title (now you understand why we have renamed the first and the last picture in each subfolder).

Setting the "Menu" Picture behavior

When the user loads the Still Picture VideoCD with Menu on his home player the first picture that must appear has to be the menu picture. Is has to be played "forever" - actually until the user makes a choice and hits button "1", "2","3" or "4" on the remote control.

Step 1. Choose "Segment-0001-menu.mpg" as playing item.

Step 2. Select the "Wait Infinite" option.

Step 3. Override the default setting for the numeric keys - check the "Overwrite this default assignment" checkbox.

Step 4. Setup manually the picture file that has to be displayed once the user presses the "1" key on his remote control's keypad. Click in the corresponding cell - a drop down list of all picture files appears - select the one that ends with "_1_FIRST" in its name. Repeat the same procedure for the other keys (2, 3 and 4). As a result in our particular example the picture list is:

Setting the behavior of each "First" picture

What is the "first" picture - it is simply the first picture that will appear on the screen after the user has selected one of the 4 items in the menu. For example if the user selects "Weekend in Villier-sur-Mer" the first picture that will appear is "Img_0819". One particular setting that overrides the default interactivity of each "first" picture has to be done - for each "first" picture the "Previous" has to be set to "menu.mpg":

Step 1. Select one of your images that has "FIRST" in its title as Play Item (just pick up the first one).

Step 2. Override the default "Previous" setting - set "Segment-0001 - menu.mpg" as previous.

Step 3. In order to apply this setting to all "FIRST" pictures click to the "..." button near the "Previous" drop down list (marked as number 3 on the figure 23 above). Apply the same settings to all other "FIRST" picture files (hold the Ctrl key to make multiple selections):

Setting the behavior of each "Last" picture

The last thing to do in the "Interactivity" screen is to set up the behaviour for each "Last" picture (the same logic as for the "First" pictures):

Step 1. Select one of your images that has "LAST" in its title as Play Item (just pick up the first one).

Step 2. Override the default "then on timeout" setting - set "Segment-0001 - menu.mpg".

Step 3. In order to apply this setting to all "LAST" pictures click to the "..." button near the "then on timeout" drop down list (marked as number 3 on the figure 25 above). Apply the same settings to the other "LAST" picture files (Hold the Ctrl key to make multiple selections).

Step 4. Override the default "Next" setting - set "Segment-0001 - menu.mpg" as next.

Step 5. In order to apply this setting to all "LAST" pictures click to the "..." button near the "Next" drop down list (marked as number 5 on the figure 25 above). Apply the same settings to the other "LAST" picture files (In fact the selection is still active from step 3, just hit OK).

Burn The CD

Now all that you have to do is to click on the "Go" button on the bottom right part of the window. VCDEasy starts its work and gives you full status information via the Log. You'll have to wait patiently the for the CD burning. At the end you'll get the following message box:

The End

That's all folks! I hope it was useful for you. Now you understand the real power of this wonderful peace of software called VCDEasy! I am sure that you are going to do now some great stuff with your digital photos collection...

Check out soon for the Part 2 of this guide which will explain to the VCDEasy advanced users how to do some really great VideoCDs combined with some video, sound and still pictures. You'll learn to make animated menus with small video thumbnails, or moving menu items.

If you have any intelligent questions or useful comments about this guide you can write me to "chivi_g@noos.fr"

Copyright © 2003 by Chivi, All rights reserved. Distribution and duplication of content is strictly prohibited without authorization.