Rivergate Software Inc. - makers of DVDAfterEdit

Hi David,

As Larry says, the problem you have is a limitation of DVDSP. Briefly, to overcome it with DVDAfterEdit, you would:

• Author as normal in DVDSP, but not add any commands to the "buttons over video" that you add
• Create scripts to respond the the GPRM values you intend to set using DVDAE
• Open in DVDAE and add the button commands to set the GPRMs
• The scripts created in DVDSP based on the values you set via commands added in DVDAE will now work

There are a few factors which might complicate things:

• A button can only be activated once per cell (every time you create a button marker in DVDSP you create a cell to contain it). For the application you've described I don't think this will be a problem
• You can only have one command per button. You can have certain limited types of more complicated composite commands, allowing you to set a GPRM, button, and optionally link to somewhere else, but it sounds as if all you need is something like Set GPRM 2 = 3, for example ?

As Larry says you can experiment with the demo program - if you follow the Guided Tour you will find that DVDSP tracks are contained in a VTS and that button commands are contained in the navpacks of the video stream within that VTS. If you change the button commands of one navpack to what you want, you can then copy those commands and paste them to all the navpacks in a cell by selecting the cell and choosing "Edit > Paste Deeply Into".

The last thing to mention is that what DVDSP calls GPRM 0 - 7 are actually the registers r8 to r15. So, GPRM 0 is r8, GPRM 1 is r9, and so on. So if you want to display info in DVDSP based on what it calls GPRM 1, you should use the command Set GPRM r9 = 0 in DVDAE, for example.

There is a more detailed discussion of the ideas I've outlined here in my article Sharing GPRM registers between DVDAfterEdit and your authoring application - it was written back in the days of DVDSP v2, but is equally appicable to the new version.

I hope all that makes sense and is useful, please ask if you need any further info or help,

Cheers,

Ian