This concise tutorial which is tended to express useful tips for movie menu DIY is provided by Brian Harbaugh. Much appreciation for his effort. The official and detailed movie menu DIY guide will come soon.
Movie DVD Maker provides dozens of stunning and holiday-style menu templates for dressing up DVD discs. And through changing the background image, music, disc title text, and playback mode, you could customize the menu to make personalized DVD movie enjoyment. With this amazing feature, burning DVD movies with Movie DVD Maker is not only DVD back-up but also DVD creation!
Note: The update is Life-time FREE for registered users!
This document is to create your own template with Sothink Movie DVD Maker. Creating your own templates, besides the ones that are already given, is a relatively easy thing to do. I use to use version 3.5 and it accepted new entries without problems with Windows XP. In my example I am using Windows 7. This can be done with any other version of Windows, but the paths to the directories may change.
In C:\Program Files(x86)\SourceTec\Sothink Movie DVD Maker\Templates (the directory where the program is placed) right click NEW and FOLDER and name it MINE. There MUST be 9 (nine) files created for the process to work. You may cut and paste from existing templates you pasted to Temp if needed. Size of files is important, names are not so important!
Nine files needed will be shown at Tab.1:
Tab.1 Files needed to be prepared
Background image |
jpg or png; size:720×480 |
|
Background audio |
mp3/wma/wav; 15 seconds—180 seconds long audio recommended. |
|
video.png |
Button border |
|
prev.png |
Pageup button background picture |
|
next.png |
Pagedown button background picture |
|
video.wmf |
Button highlight | The consistent color is recommended to be used in these three pictures. |
prev.wmf |
Pageup button highlight | |
next.wmf |
Pagedown button highlight | |
template.xml |
Copying the existing template.xml file is recommended. | |
The first file is by default is named background.jpg. It can be any jpeg picture you have, but the smaller the better. It will automatically stretch to fit the background menu. The bigger the jpeg, the less space for video quality! You can change the name in the DVD Menu section by changing BG image path to whatever you have your selected picture named, (flower.jpg). It still must be copied into this directory.
The second file is background.mp3. You also may want an mp3 to play during video selection. Once again size is important, but this file is not really necessary. This file is about 15-180 seconds in length at 128 kbps/44 kHz. The path can be also changed in DVD Menu BG audio.
The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth files are also not that important unless you are planning to have multiple menu screens for your videos. They are next.png, next.wmf, prev.png, and prev.wmf. These files are basically just pictures to click on to go to the next screen or backtrack to the previous screen.
These can be created with Microsoft Paint or copied from other templates if you like the pictures. You may need a WMF editor.
The next two files are video.png and video.wmf. They are used to frame your file that you ADD and as a menu selector. They also can be created with Microsoft Paint or your favorite WMF editor. The size of these files will be discussed in the TEMPLATE.XML which is the most important part of your template creation which I reserved for last as it will be the most detailed.
TEMPLATE.XML has many parts and is the most important file. It can be created or modified from an existing template. The format is very important! Also all syntax must be used! Be careful not to remove any "<" or ">" or "/". Just change the numerical values between the double quotes. If you want to remove or add a button section, keep a blank line between them. I am using the “Classic Black” xml as an example. The first line MUST be:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
to work with the program.
The second line is:
<menu id="menu" name="Classic Black" background_image="background.jpg" background_audio="background.mp3" title_text="My DVD" title_font="Arial" title_font_size="48" title_color="$FFFFFF" title_x="70" title_y="40" duration="30">
where "menu id= menu" what is recognized by the program and should NOT be changed. The second part would be, in my example named, name= “MINE”. Also if you copied your picture into this directory you would have to change it to the background_image=name or rename your picture to background.jpg and the same with the audio. The rest can be changed in the DVD Menu section by double clicking on Font but the line must have a default value! The title “My DVD” can be changed in the DVD Menu along with all the fonts and sizes. The title_x= and title_y= value is where you want the “My DVD” to appear. X would be side to side placement and y would be top to bottom placement. Duration is how long the mp3 will play in seconds before restarting. All these parameters still must have a default starting value!
The next line is very very important! It is:
<buttons id="buttons" text_align="center" text_color="$FFFFFF" font="Arial" font_size="14" >
Buttons are defined below, which will be described in a moment, the text _align=”center” will center any text from the DVD Menu Button text below your inserted video. You can also use left or right if you prefer. Text_color, font, and font_size can also be changed here from the program but default values must be supplied.
After a blank line the "button" will be how many different files you will add to your menu before going to the "next screen". After each "button" a blank line should be added. For example if you look at the Album template, you will see four "button" areas. If you look at Classic Black, you will see six button areas.
Each of the "button"s will have four lines with four parameters:
x0= the side to side start position of the file you add
y0= the top to bottom start position of the file you add
w0= the width of the file added
h0= the height of the file added
x1= the side to side start position of the frame surrounding your file that was added
y1= the top to bottom start position of the frame surrounding your file that was added
w1= the width of the frame
h1= the hieight of the frame
x2= the side to side start position of the highlight frame to select the file to play
y2= the top to bottom start position of the highlight frame to select the file to play
w2= the width of the highlight frame
h2= the height of the highlight frame
x3= the button text side to side start position, if any, added from the program
y3= the button text top to bottom start position, if any, added from the program
w3= the width of the button text
h3= the height of the button text
The remaing two "button"s are the previous and next buttons respectively that appear if you add more files than the number of buttons from above, Album would have four and if you add another file, you will see the next icon appear and if you click on it, it will change to another blank area where you can add more files and you will see prev.
Once again, the first one is "previous", the following one is "next"
x0= the side to side position where you want the prev.png or next.png to appear
y0= the top to bottom position where you want the prev.png or next.png to appear
w0= the width of the .png
h0= the height of the .png
x2= the side to side position of the select highlight
y2= the top to bottom position of the select highlight
w2= the width position of the select highlight
h2= the height position of the select highlight
The last line of your xml must be:
</menu>
Start your program and see if menu name appears. You should not have any problem. At this point you can go to your Temp directory and cut and paste all templates back into your Templates directory and after you restart the program, you will have all templates available for use.
Users can refer to more DVD movie menu templates. DIY your movie menu with this Free DVD Creator--Sothink DVD Movie Maker.
