Note: This tutorial is still rather incomplete and vague. It will be rewritten some time in the future, and maybe beefed up with some screenshots. Hopefully it can still give a rough idea of authoring SVCD discs using Philips SVCD Designer and Philips SVCD Toolset.
An SVCD disc consists of tracks (just like any other CD disc):
The general idea is that you put your payload - i.e. the actual movie or video clip you want to deliver - in the sequence area (which practically means storing it as an MPEG track). (If you have several main video clips - say, a collection of music videos - you put each of them on a separate MPEG track, from Track 2 onwards.)
Everything else - such as menu backgrounds, still images, your company logo animation, start screen, copyright warning screen etc.- goes into the segment area (i.e. the ISO-9660 file system stored on Track 1).
A good rule of thumb is that segment area is so called because it is just a mixed bag of multimedia "segments" and not the actual "beef" of the production. The 'beef' of the production should be put in the sequence area.
Why do we need a separate "segment" area and a separate "sequence" area?
The user cannot access segment items while watching the disc in manual control mode (PBC). Separating the main content (i.e. sequence items) from the supportive content (segment items) is reasonable, since this way the author can control which items are actually visible to the user in the PBC mode and which aren't.
This is not a content protection system (since all the items can be easily read in a CD-ROM drive, anyway), but more like a user interface decision. For example, it is not very convenient for the user to have to wade through useless menu background animations while in the PBC mode.
What exactly is a "PBC mode"?
PBC (which is apparently short for playback control) is a standard manual control feature on any stand-alone SVCD player. Usually there is a button labeled "PBC" on the remote control. This button toggles whether the player respects the menu/playlist structure found on the disc, or if it lets the user select tracks to play manually.
While in manual mode, the SVCD player behaves much like an ordinary audio CD player. The user can simply push the numeric buttons on his remote control to freely select whichever video track he wants to play. He can also use the "|<<" and ">>|" buttons to skip tracks, "<<" and ">>" buttons to fast forward or rewind, the Play button to start playing the MPEG tracks in sequence and the Stop button to stop playing.
As recommended earlier, one should put all secondary and supportive material - even the MPEG clips that fall in this category - in the segment area (i.e. the Track 01 file system). This is because the player will completely hide Track 1 from the user. As all supplementary clips and images will be hidden, the user can only see the truly important clips - the actual content of the disc - in the manual control mode, instead of having to wade through all the corporate logos and menu background animations.
Note: While in manual control mode, the user will see Track 2 as Track 1, Track 3 as Track 2 and so on (i.e. the Track 1 is invisible). You should take this renumbering effect into account when designing the cover booklet for the disc.
Note #2: Put the MPEG video tracks on the disc in a sensible order, even if you primarily intend to use playlists and menus for controlling their playback order. While in manual control mode, the user will see them in whichever order they have actually been stored on the disc. (It should be possible to alter the track order in any decent authoring software.)
In order to create an SVCD disc in the Philips SVCD Designer, you should already have
Note: Still images - including the background images used for menus - can be stored either in the resolution 480x576 or 704x576. (For NTSC, these figures would be 480x480 and 704x480, respectively). Use 704 pixels; it looks much better. Also note that these modes do not use square pixels. For PAL users, it is handy to design still images and menus in 768x576 (which is a square-pixel 4:3 mode), then resample to 704x576 by using bilinear interpolation.
Now we'll get on the business. The basic workflow goes like this:
We start the authoring process with the SVCD Designer's Asset Pool. Asset Pool is a repository for all the multimedia content which we are (possibly) going to add on the disc.
Note: "Asset Pool" does not represent anything on a real SVCD disc we're about to create. There are no "Asset Pools" on SVCDs. Asset Pool is just a project management feature of the SVCD Designer - a kind of a "check list" in which you mark up your multimedia files ("assets", if you will) before you actually start adding them in the disc structure.
Open the Asset Pool window. Add all your still images, elementary MPEG audio streams and elementary MPEG video streams in the list.
While you're at it, also give them meaningful names. It will make things a lot easier later.
Next, open the Segment Item Editor and the Sequence Item Editor. You should also leave the Asset Pool window open.
Note: If these two editors were combined, they would serve the same function as the "Play Item" editor in Enreach I-Author for SuperVCD.
As the names suggest, these two editors are used to create Segment Items and Sequence Items. But what are Segment Items and Sequence Items?
An "item" is simply a piece of multimedia content that is to be included on the disc. Still images and MPEG clips will both be managed as "items" in SVCD Designer.
The key to using both Editors is mastering the "drag & drop" technique. You have your multimedia files already listed up in the Asset Pool window, remember? Now simply drag the elementary audio and video streams from the Asset Pool window and drop them on the audio/video tracks.in either Segment or Sequence Editor. All the assets dropped in the Segment Item Editor will, logically enough, be stored in the segment area of the disc (i.e. Track 01 file system). The assets dropped on Sequence Item Editor will be stored in the sequence area of the disc (i.e. as separate MPEG-2 video tracks), respectively.
As you could probably already have guessed by looking the audio/video tracks in the editor windows, these editors also let you define how the elementary audio and video streams will actually be multiplexed together into program streams. (At maximum, you can multiplex one video stream with two audio streams and four subtitle channels.) So if you have assets that must be multiplexed together, drag them in the same Editor, on separate tracks.
Give each of your Items a meaningful name. You can use the same names you already used in Asset Pool, if you want.
You have now defined.
Note: Asset Pool is simply an inventory in which you can keep track of your elementary multimedia files. It has nothing to do with the actual SVCD disc structure. No asset will automatically get from the Asset Pool window in the disc image. You must specifically designate each of your assets either as "segment items" or "sequence items" in order to actually add them into your SVCD image.
Next, you should open the Play List Editor. The idea is to create some playlists in which to put your freshly defined Segment/Sequence Items. (You may now close the Segment Editor, Sequence Editor and Asset Pool if you want.)
A play list defines a list of play items to be played sequentially, one after the other. A typical use for a playlist is creating a slide show. You can put a bunch of still images inside a playlist, and have them play back in a predefined order. On the other hand, you could create another playlist that would display exactly the same images in a different order, or yet another which would only play back a smaller subset of the images.
You can create practically as many playlists as you wish, and it is possible to reuse the same Segment/Sequence Items in them as many times you wish.
Then comes the part that might be somewhat difficult to grasp:
Playlists are not only used for sequental slide shows. They are used for all display purposes. You cannot display any Segment or Sequence Item on screen without first putting it on a playlist (or a selection list). Even if you only wanted to display a single Segment/Sequence Item, you must still create a "playlist" for it. (It is perfectly legal to define playlists that only contain a single Segment/Sequence Item.)
I know, it feels a little bit laborious to first define a still image in Asset Pool, then make it into a Segment Item, and finally create a dedicated playlist for it in order to actually view it on the screen, but these are the three steps you have to take if you intend to display it at all.
Give a meaningful name to all of your playlists. (You can use the same names you used for the play items.) Also be sure to set meaningful values for timeout and delay settings in each playlist.
The final step is to go to the Selection List Editor and define Selection Lists. Selection Lists are menus,.from which you can branch to either submenus (i.e. other Selection Lists) or playlists containing AV content)
Selection lists and playlists operate on equal level, in terms of designing the actual navigation on the disc.You can branch from a selection list to a playlist. You can also branch from a playlist to a selection list. You can even branch from a playlist to a playlist, or from a selection list to a selection list. The disc can made to start either with a playlist or a selection list. Both lists can have images or MPEG clips attached to them.
To make some sense, let's recap:
Iif you only intend to use a particular Item as a menu backdrop, you don't need to create a separate Playlist for it. Simply designate the Item as a backdrop for the Selection List.
The editor should be quite self-explanatory. The funny icons represent the buttons on the remote control . You assign functions to the numeric buttons by clicking the '+' icon. The other remote control buttons you can use for navigation are "Return", "Play", "Next", "Previous". There is also a timeout event which is activated after a predefined time period if the user does not do anything. See the online help, it is all explained there.
You define a menu by simply attaching Lists to the remote control buttons (i.e. when a button is pressed, the player jumps to the corresponding List). Again, remember to check out the timeout and delay settings. Also make sure that the correct return path is defined (i.e. if you branch to a particular Playlist, it shouldl return you back to the menu after it has played.) Beware; it is quite easy to author discs with a broken menu hierarchy / navigation system if you're careless.
Note: There is an "infinite" setting for the timeout function at the end of the drop-down list. Use it if you want to create a menu that stays on the screen forever (until the user makes a selection.)
Note: Neither the player nor the SVCD Designer will automatically create the menu screens for you. You must design all the menu screens as still images in a separate graphics application (such as Adobe Photoshop). Then add them into the project as Assets, make them into Segment Items and finally attach them to the corresponding Selection Lists as background images.
Now, you should go to the PSD Editor and assign the ID number "1" for the playlist or selection list that will start first when the disc is inserted into the player.
Note: This is a very important step. If there is no playlist with the ID number "1", the menu system will not start up at all when the disc is inserted. See the included PDF manual, section 5.3.7 for more information. Especially do so if you are creating volume sets consisting of multiple discs (such as a movie that does not fit on one disc).
Here you can define the volume name of the disc, the author/publisher information, whether it is a single disc or a part of a multi-disc set etc.
Finally save your project as a .dds file to an empty directory (Note: when creating the actual disc image, this is the directory where all the temporary files will be created as well.)
Start up SVCD Toolset.
Load the .dds file you just saved in the SVCD Designer and hit the "Create image" button.
If everything goes well, you'll soon have a .cue file in the same directory where you stored the .dds file and a corresponding .dat file in the DiscImage subdirectory.
If you don't already have a CD authoring software that would allow burning .cue/.dat files, use CDRWin.
If CDRWin does not support your recorder, get Fireburner.
If even Fireburner does not support your recorder, you can still use it to extract the individual raw track images from the .cue/.bin files and burn them in another application. Just remember that SVCD is an CD-ROM XA disc - use the proper Mode 2 sector format.
Note: Unless you have already noticed, both Philips SVCD Designer and Philips SVCD Toolset come complete with a PDF manual. You really ought to read it instead of wasting your time with a useless tutorial like this. :-)