Hey Nick,

how's a bout some answers huh!

1. using the onEnd event and pointing it to itself will always go to black. It would be true of this scenario in any BD authoring environment not just DSA. The reason being that the onEnd event occurs truly when the playlist has ended... so at that point the video buffers have been emptied and playback basically halted, so there's nothing to display. The way around this is to create a means for looping where you can catch it before it actually reaches the end of the title/playlist. You can add a chapter mark, for example, 1 second before the end of the title. you can then assign a "Play Chapter" action to that chapter that Plays the beginning of the title again. By doing this you will avoid going to black. Depending on the degree of seemless you require, you may need to build in a 1 second hold to the end of your video that way it appears that the whole video completed, but you have that added 1 seconds to put a chapter and use it to trap on and send back to the beginning.

2. I'll do my best to describe this, but read it and if you somethings not clear let me know and I'll try and explain that part better.

Step 1
First you need to create an "Advanced Parameter" to store a random number in. The last tab in the control panel under "disc settings" is "Advanced Parameter". on that tab, hit "New" and enter a name to reference this by (eg. 'randomPlay')

Step 2
Then go to a button in your menus that you want to do this random playback from. Lets start with generating a random number. in the action list for the "enter key" of your button:
- Add action "Random Number for Advanced Parameter" under the category of "system actions". You have some properties to define for this action. the first is a pulldown where you will select your 'randomPlay' APRM that we just created. the seed number should be anything you want (pick any number, 42 or 5676234, it shouldn't matter, just put a number). the maximum number for your scenario would actually be 9 (because 0 is included).
- Add action "Round Advanced Parameter". Select you 'randomPlay' APRM from the pull down. this should result in the your APRM storing an integer value between 0 and 9.

Step 3
right click on the "enter key" in the button tree that you just added the random number actions to and from the contextual menu, select "Add Condition".
- give your condition a name if you'd like (eg. playClip1)
- the control panel has two tabs in it, the condition you want to evaluate and then the actions tab is where you will define what to do when that condition is evaluated as true.
- for the condition, select your 'randomPlay' APRM form the pull down, leave the Operator as "=" and Compare With as '(Value)' then enter the number 0 in the Value field. Click "Save"
- switch to the actions tab and Add a "Play Chapter" action and set it to play your first of the clips you want to have available in the random selection

Step 4
Repeat Step 3 until you have created 10 conditions. each time incrementing the number entered in the Value field of the condition by 1 and in the action tab choosing the next of your clips.

Done!


Give it a go and respond back if you get stuck on anything.

cheers,
_scott

Hi again Scott,

In order to test setting up the APRM to generate numbers for a random play, I started a new test project with 6 tracks. I compiled and tested it as a straight (no random) play BD and everything worked fine (I just wanted to make sure that there's nothing wrong with the media files, compression etc). The trouble starts when I introduce the APRM... I followed your instructions which I figured would select one of the six tracks at random, play it and then return to wherever the track was programmed to go. As I need the random selection process to continue indefinitely, I applied the "Random Number for Advanced Parameter" and "Round Advanced Parameter" actions to the "end" of each random title and also added the six conditions to "end" of each title. (Bring on the "copy and paste" feature!!!)

Now when I go to compile the project, a few seconds into the process I get the dreaded red type warning:

"Dostudio Authoring Edition is having a hard time creating your interactive layer, please make sure you are running DSAE on a Windows XP machine. If you are running on an XP machine please send NetBlender the log file found in My Documents>Netblender>DSA>log.txt. Thank you."

I am running Windows XP (on a Mac Pro) using Bootcamp. I have burned quite a few test BDs with "conditions" and "actions" and all has worked fine, in fact, if I delete the titles with the references to the APRM and the APRM itself, the warning goes away and the thing compiles fine.

When I first started to get this warning I sent the log file to Owen, who said he'd passed it on to an engineer. I'm going to send him this one too as I figure at least the APRM set up will be correct, whereas my first attempt was missing the "Round AP" action.

Any ideas?

Nick

Hey guys, make sure you are using numbers for the value of your APRMS. I had a similar issue using text for the values (yes/no) and once I changed the values to numbers it worked correctly.

-Luke

Could this be a solution to my question above of how to get a series of Titles to either loop or play at random?...

Create an APRM. Each of the six "loop" buttons has a Condition and Action that IDs the Title and allocates a number to the Title and then gives the APRM a Value. i.e. Button 01 would have Condition: if this is Title 1/Action: set APRM to 0 and Button 02 would have Condition: if this is Button 2/Action: set APRM to 1 etc etc.

Title 01 would have a Condition and Action at the end (a 2nd Chapter) that would say Condition: if APRM is 0/action play Chapter 1, Title 01 and Title 02's would be Condition: if APRM is 1/Action: play Chapter 1, Title 2 etc etc. That seems to take care of the looping.

The random play Button would have the following Actions: "Random Number for Advanced Parameter" (from 0 to 5) and "Round AP" then add 10 to the APRM (I'm on my laptop, so can't see the exact wording, but seem to remember you can do things like add, subtract and multiply) so I would then end up with possible APRM numbers of 10, 11, 12, 13 or 14. A list of Conditions and Actions would tell an APRM Value of 10 to play Title 1, 11 to play Tile 2 etc etc

All titles would have a Condition and Action at that 2nd Chapter that would say Condition: if APRM is > 4, run that whole random play button sequence again.

This is all a little foreign to me, but it sounds logical. I'm not sure where the Round Advanced Parameter should come - before or after you add to the Random Number, so if anyone has thoughts, a better way etc, please feel free to correct this. Also, I still can't figure out a way to prevent the random process from repeating a Title until all Titles have played - now my head's gone fuzzy!

Thanks!

Nick

Not that my way is the right way... but here's how I would deal with your scenario.

have a APRM for "randomMode". your six buttons that play the individual loops would set this APRM to 0/false... the 7th button would set it to 1/true.

at the end of each of your six pieces of video you put a much simpler condition set of if ramdomMode = false then play itself again. if randomMode = true then play 'dummyPostCommand" title.

that "dummyPostCommand" title you'd fill with like a 5 second black slug of video... but in the start command of the title you'd fill it with all your random logic of choosing a random number and jumping to the random video. because you put it as the start actions, it will basically jump as soon as it can, so you wouldn't ever see the black slug play out. the advantage here is that you centralize al your random code into one place rather than having to repeat it all over the place. so the 7th button would set the randomMode APRM to true and jump to the dummyPostCommand title. this way the button and all 6 titles are using the exact same set of conditions to evaluate on so maintaining/updating is much easier.

to take it a step further, for your random without repeating... set up an additional 6 APRMs for "alreadyPlayed1", "alreadyPlayed2", etc. somewhere at the start of the disc, initialize all those to 0/false. in the dummyPostCommand set up a condition to check if all of those values are now 1/true, and if so setup actions to turn them all back to 0/false. Then do your random conditions as you already have them, but add to each of them a second "if" testing that value of it's respective alreadyPlayed APRM. if that's the right random number it's alreadyPlayed APRM is still 0/false then you know you have a success match. in the actions before you jump to that title, set the respective alreadyPlayed APRM to 1/true.

lastly add a chapter to dummyPostCommand title at like 12 frames in in the actions for it tell it to play itself again from the beginning. I haven't tested this part, but it should make all the stuff you have on the start action re-execute. if it doesn't rather than using start, put it all on a chapter at frame 0. This way if you picked a random number, but it happened to be one that was already played, the dummyPostCommand will loop on itself making it re-pick a new number and trying again and again till it has success. once they are all true, they all become reset and it all starts over again.

again, if an aspect of that is not clear, just ask and I'll try to describe it further.

_scott

Hi John,

Sometimes if the chapter point is not on an I-Frame the event will not fire reliably on certain players. Would you be able to move the 2nd chapter's time code up or down by a few frames, or if you know where the I-Frame is to place the chapter on the I-Frame?

Also which version of DSA are you using? You can find out by click on the About file menu item.

Cheers,

Denny

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NetBlender DoStudio Blu-ray Team - DSA - http://dostudio.netblender.com

Hi John,

Unfortunately are not 100% sure the H.264 streams from Procoder are 100% compliant. Would you be able to contact our sales team (sales at netblender dot com), they can
work with you to verify the streams.

Cheers,

Denny

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NetBlender DoStudio Blu-ray Team - DSA - http://dostudio.netblender.com