DVD Author 3: Changing Bullet Styles in Custom Audio/Subtitle Menu Pages

As you may know, TMPGEnc DVD Author 3 with DivX Authoring allows you to create your own custom DVD menu. If you select to have multiple audio tracks and/or subtitles, an Audio/Subtitle menu page will be created in your DVD menu. Like any other menu page, the Audio/Subtitle page can be almost fully edited to your liking. But there's something on the Audio/Subtitle page that you can't quite get rid of, even if you wanted to: the red, square bullets for the audio track and/or subtitle lists which show which audio/subtitle track is selected.

You may find these red squares a bit garish, ugly, or even unnecessary, so how can you alter them? You can't outright delete them, but you can make them "disappear" or change them to a different image.

To get started, simply select the red square you want to change by clicking on it, then click on the Menu Item Settings button (or you can use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Enter). This will open up the Menu Item Editor.

Within the Menu Item Editor window, you have a couple of options. You can change the red box to a different image by clicking on the File Browser button and selecting an image on your computer. You can use still images, photoshop files, or even movie files. You can't use .gif files however, so no animated .gifs.

If you would rather not see any image at all, you can go to the Effects tab in the Menu Item Editor and enable the Opacity effect. You can then use the slider to set the opacity value to 0, making the button completely transparent.

So here's the outcome of my particular example:

As you can see, I've changed the opacity of the bullets for "Audio 2" and "None" to a value of 0, making them appear nonexistent. For the "Audio 1" and "Subtitles1" options, I changed the bullets to completely different images.

And finally, here's how the bullets will appear when played in a DVD player as shown in the Simulation stage.

Only the options selected will have a bullet appear next to it so you can tell which option is going to be used for playback. That means only one bullet will appear at a time for each set of Audio or Subtitle options. Please note that if you make all of the bullets completely transparent, it may be difficult to tell which audio and/or subtitle track is selected.

This tip can also be applied to pretty much any menu item that can't be deleted, however text menu items can only be replaced by other text and not images.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of TMPG Labs! Please join us again next time for more tips!