larryapple's blog

Adobe's marketing message about using Encore to produce DVD, Flash, and Blu-ray from the same project is misleading. In fact, trying to do Blu-ray as if it were DVD just makes things more difficult, and exposes the many bugs that have plagued Encore Blu-ray output from its inception with CS3 to CS5.5 today.

Blu-ray has two modes of menu creation and navigation authoring - Movie Mode (HDMV) and BD-J (Java).

Movie Mode uses a virtual instruction set that is similar to computer assembly languages, ties in directly to the player status registers, and has 4,096 general purpose registers to hold information. (DVD is similar in concept, but has only 16 registers).

Movie mode controls its own private interactive 8-bit graphics layer (IG stream) which is laid on top of the primary and secondary video streams.

When you use traditional Motion Menus in Encore for Blu-ray, you are not only making your project look old-fashioned, but you are doubling or tripling the amount of work in making your menus if you also do popup menus. Popup menus can be designed to look nice over almost any content, as we demonstrate in our tutorials.