Page 3 of 3: How to use MenuShrink to save MB of space

  • - By clicking the log button, you can view the output of the shrink. This contains useful information if you’re interested in the gory details! Warnings are marked in green text, while errors are marked in red text.

  • - If you goof up, don’t worry. Just click Restore Backup and all will be back as it was in a flash. You can do this at any time, even after the program has been closed and re-opened.

  • - In the Preview-Select mode, after you click Process, a preview dialog pops up for each menu cell that has buttons and has more than a couple images in it. This is to minimize the number of cells for which you need to manually select the frame. However, if you selected “Preview all cells” in the advanced options panel, even cells without buttons will be opened in the preview.

    The preview panel will be slightly different depending on whether the cell you’re previewing should normally be killed (because it’s a menu intro/outro and has no buttons, or only has NOP commands etc) or it’s a normal menu cell.

    Here’s an example of a normal menu cell:



    You can use the slider and the arrows to select which image you would like to use for this menu.
    Clicking Shrink (or hitting Return) will validate the selection and let MenuShrink process the next cell. If you click Keep, the cell will not be shrunk and will remain animated (unprocessed). This is useful if you want to keep part of your menus animated, but shrink other parts to still menus. The size of the cell is indicated in the title bar (15.20 MB in this example) so you can decide whether or not it’s worth it to keep the cell.
    If you click Abort, processing stops right here. If you click Auto, you will no longer be prompted to select the image for menus in the current Video TitleSet. In other words, if you were processing VTS 1 and you click Auto, the frame selection dialog will not open until VTS 2 is processed. This is useful if you just want to manually select the frame for a specific menu for which the default didn't’t work well. Once the frame is selected, click Auto to get the default frames for the rest of the menus in that VTS (and Auto again for other VTS if needed). The keyboard shortcut for Auto is the A key.

    MenuShrink remembers which frames you selected manually. When you close MenuShrink, it will remember the selected I-frames of the last DVD you processed manually, so if you reload that DVD (for example using the shortcut O), your selections will show by default in the preview dialog. In this case, when you click Auto, your previous selections will be used, (or the default slider selection if you didn't’t select any frames).

    Note: If you don’t click “Preview Select” in the advanced options panel, you get the default frames selected by the advanced options frame slider, not the frames you might have selected in a previous Preview-selection.

    The preview dialog also offers a Kill option for advanced users. If you know that a specific cell is not a useful menu and that you can safely discard it, you can press CTRL-K. MenuShrink will ask you to confirm and then strip the audio from the cell, shrink it, and attempt to skip its playback, as it normally does for any cell that does not have buttons. Be careful though! If you kill a “good” menu by mistake, the DVD will not play normally. (You can always check that with the soft player button and of course, restore backup if you make a mistake).

    Here’s an example of the preview panel for a menu intro:




    As you can see, the button names have changed: For these types of cells, you have the option to kill the cell (the default option, what would have happened if you had not selected to preview all cells), or to keep it animated. In both cases, the slider is useless, except to let you see what’s in the menu. The preview allows you to also keep animated menu intros/outros, or other videos that might have been put in the menu domain (interviews for example) and would normally have been killed by MenuShrink in automatic mode.

 

 


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