EASTER EGG (hidden button)

Create 2 chapters point 5 seconds apart and make them button highlight markers. Create an overlay to insert into your subtitle track and make the buttons invisible. Determine which button will be active with 3 down strokes of your remote and make that button accessible to what ever track or menu you desire.

This can be achieved by setting a timeout on the menu. You're going to need to be creative depending on the situation, because there are several ways to do it. I'm assuming you don't mean "press down three times within the first five seconds", otherwise you could have the menu timeout to itself after five seconds, and simply have your target button be an auto-activating button that is the third of three hidden buttons that are navigated to by pressing "down". The only problem with this is that the highlight will jump back to the default button every five seconds, although of course if there's only one button it'll just blink every five seconds and there may be a slight pause.

Speaking of which, DVD easter eggs usually have a "home button", which is where you start from. You can certainly set up each button to activate the egg if the viewer presses "down" three times, but that's kind of overkill. I'd say pick a button you want to "launch" your egg from, then create an invisible button that auto-activates to an identical menu that times out after five seconds. Then all you have to do is set up the buttons so that if the viewer moves anywhere else it'll jump back to the "real" menu and highlight the appropriate button, or if they continue pressing down two more times before the menu times out, it jumps to your egg content.

It's really not something for a novice, but if you must do it, those are the steps you need to take. Perhaps modifying the method of uncovering the egg might be the best course of action. Good luck!

Unfortunately the flaw in setting chapter points for the button is that it's a specific five seconds of time, and if the button is invisible, the viewer has no cue as to when to start pressing down. Nice try, though.

Nice question - good challenge!

OK, here's one way you could do it by scripting... I wouldn't try it with time outs or chapter points, because you don't get a reliable counter that way.

First off, set up a script which sets GPRM0 to be a counter, move a value of 0 into that counter and exit the script (which will be a pre-script when we use it):

GPRM Mode GPRM0 to Counter
mov GPRM0, 0
Exit Prescript

Now, attach that to your menu with the button on that needs to be activated.

For the button which has to be activated within five seconds, set it to first go to a script which checks the value in GPRM0. If it is equal to or less than 5, the target will play:

Jump Trackname If(GPRM0 <= 5)
Jump menu2

Where Trackname' is the intended target if the button is activated in time.

On menu 2 you can either make a duplicate of menu 1 without the hidden feature, or you can give a message and send them back to menu 1. When you arrive at menu 1 the counter will reset to zero and the user will have another five seconds to get the button activated.

GPRM counters in DVDSP increment by 1 second at a time when activated. Setting a counter into a pre-script means that the counter will start as soon as the menu is called.


For what it's worth, five seconds is very short. If your user has to first take in what the menu is doing, then navigate to a 'start' button, then press 'down' three times - it's a big ask!

You will also need to set the menu navigation up carefully, making sure that the navigation from the 'start' button goes to a stack of hidden buttons, and that navigation from these only goes to the target if the down arrow is used. Any other direction should take you back out to a visible menu button, IMO.

You can stack the hidden buttons underneath a visible one to prevent computer users 'mousing' over them, but remember the order of the stack is the last button drawn goes on top of the others by default. Therefore you need to start off with the last button in the stack OR alter the order of the button arrangements using the 'arrange' feature in the menu editor.

Its going to be a challenge for you (or anyone) to get this right, but it sounds cool to do!

Hope this helps 🙂

Another nice try but a bit Rube Golberg, old chap. You're still limiting the timeframe to the first five seconds of the menu, which is probably not what the OP wanted. In Flash and many other programming languages, you can detect three rapid keypresses and make that trigger an event, and I think that's where the OP is coming from. It's just not that easy in the DVD world, but I've tried to explain a way to "trap" (the programming term) keypresses and branch off to a new menu to check for more, and it seems to me the OP would like more flexibility in the timeframe for activating the egg than just the first five seconds of the menu.

yeah - you could be right... let's see what the OP makes of it.

I didn't think it was too complex really - a couple of simple scripts, one to be a counter which just ticks away in the background, and another to catch the value when a button is activated. You can set the appropriate value in the second script to be whatever - it doesn't rely on auto-activating buttons or anything, and seemed the cleanest way to achieve it... providing of course the count down (or rather, count up) is intended to start when the menu appears.

If you set the first button in the sequence after the start button to be auto activating, and make the target the counter script, the count will begin right at the point the down arrow is first pressed. If the script then targets the next button in the sequence (i.e. the second 'down' arrow) then the counter can be triggered from the moment the user first starts the sequence and not from when the menu appears... the user has five seconds to activate the button after the third down arrow press...all pretty simple stuff, IMO 🙂

What I meant by "Rube Goldberg" was that you can set a menu to timeout after five seconds instead of going "okay, we have our three keypresses, now how quick was that? Under five seconds, show 'em the egg; over five seconds, nada." Much better to wait for the first button press, then give the viewer five seconds (or 4.5 if you prefer) to make the next two, otherwise the menu times out and goes back to the "real" menu. If you are going to limit it to being just the first five seconds of the menu, you don't even need the second menu.

We can wait for a clarification from the OP, but as she's marked the question "answered" she either got what she was looking for or simply gave up.

Oh, and I'm not really guessing on this, it's how the pros do it. Still, different strokes for different folks I guess.

As ever, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Certainly using branching menus is pretty much going to get the result, but so will setting a counter as a button action! I would definitely want to set the five seconds from when the user begins the button sequence, myself - using only five seconds from the beginning of a menu is, as you suggest, going to be tough on the viewer.

Like anything, it comes down to choice, experiences and need. I can see how your time outs will work, but I'd probably look for the scripting route, personally.

It's a good challenge to try, whichever way is used... be it by pro's or not. I would have thought that Scenarist (and other high end authoring tools) with the access it has to all the GPRMs would have used a scripted solution, but you can never tell for sure without dissecting the disc. It all depends on the author, I guess.

Well now you're getting closer to the solution. In theory, using the first of three buttons to set a counter may work, but you still have to get to the end result (the second and third buttons) and then compare to see if they were pressed within five seconds. That is basically doing it backwards. As I said, something like that is typically done by opening up a window of time and if nothing happens, things move on as usual. What you're suggesting depends on something happening first (pressing down three times), then checking to see if it was done within the time constraint.

People wonder why I get so frustrated here, and it's chiefly because every time I provide an answer to a problem and point out where other proposals fail, the standard reply is "well, there's always different ways of doing things". You can insert the DVD into the player with your buttcheeks if you want, but that's not how it's done, now is it?

Thanks PDTV, you have an excellent way with words.

In actual fact you have described a solution that uses a menu time out, and pointed out the short falls of that. I have described an alternative solution that uses scripts. I acknowledge there are some points to consider with that too.

Both systems will work, both will achieve what the OP originally (very briefly) described.

Neither is more right than the other, both have merits, either will work. I see no point in continuing to debate this one, and no reason for you to get so frustrated. This is a learning process for a lot of folk, and it is as well to point out alternatives when there are some to look at. You are obviously an accomplished author, but not everyone here is... I'm not convinced any one of us would want to try your rear-end method of loading a disc, although I would bet money that not everyone loads their DVDs into a player in the same way that you do.

As ever, there is always more than one answer...

Well, I'll leave you with one final thought. I would hazard a guess that anyone asking a question here in this forum is looking for an efficient way of achieving the desired result. All I'm saying is that if you're going about things backwards, it can certainly be said that you have arrived at what could only be described as an incorrect answer. I also pointed out that my solution is not only a way that this could be done, but that it's THE way it's done on major releases, but that's been ignored.

Edited by an Apple Discussions Host

Do you want this button in a menu or on a track?

You can have hidden buttons on a menu but I don't think you can control the time factor (5 seconds).

If you make your menu a track you can follow the instructions above.