"Colin Grant" wrote in message
...

You mention control over menu and scene control. As far as the letter is
concerned I can find no control whatsoever - Movie maker decides which
scenes to use and that is that! Or am I missing something?

Nice progs the MM and DVD Maker are - I'd rather have no scenes at all
than have to work with a selection that I cannot control. I suppose one
could use an external DVD authoring tool but I have not worked out how to
save anything other than a project or WMV file file in MM. Again, any
ideas?

Thanks
Colin
In XP, I typically do three things related to DVD production:

I use MM to edit school plays. I typically produce one high quality WMV file
per scene, and then assemble and burn these using MyDVD. MyDVD does a
reasonable job of button layout, button image selection, and button
labeling.

MyDVD does a lousy job of re-encoding the 480x480 TiVo .mpg files, so I use
TyTool to create a DVD file structure on the hard drive, and Nero to burn
the DVD. This allows me to bypass the re-encoding - but the menus TyTool
produces are not the best, plus Nero has become fat and bloated.

The other DVD tool I use is DVDburn.exe - from Microsoft - to burn ISO
images with minimal fuss.

In Vista, I was hoping that DVD Maker would simplify my life by being a
single tool that would do a good job of all the things I need to do. I saw
the note about automatic scene selection, but that did not kick in on the
Molto Mario project. I hope that it is a typo for automatic chapter
selection - the Molto Mario DVD has chapter marks every 5 minutes, which is
just perfect. As with my previous comments, I would prefer some direct
control - say chapter marks on cuts, every x minutes, or selected by hand.

My overall impression is that DVD Maker is trying to automate too much, and
unless they allow more control by the user, I'll still be using a mish mash
of other stuff on Vista.