The Opus DVD publication type allows an Opus publication to be published to a format that can be used to create DVD Video discs that can be played on standard DVD players, not just on personal computers which use DVD Rom disks or vCD disks.
Opus provides a great deal more interactivity than a standard DVD Video and so little of the functionality of Opus is provided. Customisation of hotspots is limited and they cannot be animated. Nor is Opus intended to provide a replacement for a dedicated DVD-authoring tool. It provides the opportunity to use your existing material and a familiar tool to generate simple publications with a straightforward menus and front ends but this opens a vast range of untapped opportunities to produce DVD from non-video or combined materials including animated DVD books, training materials and promotional pieces.
Opus provides three types of page in DVD publications which you can select when you add a new page to your publication:
Menu pages – allow hotspots and enable you to launch other pages.
Normal pages – these are standard Opus pages which can contain text, images, sound etc and can have animation. They cannot include interactivity but can be linked by automatically moving onto the next page using the Display for option on the General tab. When published these pages will be exported as video. If you wish to include interactive pages you need to use the Mouse and Keyboard Recorder to record your activity to video (see below) and publish that.
Video pages – these pages simply display video files full screen and are the easiest way to add third party material including that created by the mouse and keyboard recorder in Opus.
The files produced by the publish process are all that is required to create a DVD. The only additional step is to burn those files to a DVD using any suitable burning application.
Browsers
DocView
QuickTime VR
Multiple windows or any functions that invoke extra windows (such as bookmarks or the publication search)
Opus uses Chapters differently to DVD and you cannot set DVD chapter points from within Opus. You can produce a separate video for each chapter and provide menu buttons to run these individual chapters if you wish.
To help make DVDs, Opus also provides a mouse & keyboard recording facility. This allows the author to record their progress through a publication during a preview and then play that recording back at publish time, thus creating a video of the publication "in use".
DVD Video publishing encodes your video to MPEG2 format. If you subsequently wish to sell the DVD Video as a commercial product available for retail sale you need to arrange to pay a royalty for encoding MPEG. Please see www.mpegla.com for more information.
DVD Video Compatibility Issues