Many DVD players can play MP3 format audio off a CD-ROM disk. Some can also do WMA format. Unfortunately, many cannot do the same with a DVD-ROM disk, and few have really good playlist features.
What I would like to see would be software that would take a collection of audio files and playlists, and produce a DVD which could be used in any standard player. This DVD would use the standard DVD interactive features to allow users to select tracks and playlists, and could either show song title/artist information or else show selected JPEG or other pictures.
Because video bandwidth requirements would be minimal, I would estimate that a single-layer DVD should be able to hold more audio than CD-ROM full of anything but the most highly-compressed MP3s. A double-layer DVD should of course be able to hold twice as much.-- supercat, May 19 2005 How to create an Audio-Only DVD in DVDLab Pro http://www.videohel...topic.php?p=1248790 [Worldgineer, May 19 2005] Audio DVD Creator http://audio-dvd-creator.com/ [Worldgineer, May 19 2005] Although I know that pro-level software exists which will allow one to set up a DVD as described, all such software that I know of includes a lot of extra functionality and requires a lot of effort on the part of the user to set up the menus, etc.
My thinking was to have a program where one simply gives it a list of one's music tracks and associated pictures, along with a list of playlist files, and it would generate the appropriate menus and such automatically.-- supercat, May 19 2005 Another distinguishing feature: Artist/Song information could be displayed using the "subtitle" feature so as to minimize bandwidth requirements and allow it to be selectively displayed or not.-- supercat, May 19 2005 Artist/song info? I'd want Karaoke-style lyrics.-- Worldgineer, May 19 2005 That'd require having some way to feed all the timing information into the software, complicating things a bit beyond what I had in mind. Having the system show a page of lyrics at a time, though, probably wouldn't be too hard (just specify timings to within a second or so).-- supercat, May 19 2005 random, halfbakery