I have been successfully creating MYDVD projects with multiple movies and submenus burning them as iso files first and then onto the DVD. I recently created a DVD project with 2 main movies, each movie has its own chapter menus. It previews fine but after I burn the iso file onto a DVD, it is just going straight onto the first movie. When I choose root menu from my controller, it moves to the next movie instead of going to the main menu.

I am really puzzled because I have created quite a few multi-movie DVD projects in the past but this one just refused to display the main menu.

What am I missing or doing differently? The movie is quite big. Only leaves 11.8 MB free on the DVD after burning. Is that the issue?

Most strange???

Have you played the DVD in more than one place?

If it plays as intended anywhere, it may be a media issue – nothing says success like Verbatim!

Could try with Tools – Options – Render, set to Software.

That is a few things to look at, let us know.

Yes I have played successfully on the DVD player and on the computer and with both places, it is just playing the movie straight away without displaying the menu first. Although when I return to the project and preview the movie, it is showing the main menu. I am really puzzled. I suspect it is because of lack of free disk space on the DVD? Although it is still showing as 11.3 MB free ...

It's not the disc space!!!

Try the other suggestions.

If you still have the ISO file, I am curious to know how that one play. Download VLC media player (search it on Google), open the app and drag the ISO file onto VLC. Does it play properly in VLC?

I've found that several versions of EMC have been very poor when it comes to calculating space needed vs. free space, and on many occasions when I was trying to shoehorn the final few possible MB of data onto a disc I put too much on and killed the disc. The Roxio space assessment isn't precise.

I gave up trying to Scrooge it, and now I always make sure I have at least 20 MB free space showing. That has stopped those errors from happening to me.

What errors???

Update: I just did this one with 3 movies and using all but 0.1 MB of space and it plays as expected, menus function normally.

Click to view attachment

That is my point. It functions normally in Creator and in the Creator preview. I then burn an iso file before burning the image onto disc. It is when I play the disc that all the menus dissapear.

couple of things I haven't yet tried from these suggestions is to view the iso with VLC and using software rendering instead of hardware. will do that and let you all know !
thanks for all the suggestions !

Sorry took so long to get back. I have tried all the things as suggested and this is what I have discovered:

Using software rendering is much more reliable and I am now getting the menus showing consistently when I burn the project both as ISO and direct to DVD

The disk space availability on my PC has a huge impact on the speed of rendering to dvd and iso as well as when outputing the movie as .mpg.

So thanks for the help.

Disc space has no effect on the speed of rendering; if you don't have enough space the program will propably crash. What can effect the rendering speed is the amount of fragmentation of your free space.
If software rendering is "much more reliable" it usually means that your video card is not up to the requirements of hardware rendering.
BTW, 11.3GB free is not enough to do any kind of useful video work.