Creating Video Drop-out??

[Ryan Jilek]

I'll try and explain my situation as best I can. What I'm working on is a public access channel for the local cable television. I have a series of DVD players that we are putting various events on the be scheduled for playback by an event controller. How it work is that it will change over to a given input and start the DVD playing at a certain programmed time of day. What it will do is if there is a drop in video signal it will then switch over to a default video source which in this case is the bulletin board software.

This all works fine with VHS tapes when it hits the end of the program it switches over to the default source. As I understand it is that it is searching for a video signal and if there is not one there it will revert over to this default video source.

Now the big question.... Is there a way to record a couple second segment of "negative" or "anti" video that will fool this switcher into thinking that the video has dropped out. I could then append this to the end of my program on the DVD and when it hit that video it would switch over to default programming. What happens now is that the DVD player displays it splash screen when playback is over which the switcher sees as video...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

[Rob Lohman]

I think it is in theory possible to have a DVD player actually stop
playback after it finishes a movie or gets to a certain menu. I
think there is a command in the DVD's programming language
for this, *BUT*, probably no authoring package (except perhaps
Scenarist or DVD Studio Pro) supports it.

It is not possible to completely drop the signal. Perhaps you can
fool it by having a completely black screen for 10 seconds or more,
but I doubt that.