MediaMenu Portable

Throughout the years, multimedia distribution has developed different methods. One of the most commonly used is creating visually appealing menus for CDs or DVDs, which comes in handy if a specific content is structured in more parts, enabling quick navigation. However, with the help of applications like MediaMenu Portable you can create your custom links to media stored on CDs and share it with your friends.

One of the first things that needs to be mentioned is that the application comes equipped with an incredibly helpful example of what can be achieved. This makes up for half its practicability and would have otherwise made short-fuzed people look for alternatives.

Taking a look at the sample file might convince you that there's an extremely complicated set of tools to work with. On the contrary, all images, background music and accessible menus are simply lines of text carefully written in an INI file, and this is where you spend most of your time if you decide to give the application a shot.

It's best to work on the provided template since there's no help manual to get you out of sticky situations. However, each section is explained, along with values you can modify and test out. You are not limited to a specific file format to include in your menu, but rather have the possibility to make quick launch buttons for videos, music and even external applications, such as popping up your default web browser with a specific web page.

Unfortunately, you need to spend some time to get to know the application in order to get a proper result. What's more, the application does not support high-resolution images so you have to run several tests when adding custom files.

What's more, you need to take into consideration nearly every visual aspect, with no automated tools to aid you. Positioning, font size, style, color and not only for menu entries, needs to be specified in the INI file.

On the other hand, enthusiasts are able to create menus with around a hundred entries, complex images, background music and more, with the possibility to trigger various file types. Moreover, the menu is not dedicated to CDs and DVDs and can be used on removable disk drives as well.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that MediaMenu Portable might not appeal to everyone's taste, but dedicating some of your time in carefully adjusting values can generate a pretty powerful and visually appealing menu. What's more, the possibility to implement more file types and formats make it worth the effort.