Someone has got to be able to help me here...

A lot of DVD appliance firmware's store their background images in the ROM as an MPEG2 Still Image. mklogo.exe is a common utility to crate an MPEG2 Still from a bitmap, it easily turns a one meg bitmap into a 15K MPEG2 Still Image, which can then be patched into the ROM, and then loaded intot he DVD player. I've done this many times.

What I 'm having trouble with however is this... I can't view MPEG2 Stills in anything. Not in the two patching programs I have (MookImage and ApexLogo Lite) in their preview windows, not in WMP, not in IrfanView, not in Media Player Classic, not in Elecard Player, not in RealPlayer Plus, not even in WINDVD 2.3... not with the MPEG2 codec from ApexModChip, not with the MPEG2 Decoder from Elecard, and not with WinDVD. This makes no sense. The majority of the time, the apps simply close themselves silently (i.e. crash) and that's it. The two patched programs have given errors... MookImage gives an MCI Init error using the Elecard codec, and ApexLogo Lite gives "The driver cannot recognize the specified command parameter." no matter what.

I know it's possible to view MPEG2 Stills in all of these apps, people have done it, and have done it with the codecs I tried, but none of them will work on here and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

If anyone out there has *any* clue what the problem is, I'd appreciate a heads up. This is WinXP Pro.

I'll even settle for a documented working procedure, or small utility to convert them back into something else that can be viewed in other apps... I just need a way to see what they look like. :P