Can I mimic a 'slide show' of stills and videos with this technique

Question

I want to be able to mimic an old fashioned slide show on a Blu-ray disk, except that each 'slide' – I'll call them items – could be a true still, or a still with pan/zoom, or even a short video. Whatever a particular item is, I want to click a button and the show advances to the next item. If the next item is a video, the video pauses on the last frame when it is finished.
Just like the old magazine full of slides, imagine a folder full of items – some may be stills, some videos. After importing into Encore, setting up the navigation and menus, and then burning to Blu-ray, I want to be able to play them in sequence at the press of the Enter button.
I'm pretty much a novice with Encore, and to save spending more time reading the manual, I thought I'd ask if I can mimic a slide show in Encore with the technique described below. I got the idea from page 152 of the PDF manual:
The buttons on a menu are the primary navigation tool for the viewer. They control how the viewer steps through the project. Each button in a menu must lead to another menu, a timeline, a chapter, a playlist, a chapter playlist, or a slide show.
My limited experience with Encore is to set up a series of videos on a single timeline, and generate one menu with a "Start" button on it. When the Blu-ray starts up, the Start screen appears and stays there until I press Enter. Works well.
A slide show of stills using buttons only
So I thought: to generate my old-fashioned slide show (ignore videos for the moment), I would use the buttons themselves as the stills, taking my queue from the quote above: "Each button in a menu must lead to another menu…". My slide show would consist of jumping from one menu to the next. This leads to my first question:
Q1: Is it possible for a menu to have a full-screen button, call it the Image Button, that is actually the still image that is desired to be shown? So the viewer sees the Image Button, thinks it's the image (which it is), but it is actually a button. When the viewer presses Enter, the button activates and goes to the next menu which also happens to be the next full-screen image. The viewer is jumping from Image Button to Image Button, with the buttons filling the screen and being the actual images.
A slide show including videos
To include a video in the slide show, the destination when Enter is pressed would be a timeline with the appropriate video. At the end of this video, the navigation would lead to a menu which has an Image Button of the last frame of the video. The effect is that the video is paused on the last frame, waiting for the user to hit Enter to advance to the next item (still or video).
If there is an easier way to mimic a slide show of stills and videos, please let me know.

Answer 1

Stan – I posted 3 years ago in the Keynote Forums (I'm on Mac) about this sort of thing, knowing that eventually I would want to do it. The answer came back then that Keynote might have problems. So I've recently posted again about Keynote, but no responses as yet.
I expected problems with Encore and welcome some of them. Overcoming problems is the best way to become intimately involved with software.
I'm glad you asked why I don't just use Powerpoint (or Keynote in my case). Now's my chance to clarify my thoughts:
Macs do not upscale very well. Sometimes I may want to show part of a DVD. I've tested playing a DVD on my iMac versus on a Oppo BDP93, fed to a BenQ W7000 projector throwing a 3 metre image. There is an obvious difference in image quality because the Oppo, being hardware based, can interpolate in real time as it scales from 576p (PAL) to 1080P. DVD Player on my iMac simply magnifies the image, resulting in obvious pixellation.
Dissolves and complex effects in Premier challenge any software based h.264 player. I don't like to see decoding artifacts, for example, during a dissolve while a part of the image is also reducing in size, spinning, and disappearing into the distance. An extreme example, but an effect I used once. From my reading of blu-ray player reviews – and from my limited testing – all blu-ray players can easily handle the highest bit rates from a blu-ray disk.
I don't have a laptop so I'd have to buy one. I'd rather spend the money on a dedicated player if that route turns out to be suitable.
I don't trust computers for a presentation. Too unreliable. When I was showing multiscreen audio visuals in the 1980s (4-6 projectors), I always had a backup Tascam 4-track with me, back up soundtrack on tape, back up amp, and a backup slide projector. Even had a backup amp in the car. Speakers, well, if one failed I had two there anyway. With digital, to feel comfortable, I'd have to buy a second laptop. A good quality, backup Blu-ray player can be had for $100. And yes, I do have a backup W7000. I don't trust digital projectors either.
Running a presentation from a laptop always looks amateurish to me. Someone hunched over a tiny screen, fooling around with Windows or OSX. And usually it's all mirrored on the big screen for everyone to see. I'm never impressed. I want to replicate a cinema experience as closely as possible. Darkness, the audience hushed, and up comes the first image.
Any suggestions about automatically linking a whole heap of menus?