> Modern DVDs and Blu-ray menus alike are often little more than an image or video with a generic menu atop it. It is understandable. Physical media as a whole is less popular with the mass adoption of streaming services;
I disagree; it's because we prefer disks with very simple menus, and care very little about the special features.
Let's think about the alternatives:
VHS: No menus; it would just start the ^%$^# movie (or would have trailers that were easy to fast forward through.)
Streaming: Standard menu no matter what you're watching, and then just starts the ^%$#^$ movie.
FWIW: Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube are all much "faster" than my BluRay player when it comes to getting to the actual content.
Regarding the special features: They were very cool on late 1990s and early 2000s disks, because most of them were promotional bits that would air on TV to promote the movie. They quickly devolved to be more like home movies filmed on the set where the cast and crew would just slap each others' backs for an hour. Useful maybe if you were cast or crew reminiscing, but otherwise rather boring compared to a planned interview or documentary.
VHS to me was the best in usability, put the tape into the VCR and it turned the VCR on and start playing, also (this is true for European TVs connected with the SCART connector) it would switch the TV to the correct input (and in some TVs even switch on the TV itself) because SCART used a +12V signal in addiction to the video to control automatic video switching (something I miss these days in HDMI, yes there is CEC but I was never able to make it work like the old SCART, and it's quite frankly a mess). And when you finished you turned off your VCR and it started playing TV again.
And controls were basic, play, stop, forward and back, nothing else. You could operate it with 4 buttons on the player without the need for a remote. It was as simple as operating a audio cassette player. Something that was easy to understand even for my grandparents, that after VHS gave up recording and playing stuff because DVDs, BluRay, etc were too complex for them to use (understand about menu and stuff they were not used to, instead of just putting the tape into the VCR and start watching).
VHS has annoyances too. No scene selection and no chapters meant you were almost always forced to FF through trailers and ads to get the show to start and you could overshoot and have to rewind again to get to where you wanted. Pause and frame forward didn't quite work right, and stopping a movie once the credits started to roll meant that the next time you wanted to watch the move you had to sit there for 10 minutes while you rewound the entire length of the film.
That annoyance was only made slightly better if you bought an entire separate device for rewinding tapes at faster speeds (at the risk of breaking them as they got older)
Are you only buying disks for the features? (And otherwise just streaming / pirating the movie if the disk isn't interesting?)
I've found that now they're a crapshoot, some disks come with great special features, and some don't.
IE, The box set for The Shield had a "back slapping" "home movie" special feature with each season, but the two special feature disks were loaded with cast and crew interviews, panels, and detailed teardowns of scenes. It was really well done.
The Martian also had a 2nd disk with great special features, including a panel and a documentary on how "real" a trip to Mars could be.
But I don't buy the disks for the features, plenty of my disks either don't have them, just have a trailer or two (which I enjoy), or a "back slapping" "home movie".
the 2 disc DVD set for Contact was the first title I purchased. It set the standard for behind the scenes moving making special content.
Streaming could be so much better with the accuracy of their skip features. How many times have you hit skip opening for it to jump with 10s of the opening yet to play out? How many times have you seen the skip to next well into the credits making it pretty much pointless. The exact root cause of the inaccuracies is not known to me, but I'd assume laziness on the part of those creating the times. Whether it's just a generic :60s from the beginning on the assumption the opening is always exactly the same length or some other bit of just not caring to do it right. Either way it's annoying AF to see a recap of the episode you just finished watching 5s prior or forced to watch footage you're about to watch immediately.
Where a menu might help is a list of the titles and chapters, although such things can also be printed on the box and selected directly by numeric entry (in which case the menu is not needed, but can be helpful in case you do not have the box). Subtitles, audio, etc can usually be selected by other functions in the DVD player. (Sometimes there are other functions as well, but mostly it should be good enough to just select titles and chapters by numeric entry. DVD players ought to have the option that you can disable unwanted functions in order to just play the selected title directly.) VHS also has index marks but those are mostly used for making your own recording rather than movies.
I foolishly purchased the Blu-Ray remaster of Battlestar Galactica and every damn episode begins with the same introduction from Ronald Moore talking about sound quality.
To your earlier points about VHS and Streaming, both of those formats allow the user to pause and resume at a later time. DVD players don't provide this.
It's not at all. It's really common. PS3 does it and has resumed discs I played years ago. Blu-ray is more hit or miss because BD-J mucks it all up. Titles without that tend to work, but big studio releases tend to have it so...
I think all the recollections above may be correct. IIRC, the DVD spec allows a disc to override some stored user preferences, skip to main menu (ignoring auto-play intro content) and play main content (skipping the menus), but not all DVD players had those user pref options - earlier models often didn't. That could definitely be annoying because some studios loved to force ads, trailers, warnings, etc to play.
Some DVD players, especially later, off-brand models, would ignore a disc's instruction to override the user preference. I remember the presence of these capabilities being a key feature in forum reviews of DVD players. Back then, the holy grail was an inexpensive player that had quick load and seek times, ignored region codes, respected user preferences and had analog component output (or a good composite/S-Video encoder chip). Based on these detailed user reviews, the community would arrive at a handful of players that were worth getting. These lists would be regularly updated as models would change firmware or chips and be sold under different brand names in different regions.
The really impressive and ironic self-own on most DVD and Blu-ray discs is the unskippable copyright message that basically advertises piracy. "If only you'd pirated this movie you wouldn't be forced to wait through all this boring shit".
I remember watching the DVD of Memento, and using the secret DVD menu button combination to enable watching the film backwards scene by scene. I remember thinking that was amazing and we were entering a new era of creative movie distribution. Shame that sort of thing didnt really catch on.
Not exactly the same, but some creative things similar to this are happening in the video game space. There have been a number of recent video games that primarily consist of watching a movie and discovering little hints here and there that let you unlock more of the movie through the user-interface. Sam Barlow has been a pioneer here, "Immortality" from 2022 is probably the most innovative example of this approach to interactive movie-watching.
I was a DVD programmer for just under 10 years. Some titles naturally allowed for more creativity in the menus. For one easter egg, I programmed a feature accessible after an up-up-down-down-left-right-enter navigation from a specific button. Pretty sure the marketing team "leaked" it on some forum for it to be discovered.
Whoa, TIL!
I love Christopher Nolan films.
I'm guessing there might be an OSS toolkit or multimodal LLM able to do this kind of de/reconstruction with an avi or whatever file format.
Related tangent (creativity assoc w a Nolan film), one of my all-time favorite web pages is this interactive visualization of Inception^1 which makes the levels of dreaming and the related slowing of time intuitive. Sadly it's desktop-only, but well worth it.
If you have the DVD, or have ripped it with chapter markings it would be super easy: you just need to change the chapters order, like in a playlist (that's basically what the original DVD did, IIRC)
This reminds me of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVD my friend had. There was an option to Play All on the main menu and it would simultaneously play all the episodes at once on the screen, each in their own box.
Memento is one of the few movies in history where out-of-order watching would even make sense, possibly the only one. Much like 3D TVs, it didn't catch on because people don't actually want to consume media that way.
I seem to remember a hidden menu option in Monty Python and the Holy Grail's DVD menu labeled something like "Menu Reader for the Hard of Hearing" that, when selected, had a cast member start shouting the menu options at you. It was quite humorous to me as a kid.
I've been collecting DVD menus. I maybe have somewhere in the vicinity of 250 on my computer. Some are quite large (>1GB) because the menus themselves have videos that need to play to operate and some are like quite long movies. I use a method which strips out any actual video content (the movie and any special features), so if you click on an item which would take you to a video it craps out, but otherwise the menus do completely work most of the time. It just depends on the structure of the DVD (I _think_ it is basically whether some of the menu images or videos are encoded in the movie vob file itself? I haven't gotten around exploring the actual structure of the ifo/vob files).
I find DVDs to be an interesting technology all the way down to the often absurd special features they have (my favorite? On the Tango & Cash DVD they have actor biographies in which they mispell Jack Palance's birthname).
Back in High School me and my friends made a zombie movie over summer vacation, and I had so much fun making overly-complicated DVD menus for it using a pirated copy of DVD Studio Pro.
Full of stylized video transitions, menu selections that were fully graphical (not using the 2-bit overlays, DVD Studio Pro supported Photoshop layers), pointless special features (gotta fill out that list on the back of the box), poorly-translated subtitle tracks, and easter eggs in various menus when you hit a special button combination on your remote.
I remember the first Harry Potter DVD had its special features hidden in a sort of maze game that presumably used the DVD menu system. It was an interesting idea, but I found it too difficult to navigate/play. One part I remember was you had to tap the bricks outside The Leaky Cauldron in a special order to enter Diagon Alley and then what happened I don't recall.
I also had this idea for a home work out DVD that would give you different "random" workouts based on the timing of when you clicked menu options. There would be predefined playlists of different workout routines. Each video segment in the list would be a set of one kind of exercise. And the playlists would contain different collections of sets. I wonder if I could have made it work, I think DVD technology would support it.
I have PTSD from trying to navigate some of these menus, not just because of the UI itself but the bad remote control button qualities paired with a really slow DVD reader that took 2 seconds to register every time you push a button.
So on one hand, yeah I see some of these and I get some kind of nostalgia, but as it happens with nostalgia, it's wasn't all that good haha
The problem is that there really is limited space in a DVD, and if you care about the actual movie, you want as much bitrate as possible. Some DVDs can look almost HD with enough bitrate.
So no, I don't want animated menus or worthless features. Put a commentary track - that has high extra value to size ration - but leave it to that.
For anyone interested, interactive DVD menus can be pretty easily made with spumux and dvdauthor. I used them a few years ago to make a silly DVD-menu game at a game jam, heavily inspired by these "looping clips and audio that don’t quite seamlessly repeat or have abrupt endings": https://dos.itch.io/pipe-inspector
Yeah, I remember DVD menus (and the rare Blu-ray that employs "interesting" menus) being fun, but even the fun ones would get in the way of actually wanting to watch the movie or TV episode at hand.
They might be bland and boring, but the menus employed today by the vast majority of discs produced are infinitely preferable in my opinion. Play Movie/Episode, Audio, Subtitles, Special Features. They're made from just a few templates and generally work the same across all discs from a studio. Doesn't bog you down with cutesy animations or wild layout choices, lets you just watch your movie in peace.
I can understand the argument of simplicity and consistency for something productivity-related, or whatever, but when watching a DVD it is almost always for the purpose of entertainment. A fun and intnrnsting menu feels like part of the experience. It is a bit more of an event with all the little added flourishes.
One of the many reason I stopped buying dvds. The adverts (unskippable), the cognitive bones etc get through to the play, some disks would even have spoilers for the film.
I was just thinking back to how fun the DVD menus were as a kid. Sometimes you'd even have games on them, not that they played very well at all or I never used the right remote. I wish Plex had a feature of dropping an iso, and being able to get the whole dvd/blu-ray menu experience.
Pure nostalgia looking at the Shrek menu. It makes you wonder if the designs are actually good or if nostalgia is convincing us that they are good. Some definitely are well made and thought out, but others seemed like they just made them fancy because they could. Shrek 1's menu was a whole experience.
DVD menus honestly just tend to piss me off. I can tell that someone somewhere had a lot of fun making some of them, but if I can't skip past them and get to the point where I can start the show it really just gets in the way. What is the point in making me wait for 30 seconds while a bunch of graphics float around into place. It just adds to the already obnoxious list of other things that you can't skip past. FBI warning, ads, disclaimers about commentary, corporate logos, it's all disrespectful of my time. DVD is better about it than bluray which usually has even more things you can't skip plus a bunch of other intrusive garbage like massive progress bars (which sometimes remain on screen when paused obscuring content/subtitles) and scene thumbnails that cover a quarter of the screen as you rewind or fast forward.
A good DVD/bluray menu is the one that I can skip past immediately and has "play move" selected by default.
> Despite being a much more capable format from a technical perspective, with high-resolution media, menu layers, everything offered by Blu-ray Disc Java (BD-J) and more, Blu-rays unfortunately very rarely see impressive menu presentations.
Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do. Authoring a Blu-Ray from scratch also involves testing your code on a ton of different players, often with incompatible Java implementations. As a result, the studios just use the same simple menu templates over and over rather than creating new menus for each title.
> Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do.
Product design centered around corporate identity/branding did the rest.
My favourite was Mulholland Drive DVD menu - it felt like you were watching LA in real time from the hills, while listening to eerie synth music. Pure art.
The Twin Peaks Gold Box DVD menus are one of my favorites for the same reason. The backgrounds are just extended shots of places in Twin Peaks. The first disc, for instance, is almost all long, well-looped clips of saw blades cutting logs at the mill, sound included.
I'm surprised we haven't seen a Plex-like front end app for Apple TV that faithfully runs the full DVD menu experience from your (legally owned and manually backed-up) DVD disk images.
Despite the fact that a lot of dvd menus were confusing to navigate and / or outright ugly, it's a shame that it became another lost art form.
The bad ones were often spectacularly bad, though lol
I used to specifically re-rip DVDs that had menus. They were hideously designed, overly complex, or just pointless when I just wanted the content to start when I put the disc in. Why?
1. Because it would cause confusion with my kids when they were trying to watch movies in the car as toddlers.
2. It was an annoyance when we were watching a movie at home.
I am finding a similar annoyance w/AppleTV's content ad/preview, recap, and intro skips. Like, for fucks sake, just play the episode already.
I tried Apple TV's free trial and it really gets in the way of everything, so much so that I canceled. It's pretty annoying how modern streaming platforms try to ruin the vanilla viewing experience as much as possible. If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime which you have to click out of to hide. Like hey, I just watched a feature-length film. Let me watch the credits in peace.
> If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime
It took a lot of work but I was able to do it... once. Then it turned itself back on. Damnit, I'm watching an anime, I want to hear the ending song, it's a banger!
Got to question the reasoning behind Fastplay. If it was "Designed to make their DVDs more accessible, especially to children potentially unable to manage the remote" are those really the target audience for "it often plays trailers before the feature presentation"?
I’ve never had the fortune to see beautifully designed DVD menus. I’ve seen the Shrek 2 DVD menu, but it didn’t strike me as good.
The only use I had for DVD menus is adjusting subtitles and dubbing. I found that changing the language in the video was a good way to study a foreign language.
Glad to see some attention given to this so-quickly-forgotten and so-long-besmirched chapter of human creativity. When it was bad it was SO bad. The good ones stood out by soaking you in the verve around a film.
They were especially doomed by being constrained to that Cold War dinosaur: the infra-red remote, with its overpopulated slimy-sticky buttons. All its failure modes. No one misses those except those who stopped learning.
I don't miss the art form. But I recognize the charm. And more notably, I see them as marker in the cultural landscape sliding out from us. We used to have patient engagement with our art. We'd treasure the physical artifact, be it book or vinyl. DVD menus were that early step away from this. Not physical, but made by folks who either made or used to appreciate the physical.
Now, we just want everything to go away so we can get wherever we think we're going. All of life, an intro to be skipped.
I've never played with these DVD menus, but I do remember the days when people took advantage of YouTube annotations and interactive elements to make choose your own adventure style videos!
The late '90s had some fun ones, like the Austin Powers DVD that had secret menus and extra scenes (some extremely early on in the movie that went unused). That was a ton of fun and I wish more studios did it like that.
Also many had fun easter eggs. One of my favorites was galaxy quest. You had to watch the movie then after you watched it there was a new option to watch the movie in the alien dialect. Now some menus are just 'in the way'. Usually some blurb about whatever concerned some lawyer and a good 15-30 second block on continuing on, or even worse a set of commercials for other movies that are unskippable. The newer menus are very basic and straight to the point. The older ones were 'fun' in a way that usually mimicked whatever the movie was doing. Adding to the movie. I think one of the fight club releases even had the 'wrong' menu just to mess with people.
I can understand the nostalgia, but my experience with these menus always brought me to the absolute brink of sudoku.
I was just utterly incapable of conducting business in these screens, but it could have been a massive web of combinatronics between poorly engineered hardware in the form of remote control buttons, low patience, and some cognitive dissonance after so many years of downloading warez films on Limewire.
Sudoku is a number grid game. Surely you used the wrong term...
Secondly, I'm assuming you're just too young to understand/appreciate DVD menus. Your wording sounds like you are of later Gen Z age and therefore couldn't have had the frame of reference to respect the history and progression.
My wife and I both agree that we miss DVD menus. They felt like artistic expressions made with pride (in some cases). New movies would come out and break the mold and deliver a new flashy menu experience. I looked forward to popping in a new DVD and hoping, pleading to the universe, please...give me a great DVD menu! Mini-games, Easter eggs, and the like...
>The Rocky Horror Picture Show DVD opens with the iconic lips welcoming you to the DVD. After which you’re presented with the main menu, where a disembodied pair of legs wearing heels and fishnets walks in, kicking around one of the menu items, which begins flipped the wrong way around. The extra features are numerous and play into Rocky Horror’s cult status. Some menu options are accompanied by a large switch which animates when flicked. Throughout much of the menu the lips continue speaking while songs from the film play in the background. The 16:9-only portion of the screen is occupied by red curtains, which slide in and out again when ‘Play Movie’ is selected.
Wow, the Rocky Horror Picture Show interactive DVD menu is thrilling, chilling, and fulfilling!
The Rocky Horror Picture Show 2000 DVD Menu walkthrough (Disc 1)
When Tim Curry died, I went looking for the fishnet stockings bootleg Rocky Horror Picture Show source code I found decades ago in the MIT-AI Lab's HUMOR directory. I finally dug up this old archive where the body was buried:
The battle between form and function was never clearer than in the era of DVD menus. The viewers function objective (start watching the movie as quickly as possible) is at direct odds with the creator's form objective (steal the viewer's time to expose them to my "creation")
There was a period before 24/7 internet access when some of us were bored enough to sit and explore DVD menus because there wasn't anything else to do.
Not really menus, but related to the “programmability” of DVDs, my “favourite” “feature” was unskippable videos which would show before the feature.
This was used to reward people who had actually paid for the movie with being forced to endure obnoxious and long “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy appeals before they could watch the main feature.
An interesting effect of them doing this is that it made the pirated version of the product objectively better than the legal version. Great thinking by movie studios.
This is a thing I want to try and do. I do the same thing as you are the moment (mainly to convert things to the much more efficient mp4 instead of what you natively get from, e.g., MakeMKV) just throw the movie in as a single file, and then all the rest into appropriately named extras.
But I do try and save the (usually pretty small) menus just in case I can figure out how to get them running at some point. VLC can run the menu with the large videos stripped out. I still need to check, but I assume I could create a single iso file that would run as a "menu." I guess I'll see.
I worked on this problem a little bit. Unfortunately, it's not really a matter of simple "parsing" - the DVD menu is really a program with an entire virtual machine (IMO overly confusing and complicated).
You basically have to implement the VM, which may lead to legal problems (?)
But, VLC does this (via libdvdnav and libdvdread), so I'm not sure why more don't.
I've also been wishing Jellyfin has this. I've not tested it myself but a friend shared this plex competitor which apparently supports DVD menus: https://ampchor.com/
some software could just open a DVD ISO, so I used that as the backup format when I wanted to retain menus. XBMC and it's derivatives could open them over the network share iirc.
One dvd menu game I remember fondly from when I was a kid was the games in Robots (2005).
IIRC there was a game (maybe more than one?) about picking parts as they went by on a conveyor belt in order to build a robot. At the end it would play a little animation based on the parts you chose, if you missed parts or chose bad/incompatible parts, the robot would break down in hilarious fashion.
> In NTSC regions video on DVD almost always has a resolution of 720 × 480 pixels
This always irritated me. So presumably, television content was mastered and broadcast at 640x480, and then the x axis was scaled by a factor of 1.125 to fit 720 columns?
in the history of technology, I can't recall anything as universally bad as the DVD menus. What a terrible mess. The only thing this had to do was highlight something when you pressed a button, and it was utterly incapable of doing that.
The player could decode high quality MPEG2, but it couldn't let you select a freaking item.
Ugh and don't get me started on setting up languages and subtitles...
I get the love for vinyls, I get the nostalgia for 8-track tape cassettes. But you can't just miss everything from the past. This truly and totally sucked.
I disagree; it's because we prefer disks with very simple menus, and care very little about the special features.
Let's think about the alternatives:
VHS: No menus; it would just start the ^%$^# movie (or would have trailers that were easy to fast forward through.)
Streaming: Standard menu no matter what you're watching, and then just starts the ^%$#^$ movie.
FWIW: Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube are all much "faster" than my BluRay player when it comes to getting to the actual content.
Regarding the special features: They were very cool on late 1990s and early 2000s disks, because most of them were promotional bits that would air on TV to promote the movie. They quickly devolved to be more like home movies filmed on the set where the cast and crew would just slap each others' backs for an hour. Useful maybe if you were cast or crew reminiscing, but otherwise rather boring compared to a planned interview or documentary.
That blew my mind and was an awesome experience. In the age of dial-up internet it wasn't like you could find and / or watch that online.
And controls were basic, play, stop, forward and back, nothing else. You could operate it with 4 buttons on the player without the need for a remote. It was as simple as operating a audio cassette player. Something that was easy to understand even for my grandparents, that after VHS gave up recording and playing stuff because DVDs, BluRay, etc were too complex for them to use (understand about menu and stuff they were not used to, instead of just putting the tape into the VCR and start watching).
I've found that now they're a crapshoot, some disks come with great special features, and some don't.
IE, The box set for The Shield had a "back slapping" "home movie" special feature with each season, but the two special feature disks were loaded with cast and crew interviews, panels, and detailed teardowns of scenes. It was really well done.
The Martian also had a 2nd disk with great special features, including a panel and a documentary on how "real" a trip to Mars could be.
But I don't buy the disks for the features, plenty of my disks either don't have them, just have a trailer or two (which I enjoy), or a "back slapping" "home movie".
Streaming could be so much better with the accuracy of their skip features. How many times have you hit skip opening for it to jump with 10s of the opening yet to play out? How many times have you seen the skip to next well into the credits making it pretty much pointless. The exact root cause of the inaccuracies is not known to me, but I'd assume laziness on the part of those creating the times. Whether it's just a generic :60s from the beginning on the assumption the opening is always exactly the same length or some other bit of just not caring to do it right. Either way it's annoying AF to see a recap of the episode you just finished watching 5s prior or forced to watch footage you're about to watch immediately.
And I liked creative menus.
To your earlier points about VHS and Streaming, both of those formats allow the user to pause and resume at a later time. DVD players don't provide this.
Some DVD players, especially later, off-brand models, would ignore a disc's instruction to override the user preference. I remember the presence of these capabilities being a key feature in forum reviews of DVD players. Back then, the holy grail was an inexpensive player that had quick load and seek times, ignored region codes, respected user preferences and had analog component output (or a good composite/S-Video encoder chip). Based on these detailed user reviews, the community would arrive at a handful of players that were worth getting. These lists would be regularly updated as models would change firmware or chips and be sold under different brand names in different regions.
Not exactly the same, but some creative things similar to this are happening in the video game space. There have been a number of recent video games that primarily consist of watching a movie and discovering little hints here and there that let you unlock more of the movie through the user-interface. Sam Barlow has been a pioneer here, "Immortality" from 2022 is probably the most innovative example of this approach to interactive movie-watching.
It's a very fuzzy genre, but you can find some more examples with varying levels of interactivity by heading to the most recent titles here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interactive_films
Related tangent (creativity assoc w a Nolan film), one of my all-time favorite web pages is this interactive visualization of Inception^1 which makes the levels of dreaming and the related slowing of time intuitive. Sadly it's desktop-only, but well worth it.
1. http://www.inception-explained.com
Sadly, I thought Memento in chronological order was completely boring.
Fight Club had a couple of features/easter eggs in their DVDs as well.
The character Fuchs in Barry reminds of Sammy Jankiss.
I don't think anyone in our class had found that feature of the Memento DVD menu?
Bank then before YouTube, there were properly-tracked copies of Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz on the internet.
Another weird thing about Memento,
If you train a neural network on videos of fluids in reverse, can it recover or reconstruct the parameters of the fluid?
I find DVDs to be an interesting technology all the way down to the often absurd special features they have (my favorite? On the Tango & Cash DVD they have actor biographies in which they mispell Jack Palance's birthname).
Full of stylized video transitions, menu selections that were fully graphical (not using the 2-bit overlays, DVD Studio Pro supported Photoshop layers), pointless special features (gotta fill out that list on the back of the box), poorly-translated subtitle tracks, and easter eggs in various menus when you hit a special button combination on your remote.
It was a really fun format to mess around with!
It's ironic that the author chose the much simpler/inferior Shrek 2 DVD menu to showcase.
Insanely impressive
I also had this idea for a home work out DVD that would give you different "random" workouts based on the timing of when you clicked menu options. There would be predefined playlists of different workout routines. Each video segment in the list would be a set of one kind of exercise. And the playlists would contain different collections of sets. I wonder if I could have made it work, I think DVD technology would support it.
I like it, kind of the 2000's version of parallel grooves on vinyl records
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unusual_types_of_gramophone_re...
So on one hand, yeah I see some of these and I get some kind of nostalgia, but as it happens with nostalgia, it's wasn't all that good haha
So no, I don't want animated menus or worthless features. Put a commentary track - that has high extra value to size ration - but leave it to that.
They might be bland and boring, but the menus employed today by the vast majority of discs produced are infinitely preferable in my opinion. Play Movie/Episode, Audio, Subtitles, Special Features. They're made from just a few templates and generally work the same across all discs from a studio. Doesn't bog you down with cutesy animations or wild layout choices, lets you just watch your movie in peace.
I can't find the actual spec, but there is libdvdnav with a reverse engineered implementation. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libdvdnav.git
A good DVD/bluray menu is the one that I can skip past immediately and has "play move" selected by default.
There's a good Reddit comment here from someone who worked on authoring Blu-Rays that explains why this happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vdrbr/hey_reddit_its...
Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do. Authoring a Blu-Ray from scratch also involves testing your code on a ton of different players, often with incompatible Java implementations. As a result, the studios just use the same simple menu templates over and over rather than creating new menus for each title.
Product design centered around corporate identity/branding did the rest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMztEUXXF00
This is totally normal, compared to VHS that often had trailers before the feature.
1. Because it would cause confusion with my kids when they were trying to watch movies in the car as toddlers.
2. It was an annoyance when we were watching a movie at home.
I am finding a similar annoyance w/AppleTV's content ad/preview, recap, and intro skips. Like, for fucks sake, just play the episode already.
I was surprised how many people expressed disappointment or annoyance at the lack of these menus when it came to streaming.
While I specifically remember the lack of these menus (and how slow they were) being something I was thrilled to have when streaming was introduced.
It took a lot of work but I was able to do it... once. Then it turned itself back on. Damnit, I'm watching an anime, I want to hear the ending song, it's a banger!
The only use I had for DVD menus is adjusting subtitles and dubbing. I found that changing the language in the video was a good way to study a foreign language.
They were especially doomed by being constrained to that Cold War dinosaur: the infra-red remote, with its overpopulated slimy-sticky buttons. All its failure modes. No one misses those except those who stopped learning.
I don't miss the art form. But I recognize the charm. And more notably, I see them as marker in the cultural landscape sliding out from us. We used to have patient engagement with our art. We'd treasure the physical artifact, be it book or vinyl. DVD menus were that early step away from this. Not physical, but made by folks who either made or used to appreciate the physical.
Now, we just want everything to go away so we can get wherever we think we're going. All of life, an intro to be skipped.
I was just utterly incapable of conducting business in these screens, but it could have been a massive web of combinatronics between poorly engineered hardware in the form of remote control buttons, low patience, and some cognitive dissonance after so many years of downloading warez films on Limewire.
Though the idea of being so frustrated that you must solve a sudoku is kind of funny.
Secondly, I'm assuming you're just too young to understand/appreciate DVD menus. Your wording sounds like you are of later Gen Z age and therefore couldn't have had the frame of reference to respect the history and progression.
The easy path should have the ability to start playing with a second of inserting the disc.
Of course, even worse than the menus was when companies realised they could give you unskippable adverts and trailers on your DVDs.
I miss them.
Wow, the Rocky Horror Picture Show interactive DVD menu is thrilling, chilling, and fulfilling!
The Rocky Horror Picture Show 2000 DVD Menu walkthrough (Disc 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s3h_NCl9sY
The end credits kick:
https://youtu.be/1s3h_NCl9sY
When Tim Curry died, I went looking for the fishnet stockings bootleg Rocky Horror Picture Show source code I found decades ago in the MIT-AI Lab's HUMOR directory. I finally dug up this old archive where the body was buried:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/humor/...
Right there along with the rest of the original AI:HUMOR; directory:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/tree/master/files/humor
It was a huge upgrade from sitting and exploring TeleText https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
This was used to reward people who had actually paid for the movie with being forced to endure obnoxious and long “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy appeals before they could watch the main feature.
An interesting effect of them doing this is that it made the pirated version of the product objectively better than the legal version. Great thinking by movie studios.
Normally I just convert the largest title too the name of the movie, and put the rest in extras, so Jelly can pick all the extra content up.
But I do try and save the (usually pretty small) menus just in case I can figure out how to get them running at some point. VLC can run the menu with the large videos stripped out. I still need to check, but I assume I could create a single iso file that would run as a "menu." I guess I'll see.
You basically have to implement the VM, which may lead to legal problems (?)
But, VLC does this (via libdvdnav and libdvdread), so I'm not sure why more don't.
- randomized menu backgrounds/environments
IIRC there was a game (maybe more than one?) about picking parts as they went by on a conveyor belt in order to build a robot. At the end it would play a little animation based on the parts you chose, if you missed parts or chose bad/incompatible parts, the robot would break down in hilarious fashion.
This always irritated me. So presumably, television content was mastered and broadcast at 640x480, and then the x axis was scaled by a factor of 1.125 to fit 720 columns?
I used it exactly once though, when I made a DVD for our high school. But I looked like a wizard.
...I see last release was _2024_? Is this... correct? Wow. I would have guessed 2014.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/106536
edit: oh no, it's just wrong date on the page. Last release was 2011. Yeah makes more sense.
The player could decode high quality MPEG2, but it couldn't let you select a freaking item.
Ugh and don't get me started on setting up languages and subtitles...
I get the love for vinyls, I get the nostalgia for 8-track tape cassettes. But you can't just miss everything from the past. This truly and totally sucked.