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.
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/
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.
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 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 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.
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"?
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.
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’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.
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.
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 mean, i don't waste my life cataloging these things. i was just making an observation that it is impossible to be aware of the corpus of movie plots, as you'd need to live thousands of lifetimes to consume and be aware of the current available media. so, stating that a single movie is one of a few or possibly the only one that would make sense in this manner, seems like a epistemological mistake. like, how many languages do you speak? do you often watch media in languages you do not speak? do you pay for media that doesn't make it to the mainstream releases? do you travel to see media that is only premiered once before it fails and doesn't make it to a theatrical release? there are so many paths that are never witnessed, it just seems like an idiotic thing to say.
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.
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.
Pretty sure it was Lupin, but couldn't tell you which of the plethora of them. I'd guess it was an Extras menu, but it went to a bit of the actor doing a goofy bit as the character not at all part of the actual content. Just the cast/crew having fun.
By nature of DVD menus and a remote with number keys, you can just add 6 to the number of buttons on the menu to type in the specific button on screen. Then again, not many consumer remotes had those.
I was downplaying things when I said "pretty sure" as I know for a fact they did. Some people could have found the content while ripping, and some people could have found the extra buttons in a software player too.
Fascinating, how does (did) one become a DVD programmer? I wondered as a child. What’s the tech stack like there? And were there DVD programming studios/companies, or was it more of a freelance model, or employed by the big studios in-house?
I fell into it. The company started as an MPEG-1 encoding shop making interactive CDs with Macromedia Director and Video CDs. That then naturally evolved into MPEG-2 encoding and DVDs. There were a couple of DVD programming apps, but the standard was Scenarist. I started using it on the first version released on Windows NT. We used the original 3.95GB DVD-R drive that cost $15k as test discs which made it interesting when building a full 4.7GB disc. We'd write the images to LTO4 tapes when sending to replication. This was pre-SSD, so we had interesting drive configuration. Writing disc images is full of I/O. We had a raid-5 volume where the original assets lived. When muxing, it would read from the raid-5 and write to a raid-0 volume. It would then read from the raid-0 mux data and write to another raid-0 image volume. There were plenty of places programming shiny round discs that the studios would hire out. Some were the bigger post houses, but others were boutique like the one I worked. Getting studio work was a pain as you had to get certified to hold unreleased content with a security audit. This was all Web1.0 days, so not much learning resources other than an email mailing list that wasn't so much tech support rather people talking about DVD "tech" with occasional interesting questions raised here and there. Scenarist was a drag-n-drop node based UI. It was pretty useful on learning what could connect where because it would change the cursor accordingly. The best learning resource was the DVD bible from Jim Taylor "DVD Demystified"[0]. After that, it was just watching as many DVDs as possible to see what other people were doing and taking inspiration from there. Lots of cool stuff done with the subtitle track like the robot animation over the video for MST3K.
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.
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
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.
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.
There was something really cool on the Shrek 1 DVD - if you put it into a computer, you could use a little tool called "Revoice Studio" where you could record voice lines for a few different scenes from the movie and then have the scene play back with your revoiced audio. It was a ton of fun!
I found this Youtube playlist which includes a bunch of people's different takes.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
> I've found that now they're a crapshoot, some disks come with great special features, and some don't.
Back in the day special features often had some budget and effort put into them but these days, outside of a few specialty publishers who focus on curation, restoration, etc, special features have largely become a marketing checkbox most studios put little to no effort into. Often they'll just include EPK (Electronic Press Kit) materials created solely to market the film, which are widely available on YouTube prior the film's release anyway.
There are notable exceptions however. An influential director and/or stars can contractually require a studio to not cheap out, and in those cases, special features and audio commentaries can actually still be quite "special." Other exceptions include re-issues of older films which can include special features made back when most special features had real budgets and historically notable films which can have modern retrospectives featuring cast, crew and even historians or other famous directors commenting on the film.
This is why it's always worth checking reviews to see what "Special Features" actually means in a disc release. Notable examples include "Blade Runner: Dangerous Days" (https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Dangerous_Days:_Making_B...). The entire five disc Blade Runner 25th Anniversary 2007 Blu-Ray boxed set is pretty amazing. In their release of "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946), although the original filmmakers are gone, Criterion found a long-lost 1980s interview with the director and has a lengthy commentary by Martin Scorsese, who as a young filmmaker was inspired by the film, and has become quite an expert on it. There are also notable audio commentaries that rise above the norm. One of my favorites is the Tropic Thunder commentary, both because the cast is hilarious riffing off each other and because Robert Downey, Jr insisted on doing the entire commentary as his character from the movie (backstory: his character in the film is a pretentious method actor who refuses to ever come out of character).
On the original 2001 DVD there was a great speech by Author C. Clarke.
Unfortunately, the DVD was letterboxed, so I later replaced it with a widescreen DVD and then a 4k disk. None of them have the speech.
I really want to go back and hear it again. He spoke about being convinced there was intelligent life elsewhere, and wondering how similar or different they were to us.
I would think any clip of ACC saying something significant on camera that was ever distributed publicly would have been posted on YouTube or Archive.org.
It's why the original Matrix DVD dual layer release was so hard to duplicate / replicate by pirates/"enthusiasts" in a way that would fit on single layer DVDs. One of those was a secret "follow the white rabbit" mode that lead to hidden content.
Unlikely. All players manufactured had to pass DVD specification testing. This is not to say that there were not hardware bugs in early manufacturing runs, but the realities of shipping hardware players prior to widespread, cheap and consumer-friendly firmware update methods meant there were far fewer bugs and hardly any showstoppers. The limiting factor for amazing presentation features was and is authoring platform support, and it's astonishing how many older authoring platforms supported these features even though their newer updated versions dropped support for them (e.g. karaoke-style subtitles in Maestro lost in DVD Studio Pro... and don't get me started on support for seamless story branching). Player devices and commercial software had to support all the features to sport an official DVD logo, and ones that didn't (or did and failed to pay the patent licensor) were sued out of existence.
Yeah, early on in the DVD era having deleted scenes and commentary tracks was totally new and a big deal for a lot of us.
In the peak of the DVD era my SO and I were both big movie fans, and at one point had watched literally everything the Blockbuster and Hollywood video in our neighborhood had. There just wasn't the embarrassment of riches of the post youtube world.
A few years ago I hurt one of my shoulders pretty badly, so I could barely move and had to sleep in a sitting / reclined position for almost a week. No keyboards, no computers.
Boy oh boy did that LotR premium extended something-something edition on DVD turn out to be a godsend with the countless hours of behind the scenes footage and interviews, and director's commentary. I watched it all.
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. VHS also has index marks but those are mostly used for making your own recording rather than movies.
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)
You knew the movie was about to begin because there usually was a copyright slide before the actual movie would start (anyone remember the scary FBI warnings?).
So it was a sign to stop the fast forward and get ready to watch the movie.
Either way it was honestly pretty fun. It was simple, cozy and slow, not in a bad way. When you got together to watch a movie with friends or family, it was the moment when anticipation was building up.
Even going to a video store and picking a movie off the shelf to take home and watch was more fun than browsing streaming services. Streaming services have basically gone out of their way to make selecting a movie annoying and frustrating.
Besides prime, which is an ad infested minefield of "Pay us more to watch this on top of what you already pay us every month to watch this", Netflix has to be the worst. They've expressed that they'd rather just pick what you're going to watch and so their last major redesign intentionally hid most of the titles from your view and they relentlessly push what they want to you watch by showing them in ad banners, in full screen ads, and by inserting them over and over again in whatever random categories they decide to let you pick form.
If you defy them and ignore what they choose for you they'll punish you by forcing you scroll past bullshit categories like "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", or "Cool Mustaches" when all you really want is "Continue Watching", "New", and "Leaving Soon" (which they refuse to give you) followed by the usual genres.
With all the telemetry they should get a clue that the experience is bad when my wife and I navigate a bit around, watch a few trailers, and then give up after 10min.
And that's us wanting to watch something! But the experience is so bland they're just consistently good at ruining the mood.
I agree that there are advantages of the usability of VHS; the menus should not be needed (even if they are helpful on some DVDs, they shouldn't be required). There are disadvantages as well, such as being slow (to rewind back to the beginning) and being damaged (although DVDs can be damaged too). Index searching is possible with VHS but I think it is mostly only used when recording TV shows and is not used with movies, even though I think can sometimes be helpful with movies.
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".
Surprising response from someone claiming to be in the gwbasic timeline, where movie special features were oft highly anticipated reasons to buy a DVD.
It always seemed to me that (for the most part) the anticipation of special features was just because they were so hyped by the manufacturers as selling points. Kind of like when Apple makes such a big deal about the new colors their products are available in (and this is coming from an Apple fan). The one exception would be Criterion Collection DVDs which actually had worthwhile special features most of the time.
Haha, not starting the movie when the disk loads is one of my pet peeves. When I burn DVDs for friends I still put in a menu to facilitate chapter or episode selection. But, I set the menu to only load after the movie has completed or the user pushes the menu button on their remote. For episodic disks all of the episodes will play before the menu appears.
2000s disk special features started getting a little wild. Who wants to play a "game" as a special feature with their DVD remote? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I recently tried out some of my old dvds, and i have to admit I cant stand the quality of it on even my 27'' monitor, much less my 65'' tv. I'm giving blu ray a try though, can get disks for as low as $1-$3 on the used market.
I think if people cared so much about dvd menus then they would've been integrated into Netflix and the like. For most people they were just an extra step in the way to watching their film
> 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.
He went into more detail on what this actually means for the end user experience in another comment:
> As I mentioned elsewhere, I agree that when I'm first watching a movie, I want to get straight to the film and not be distracted and slowed down by a bunch of crap. But the interactivity comes into play for repeat viewing where the user wants to dig deeper into the content.
> Let me clarify what I mean by scaling the movie. Lets say you are a big fan of a movie and you are watching it with some of the special features turned on, like picture in picture director commentary with pop-up factoids. On HD-DVD we could shrink the movie down to say 1/4th of the screen and have all sorts of associated content popping up around it, like storyboards, artwork, film facts, etc. All done at the authoring level. Some of the more advanced blu-rays are starting to figure out how to do some of this on the latest firmware players, but it's complicated and not fully compatible with players. However on HD-DVD that was a spec compliant feature from the beginning.
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!
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.
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?
The 640×480 resolution is a square-pixel representation of a 4:3 image, whereas traditional NTSC television were analogue and didn't have a fixed horizontal pixel count. DVDs using 720×480 were largely because of the digital video standards inherited from broadcasted television.
Traditional NTSC televisions didn't transmit 640 horizontal pixels, rather than taking 640 pixels and stretching them to 720 it transmits it via an continuous analogue waveform along each scanline.
The DVD player generally takes the stored samples (720 of them) and displays them across the equivalent of 640 square pixels. On the topic of NTSC, I recall NTSC PlayStation games enabling you to play at 60hz and PAL games only allowed 50hz. Never understood why as a kid.
What bugs me is that DVDs, a format designed to store movies, movies which are traditionally recorded at 24 fps, only support an encoded framerate of 30 fps (or 25 in PAL regions).
How is this reconciled? Interlace every other frame into a neighboring frame, of course[1], and stamp the irreversibly munged frames onto the disc instead of dictating the player should decide how to handle the framerate. (Or just speed it up by 25/24 in PAL regions)
Analog TV didn't really have a concept of fixed horizontal resolution. The vertical resolution was a discrete number of lines, but the horizontal resolution was not discrete: it was just whatever rate the analog signal was fluctuating at as the beam scanned across the line.
So in the analog days nothing was "mastered and broadcast at 640x480," it was mastered (on tape) and broadcast at 525-lines or 576-lines and the aspect ratio was not encoded whatsoever, it was purely a function of the shape of the picture tube.
So when it came time for a digital format, the number of vertical pixels had to be chosen such that it could encode the maximum rate of fluctuation of the signal within a given line, and apparently that was determined to be 720 columns. Presumably using 640 would have lost some amount of the analog source's vertical resolution. And since the displays were still analog tubes, there didn't need to be any scaling, the aspect ratio was still dictated by the picture tube (at least when watching on TV). Scaling for the correct aspect ratio only mattered if you were using a computer or a fixed-pixel display.
I guess arguably it gave you a slightly better fit for eventual 16x9 content, too.
Nowadays it is certainly annoying to have video files with non-square pixel aspect ratio but considering the standard was designed for tube TVs it makes more sense. I mean the average home PC in 1996 i don't think could even play a 720x480p video at 30fps anyway
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] threadNormally 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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?
Sadly, I thought Memento in chronological order was completely boring.
Fight Club had a couple of features/easter eggs in their DVDs as well.
By nature of DVD menus and a remote with number keys, you can just add 6 to the number of buttons on the menu to type in the specific button on screen. Then again, not many consumer remotes had those.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/DVD-Demystified-Jim-Taylor/dp/0071350...
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
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.
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.
It's ironic that the author chose the much simpler/inferior Shrek 2 DVD menu to showcase.
I found this Youtube playlist which includes a bunch of people's different takes.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHxPId0U7JNhALhwS-3kD...
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...
- randomized menu backgrounds/environments
It was a huge upgrade from sitting and exploring TeleText https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
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
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.
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".
Back in the day special features often had some budget and effort put into them but these days, outside of a few specialty publishers who focus on curation, restoration, etc, special features have largely become a marketing checkbox most studios put little to no effort into. Often they'll just include EPK (Electronic Press Kit) materials created solely to market the film, which are widely available on YouTube prior the film's release anyway.
There are notable exceptions however. An influential director and/or stars can contractually require a studio to not cheap out, and in those cases, special features and audio commentaries can actually still be quite "special." Other exceptions include re-issues of older films which can include special features made back when most special features had real budgets and historically notable films which can have modern retrospectives featuring cast, crew and even historians or other famous directors commenting on the film.
This is why it's always worth checking reviews to see what "Special Features" actually means in a disc release. Notable examples include "Blade Runner: Dangerous Days" (https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Dangerous_Days:_Making_B...). The entire five disc Blade Runner 25th Anniversary 2007 Blu-Ray boxed set is pretty amazing. In their release of "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946), although the original filmmakers are gone, Criterion found a long-lost 1980s interview with the director and has a lengthy commentary by Martin Scorsese, who as a young filmmaker was inspired by the film, and has become quite an expert on it. There are also notable audio commentaries that rise above the norm. One of my favorites is the Tropic Thunder commentary, both because the cast is hilarious riffing off each other and because Robert Downey, Jr insisted on doing the entire commentary as his character from the movie (backstory: his character in the film is a pretentious method actor who refuses to ever come out of character).
Unfortunately, the DVD was letterboxed, so I later replaced it with a widescreen DVD and then a 4k disk. None of them have the speech.
I really want to go back and hear it again. He spoke about being convinced there was intelligent life elsewhere, and wondering how similar or different they were to us.
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.
doom9 had reams of guides dedicate to the matter: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=313722
In the peak of the DVD era my SO and I were both big movie fans, and at one point had watched literally everything the Blockbuster and Hollywood video in our neighborhood had. There just wasn't the embarrassment of riches of the post youtube world.
Boy oh boy did that LotR premium extended something-something edition on DVD turn out to be a godsend with the countless hours of behind the scenes footage and interviews, and director's commentary. I watched it all.
And I liked creative menus.
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 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).
So it was a sign to stop the fast forward and get ready to watch the movie.
Either way it was honestly pretty fun. It was simple, cozy and slow, not in a bad way. When you got together to watch a movie with friends or family, it was the moment when anticipation was building up.
None of that exists with streaming.
Besides prime, which is an ad infested minefield of "Pay us more to watch this on top of what you already pay us every month to watch this", Netflix has to be the worst. They've expressed that they'd rather just pick what you're going to watch and so their last major redesign intentionally hid most of the titles from your view and they relentlessly push what they want to you watch by showing them in ad banners, in full screen ads, and by inserting them over and over again in whatever random categories they decide to let you pick form.
If you defy them and ignore what they choose for you they'll punish you by forcing you scroll past bullshit categories like "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", or "Cool Mustaches" when all you really want is "Continue Watching", "New", and "Leaving Soon" (which they refuse to give you) followed by the usual genres.
And that's us wanting to watch something! But the experience is so bland they're just consistently good at ruining the mood.
Later on, they added menus, called Playback Control, but many players let you turn that off.
2000s disk special features started getting a little wild. Who wants to play a "game" as a special feature with their DVD remote? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Except nowadays you sit through 2 minutes of ads depending on what tier you're on
I suggest this takes the desire for instant gratification to a new level.
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.
Oh hell no
> As I mentioned elsewhere, I agree that when I'm first watching a movie, I want to get straight to the film and not be distracted and slowed down by a bunch of crap. But the interactivity comes into play for repeat viewing where the user wants to dig deeper into the content.
> Let me clarify what I mean by scaling the movie. Lets say you are a big fan of a movie and you are watching it with some of the special features turned on, like picture in picture director commentary with pop-up factoids. On HD-DVD we could shrink the movie down to say 1/4th of the screen and have all sorts of associated content popping up around it, like storyboards, artwork, film facts, etc. All done at the authoring level. Some of the more advanced blu-rays are starting to figure out how to do some of this on the latest firmware players, but it's complicated and not fully compatible with players. However on HD-DVD that was a spec compliant feature from the beginning.
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?
The 640×480 resolution is a square-pixel representation of a 4:3 image, whereas traditional NTSC television were analogue and didn't have a fixed horizontal pixel count. DVDs using 720×480 were largely because of the digital video standards inherited from broadcasted television.
Traditional NTSC televisions didn't transmit 640 horizontal pixels, rather than taking 640 pixels and stretching them to 720 it transmits it via an continuous analogue waveform along each scanline.
The DVD player generally takes the stored samples (720 of them) and displays them across the equivalent of 640 square pixels. On the topic of NTSC, I recall NTSC PlayStation games enabling you to play at 60hz and PAL games only allowed 50hz. Never understood why as a kid.
How is this reconciled? Interlace every other frame into a neighboring frame, of course[1], and stamp the irreversibly munged frames onto the disc instead of dictating the player should decide how to handle the framerate. (Or just speed it up by 25/24 in PAL regions)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down
So in the analog days nothing was "mastered and broadcast at 640x480," it was mastered (on tape) and broadcast at 525-lines or 576-lines and the aspect ratio was not encoded whatsoever, it was purely a function of the shape of the picture tube.
So when it came time for a digital format, the number of vertical pixels had to be chosen such that it could encode the maximum rate of fluctuation of the signal within a given line, and apparently that was determined to be 720 columns. Presumably using 640 would have lost some amount of the analog source's vertical resolution. And since the displays were still analog tubes, there didn't need to be any scaling, the aspect ratio was still dictated by the picture tube (at least when watching on TV). Scaling for the correct aspect ratio only mattered if you were using a computer or a fixed-pixel display.
I guess arguably it gave you a slightly better fit for eventual 16x9 content, too.
Nowadays it is certainly annoying to have video files with non-square pixel aspect ratio but considering the standard was designed for tube TVs it makes more sense. I mean the average home PC in 1996 i don't think could even play a 720x480p video at 30fps anyway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMztEUXXF00