DVD Menus: A Lost Art

[peanutbutter]

I always found it a bit rum when you tried to skip a trailer for an "operation prohibited by disc" message to show. You're mine you DVD-playing fuck. How dare you listen to a disc rather than me? How dare you? I'll deck you, cunt.

I'd have thought advertising a player with "skips everything, no fucks given" would have been a marketing coup, so why did Tandy never do this to take over from the big boys?

The issue is it'd break a lot of stuff too.

Those videos that appear relating to the menu when you turn on the disc are the same thing, all of the transition clips are the same things, all of those legal certification notification type things (which are probably by law not allowed to be bypassed) would be the same thing.
Even if you set it up to be quite smart and only bypass obvious bullshit (e.g. non interactable screens on disc load over a certain limit), the company would just stick some bullshit interaction in front of them all to bypass it or make the device legally noncompliant)


The whole system is just a bunch of video segments with the following options:
- is menu (has navigation options, doesn't have playback controls)
- is chapter (inverse of menu, with data of overall current video its a chapter of and next segment to link to on completion)
- end clip action (e.g. either loop or transition to a different different segment)

[idunnosomename]

The Led Zeppelin DVD's aged well. The menus have whole songs of bootleg footage.

I also used to get annoyed at the "action prohibited by disc". The contempt for consumers back in the 00s. Don't get me started on those fucking rootkits they put on CDs. Refused to ever buy one of them

[Replies From View]

Rootkits on CDs?  What what?

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compact_discs_sold_with_Extended_Copy_Protection

[Replies From View]

Fucking hell

[waste of chops]

The R1 Memento DVD has the absolute worst menus ever. "Let's make people go through a fake psych test to get to each special feature" probably seemed like a good idea at the time but it effectively just made all the DVD extras into easter eggs. "Select the clock then select option C 5 times then select the pictures in order 2-1-4-3" just to read a short story? Fuck that.

https://www.mutedhorn.net/memento-dvd-guide

[BJBMK2]

The R1 Memento DVD has the absolute worst menus ever. "Let's make people go through a fake psych test to get to each special feature" probably seemed like a good idea at the time but it effectively just made all the DVD extras into easter eggs. "Select the clock then select option C 5 times then select the pictures in order 2-1-4-3" just to read a short story? Fuck that.

https://www.mutedhorn.net/memento-dvd-guide

What in gods name...

[Rizla]

It's a shame the commentaries are no more, they could be a real unexpected treat. Eg, Dr Terror's House of Horrors, 90 minutes of Freddie Francis getting mildly irritated with the silly questions and not remembering Alan Freeman's nickname. Yes please.

[checkoutgirl]

If I recall correctly, he fucks off with about 15 mins of the film left to go.

When he was making the film itself or the DVD commentary?

[Replies From View]

For Batman and Robin I think the documentary is better than the commentary.  The discussion about the toyetic aspects of the movie is hilarious.

[The Mollusk]

DVD menus for me occupy a space in the mind that exists alongside dull, warm nights where you and your mate fall asleep stoned on his sticky leather sofas and you wake up feeling bloated because you ate a curry and a whole tube of Pringles and three big Bounty cookies and the menu is there, still awake, never sleeping, repeating its incessant soundbites and 22.5 seconds (you know, you counted it) of incidental soundtrack. The tiny gap where the music fades out and stops for a second before starting the loop again feels like a great chasm has ripped open inside your skull, it's somehow louder and lonelier than anything you've ever experienced before. Your mate is snoring. You can't sleep. The menu is your only company.

[mjwilson]

The few blu rays I have seem to be capable of much more advanced menu stuff, are there any especially creative blu rays?

The LOST Blu Ray sets remember where you're up to within the season even if you put the wrong disc in.
Which doesn't sound that creative, now that I type it out, but it does make me wonder why that wasn't more common.

[Helvetica Scenario]

The Beastie Boys Video Anthology DVD from around 2000 was a thing of beauty: https://www.criterion.com/films/638-beastie-boys-video-anthology

It was the only time I ever saw the mysterious 'angle' button put to use. You"d use it to seamlessly switch the video to different takes or versions of scenes, plus you can switch between different audio tracks to hear different mixes including instrumental and acapella versions. It was a real killer app for DVD and highlighted how little the medium was put to use overall.

It's still available it seems: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Video-Anthology-DVD-Beastie-Boys/dp/B00006IU5Q/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=Beastie+boys&qid=1626807926&s=dvd&sr=1-4

[notjosh]

I worked at a DVD authoring company for a while in the dying days of the format. Unfortunately I don't think I have anything useful to add to what's been said already.

I do remember them telling me that they'd done some Chris Morris DVDs (can't remember which ones) in the early days and that he'd come down and been quite involved in the process as he was interested in the possibilities of the medium.

Also if anyone has It Always Rains on Sunday on DVD (and possibly blu-ray) then you will see me in the menu if you watch it for long enough.

[Replies From View]

I always felt that the Chris Morris DVDs wanted to be experimental with the medium but were never brilliantly creative, and should have just included some decent extra features instead.

[petril]

DVD menus for me occupy a space in the mind that exists alongside dull, warm nights where you and your mate fall asleep stoned on his sticky leather sofas and you wake up feeling bloated because you ate a curry and a whole tube of Pringles and three big Bounty cookies and the menu is there, still awake, never sleeping, repeating its incessant soundbites and 22.5 seconds (you know, you counted it) of incidental soundtrack. The tiny gap where the music fades out and stops for a second before starting the loop again feels like a great chasm has ripped open inside your skull, it's somehow louder and lonelier than anything you've ever experienced before. Your mate is snoring. You can't sleep. The menu is your only company.

that one second is harrowing. like knowing you could drag your childhood best friend off the railway line, but you don't. yet again.

[BJBMK2]

I always felt that the Chris Morris DVDs wanted to be experimental with the medium but were never brilliantly creative, and should have just included some decent extra features instead.

The design/layout of the jam DVD  menus are perfect, completely suiting the tone of the show, and clearly had a lot of effort and time put into them. It doesn't surprise me to hear above that Morris himself was involved with them.

The actual content behind said menu's, mind...

[peanutbutter]

It was the only time I ever saw the mysterious 'angle' button put to use.

A quick google suggests no one managed to find a way for it to work that wasn't mostly a nuisance, asides from low budget porn. Was probably great for low budget porn, though ("fuck it, lets just shoot with 3 cameras and let them edit it themselves")

[greenman]

I seem to remember a few disks used it for branching little interviews/features at certain points.

[purlieu]

Is it because they wouldn't have been allowed to? I think DVD player manufacturers had to get a licence to access the decryption code for the DVD, which I imagine involved signing something that said they wouldn't do that.

The last time I used VLC Media Player it skipped straight to the root menu, which was really relieving.

The Red Dwarf ones are a great example of an idea that's creative but ultimately tedious: the first time you watch it, Starbug flying into the ship, the camera following a Skutter along the corridors, etc. it's a lot of fun, but when you've popped the disc in to watch Quarantine or it's time for the latest Ganymede & Titan commentary and you have to sit through the unskippable menu for the 93rd time it gets really, really grating. Also the series 3 extras menus were experimental and incompatible with certain players, meaning they were reissued with optional text-only menus. I could use them, but only just.

The Men Behaving Badly DVDs were similar in terms of nice idea on paper, tedium in reality, offering bloopers only if you could get quiz questions right - fun once or twice, but eventually tiring. And the Jingle Balls Christmas special following the VHS format by having the bloopers before the episode was a really fucking stupid idea, although I suppose it was at least more easily skippable on DVD.

Any menu that shows clips can fuck right off, because it automatically assumes you've seen the series / film before which is a ludicrous assumption.

In general agreement with the previous mentions of Morris and Partridge DVDs, and I'd like to throw the Look Around You ones in as well. They're wonderfully in keeping with the aesthetics of the two series, beautifully animated, and of course lead to loads of really fun extras, including pages from Ceefax, and a Medibot song. The two IAP ones are so wonderful, the Travel Tavern theme of the first and the bass playing of the second are just lots of fun to navigate.

It definitely takes me back to the early '00s when I got my first DVD player and the whole thing seemed really exciting. Easter eggs were always fun, and if you couldn't find them through the menus you could manually select titles and chapters and find anything you'd missed, including alternate angles and such. The BluRay player I bought a couple of years ago doesn't have the title/chapter number selection or the angle option at all, meaning things are often harder - or indeed impossible - to find. I bought a couple of films to take with me when I went to university with my first DVD-compatible laptop; after quickly returning home my next DVD purchases were the first three series of Red Dwarf, and I suppose they spoiled me, despite the infuriating menus. The DVD I bought after that was The Altogether by Orbital, released to accompany the album with videos for every song, an extended 24 minute version of the final track, a bonus studio track, some live footage, and loads of alternate versions of videos using the angle function. The menus were gorgeous and I spent hours exploring every single hidden extra on it, it was almost like a game. For the most part, DVDs have been a downhill experience ever since those early experiences.

Here's one to make you feel even older: remember when DVDs used to include booklets?

[Zetetic]

The issue is it'd break a lot of stuff too.

Automatically skipping short videos might (although there's a fairly healthy heuristic of skipping anything ahead of the first menu), but ignoring the "User operation prohibition" flag doesn't cause any issues - as others have hinted at, these days, you'd have to deliberately search out a software player that respected it.

(It does probably help that software players can more easily expose other ways to navigate around the disc, which means it's less of a problem if the disc has been aggressively authored in a way to make things more of a pain.)

[greenman]

Here's one to make you feel even older: remember when DVDs used to include booklets?

Rather pointless ones with just a chapter listening in them.

I mean these days a lot of 3rd party labels include booklets in releases, the whole culture of extras has shifted much more to those kinds of releases rather than the studios themselves.

[purlieu]

I suppose I'm back in Red Dwarf territory again - the BBC releases would include a 12 page booklet, but none of the Dave ones have had any paperwork. Mind you, the BBC authorised a release of a 4 disc boxset of extras and Remastered episodes, which is unthinkable these days.

[Magnum Valentino]

Angles are occasionally used to good effect on concert DVDs, so you can watch one or two songs focusing on a single musician if you wish.

The DVD version of Definitely Maybe was great. Play the album and at any time, the press of a directional button would either take you to a live version of the song, a video (for the singles) or a chapter from the main feature documentary about that song. It was really well assembled and in lovely packaging.

[non capisco]

Rewatching all of The Sopranos via blu-ray boxset a few years ago was in many ways a joyous experience but I still occasionally hear the looped section of the start of that sodding theme tune from the menu screen. It'll be playing in some recess of my brain forever now. *harmonica burst* REEEEER-REEEEER-OW!

[AsparagusTrevor]

"...and repeats, and repeats, until you are deranged"

[Magnum Valentino]

Rewatching all of The Sopranos via blu-ray boxset a few years ago was in many ways a joyous experience but I still occasionally hear the looped section of the start of that sodding theme tune from the menu screen. It'll be playing in some recess of my brain forever now. *harmonica burst* REEEEER-REEEEER-OW!

Same, I know exactly what you mean, with the bass line underneath and the percussion. I even went as far as to download them in the end, about halfway through watching the series on Blu-Ray. I couldn't get past the fact that unlike most Blu-Rays they wouldn't remember where you were in an episode if you resumed playback, and having to sit through those menus every time wasn't worth the five minutes or so of loading up the old PS3 in the living room.

[Replies From View]

I seem to remember a few disks used it for branching little interviews/features at certain points.

The first Matrix release had a 'follow the white rabbit' option that broke the pace of the film with its interruptions and made you realise why movies and their behind the scenes documentaries are standardly kept separate.

[Replies From View]

The DVD version of Definitely Maybe was great. Play the album and at any time, the press of a directional button would either take you to a live version of the song, a video (for the singles) or a chapter from the main feature documentary about that song. It was really well assembled and in lovely packaging.

*puts hand up*