# DVD: am I the only one highly dissatisfied? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 6, 2004, 6:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968 "2004-01-06T06:54:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ms2001](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ms2001/32/18463_2.png) [@Ms2001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms2001)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/41 "2004-01-08T01:28:30Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Avalonian \* > \*\*Yes, but that’s a marketing choice [not being able to skip commercials], not a limitation of the medium itself. Yell at the film companies who package the films that way… or praise the ones who don’t. \*\* It’s both. The limitation of the medium is that it lets the DVD author mark the commercials as unskippable, by disabling the buttons you could use to skip them, and the DVD players are required to obey that. This “feature” is called Prohibited User Operations. VHS tapes can still include commercials at the beginning, but the studios can’t _force_ you to watch them in order to see the movie, like they can with DVDs. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/42 "2004-01-08T06:58:44Z")
I do have to admit that I have seen a lot of pirates off of screener tapes. We even used to have a bunch of screener tapes around our old dorm, because someone’s mother was involved in movies, and he’d take them home on breaks. We’d always amaze people by watching movies that were still in theaters. ---
**Author:** ![Alereon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecd19e/32.png) [@Alereon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alereon)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/43 "2004-01-08T14:15:49Z")
The HD-DVD standard is finished. It’s based on the Advanced Optical Disk to improve storage capacity, raising it to 30GB per dual-layer disc. Additionally, new video formats are supported, including Microsoft Windows Media Video 9, and the MPEG4-AVC (Advanced Video Coding) standard using H.264. This should help what is DVD’s only major flaw IMHO, poor image quality compared to the standards of today. 720x480 just doesn’t cut it, especially when MPEG2’s method of storing colors results in a color resolution of only 360x240, comparable to VHS. What we REALLY need is a standard that allows for much higher framerates, 24fps to 30fps REALLY doesn’t come close to cutting it. ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/44 "2004-01-08T14:44:10Z")
DVDs are superior to any tape format but what do I know- I chose a Beta as my first VCR. I have found a few rentals that have a bad spot that at best causes a momentary blur and at worst make a part of the movie unwatchable. My biggest beef is sometimes the fricking menu takes forever to come up and sometimes doesn’t even have one. Also, I prefer full screen format but that seems to be heading toward extinction. I only hope that new technology will be backward compatible with my ever growing DVD collection. ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ccd318/32.png) [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/45 "2004-01-08T14:57:11Z")
For those of us who live in warm climates, DVDs are a godsend. My wife in Panama can leave the DVDs outside our “dry” closet. Here in Saudi Arabia, I can smuggle the smaller format though customs fairly easily. Special circumstances I am sure, but to me the smaller size and durability are serious advantages. ---
**Author:** ![netscape\_6](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/8c91f0/32.png) [@netscape\_6](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/netscape_6)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/46 "2004-01-08T15:28:23Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Apollyon \* > \*\*There is a difference between Region Free players and true multizone – which may be automatic switching or manual. > > I’m not sure what is available local to you, but the player I have now is a Mustek 560 – the newer version of which the 56L sells locally for about NZ$110 (US$75) – and I have had no problems playing any of my Zone 1, 2 and 4 discs (mix of Pal and NTSC) or any of the RCE discs designed not to work on region free players. > > The Mustek automatically switches zones but there is also access to a menu to manually switch to make the player a “true” Zone 1 or whatever if that is necessary. I’m sure that other multizone players would offer similar features. > > I’m not sure I buy in to the cheap player equals problems argument. The player I had before this was a Phillips that (adjusting for falling prices in technology over time) was worth 3-4 times as much as the Mustek and was much less reliable for playing discs – not multizone problems – sometimes it would just decide not to play a certain disc that would work fine on other players. \*\* I did not know those existed. I need a new DVD player anyway ($40 dollar (guesing about $60 for you) POS thing I had quite working). Maybe I’ll import one. Thank you very much. ---
**Author:** ![Lagged2Death](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ac8455/32.png) [@Lagged2Death](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lagged2Death)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/47 "2004-01-08T17:26:19Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Aeschines \* > **1. Incomplete system. You can watch, but you can’t record. Oh wait: you _can_ record, but there are two incompatible formats. Twenty years on, we can still play the same CDs, burn CDs at will, and all is well. How will DVDs be doing in that regard in 20 years?** I agree that this could have been handled better, but you may be glossing over the development of CD-R systems a bit. It’s true that CD burning is (mostly) sorted-out now, but it took about 8-10 years of chaos, poor performance and compatibility problems to get to this point, so it’s not too surprising that recordable DVDs will have some teething problems too. I wish that DVD had been conceived of as a _data storage system_ first and foremost, with consumer video players designed to work with it, rather than as a consumer-entertainment system with general purpose data storage tacked on later. With the example of CD, CD-ROM and CD-R to learn from, you’d think the designers would have thought this way too, but I guess engineering takes a back seat to instant marketability - over and over again. > [@](#): > > **2. Country codes. These codes prevent a DVD intended for one market from being played in a player for another market… Given the chance to make a truly universal system, the greedy makers gave us this shit. Totally unacceptable.** I basically agree. This is (and I’m serious) un-American, anti-capitalistic, antedeluvian, luddite garbage. A step backwards for the Information Age. > [@](#): > > **3. Shitty interface. Am I the only one who thinks this? The DVD controller, in my experience, is extremely counter-intuitive and hard to use. No, it’s not rocket science, but the first time I used the thing, the menus were very hard to figure out, and the ff and rewind perfectly pissy. In contrast, the LD controller is a model of simplicity. It has a wheel that you can thumb for ff and rw at various speeds.** The issue I have with DVD control is the DVD menus, not the rewind/fast forward stuff. It seems all the frustrated mystery-meat web designers from the dot-com crash decided to design annoying, time-wasting animated DVD menus instead. For an example, check out the menus on the _Tomb Raider_ disc - it must take 10-15 seconds to switch from, say, scene selection to special features. Abysmal, but that’s not, strictly speaking, the DVD system’s fault. (Of course, if you argued that the menu was actually _saving_ you from watching the wreckage that was _Tomb Raider_, I wouldn’t argue.) And there’s no consistency; on some menus, merely highlighting an item selects it, other times you have to press Enter to select it, etc. If you’re willing to shell out US$200 or more, you can a DVD player with “shuttle wheel” style controls, although they’re not terribly common. > [@](#): > > **4. Flippers. A problem with LD was that you had to flip over the disc. Some longish DVDs still require this.** Just as record albums grew in length to fill up more of a CD, home-video releases (like Lord Of The Rings extended-edition trilogy) have grown in size to take advantage of the format. There will always be a few releases like this. I think you’re reaching a bit on this one. > [@](#): > > **5. Scratches. The good thing about a DVD is that it will play forever IF you don’t scratch it… How much of a problem has this been?** I’ve had pretty good luck with rented DVDs. There have been a few I couldn’t play, but probably no more than unplayable VHS tapes. I probably own 40-50 DVDs now, including quite a few old rental discs, and AFAIK, all of them play fine. This is another spot where better engineering could have saved the day and made this a non-issue. It was originally proposed that CDs be encased in a hard shell, like 3.5" floppy discs. Later it was decided that they could be made cheaper if they used a lot of error correction instead of a protective shell. When DVDs were developed, it was considered an absolute requirement (for consumer acceptance) that the DVD players work with CDs, so DVDs couldn’t have a hard shell either. As it turned out, while CDs and DVDs are much heartier than LPs ever were, neither is as impervious to scratches as consumers were originally told, and both could have been a _lot_ tougher if the deveolpers had been thinking about the long term at the outset - circa 1981. > [@](#): > > \*\*6. EVD. China has said “Fuck this” to the whole DVD mess and is pioneering its own system. Who can blame them? They didn’t feel like shelling out royalties for this shyte system… > > 1. Looming obsolescence. I’m not fain to shell out bux to build a DVD collection, as I can’t imagine this system being around in 10 years…\*\* Consumer electronics and the computer biz have been changing so fast lately that these sorts of problems will exist for almost any new format, even a better-thought-out one than DVD. All in all, I like DVDs well enough to buy them, rent them, etc. But when I learned a little more about them, I was disappointed to see that they weren’t as great as they might have been. ---
**Author:** ![prisoner6655321](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5f8ce5/32.png) [@prisoner6655321](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/prisoner6655321)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/48 "2004-01-08T18:56:58Z")
Am I the only one who remembers when CD recording wasn’t standardized? There were two? competing formats, like there are FOUR competing DVD formats today. ---
**Author:** ![RedFury](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ec9cab/32.png) [@RedFury](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RedFury)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/49 "2004-01-08T19:14:35Z")
Love DVDs. Truly a vast improvement over VHS in every way possible – from picture to sound to available features such as subtitles, different audio tracks and commentary, there’s simply no comparison. None. As a home theater freak for over a decade – way before it was “fashionable” – I would have switched over for the Dolby Digital and/or DTS sound alone. Add the almost 3-D, crystal clear picture you get on a good rear-projection big screen TV and it takes a _lot_ of cajoling to get me out to the movie theaters to watch anything. Next step, a HDTV set along with higher resolution DVDs. This atheist’s idea of heaven on earth. ---
**Author:** ![occ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/8c91f0/32.png) [@occ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/occ)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/50 "2004-01-08T19:57:47Z")
DVDs do have several problems. They are: \*Spacial limitations. These can be somewhat overcome with better compression, but the fact that discs generally can’t contain both the widescreen and pan-and-scan version on a single disc is annoying. \*Generally, bad interfaces. I don’t know why, but I find most DVD players kind of unresponsive. Button clicks take several seconds to register, scrolling through scene lists takes forever, the play/pause/etc stuff can be awkward (and often times, you end up back at the menu), and so forth. This can generally be remedied through better player design, and better design of menu interfaces by the companies that create the media. \*No HDTV support. HDTV will be ubiquitous within, say, 5 years. DVDs don’t take advantage of this higher resolution, so image quality will suffer. \*Scratch-a-bility. DVDs (and all disc formats) should really be packaged in caddies (like how first-gen CDROMS often were). This completely eliminates scratching concerns, but it also likely doubles or triples the cost of producing a disc, which is probably why it isn’t done. That said, they’re vastly superior to any tape-based medium. Ideally, the format would have been designed with open-ended compression algorithms (the algorithm for each disc could be stored on the disc itself, and booted into the memory of the player), which would allow more space as better compression is developed. I suspect that within a few years, an “upgraded” DVD format will be introduced (“DVD+”, maybe?), which will address various issues. ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2004, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/51 "2004-01-08T20:35:21Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by occ \* > \*Spacial limitations. These can be somewhat overcome with better compression, but the fact that discs generally can’t contain both the widescreen and pan-and-scan version on a single disc is annoying. Depends on the disc. My DVD version of _The Iron Giant_ has pan-and-scan and widescreen versions on one disc. You simply flip the disc to get the format you want. That said, given the inherent inferiority of pan-and-scan stuff anyway (oh, great, mutilate the movie to make it fit in a smaller screen), IMO the space would be better used for extra features and goodies anyway. Screw the pan-and-scan crap, gimmie the director’s commentaries, art design, behind-the-scenes… ---
**Author:** ![John\_Harrison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b5ac83/32.png) [@John\_Harrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Harrison)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2004, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968/52 "2004-01-09T00:52:21Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by rjung \* > \*\*That said, given the inherent inferiority of pan-and-scan stuff anyway (oh, great, mutilate the movie to make it fit in a smaller screen), IMO the space would be better used for extra features and goodies anyway. Screw the pan-and-scan crap, gimmie the director’s commentaries, art design, behind-the-scenes… \*\* Amen to that brother. Although I prefer the terms pan & cram or fool screen. 😉 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dvd-am-i-the-only-one-highly-dissatisfied/222968.md?page=2)