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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I basically agree. This is (and I’m serious) un-American, anti-capitalistic, antedeluvian, luddite garbage. A step backwards for the Information Age.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Amen to that brother.
Although I prefer the terms pan & cram or fool screen. 