Stop making “special” “anniversary” or “high school reunion” (WTF?) edition DVDs without putting any extras on them! (I’m looking at you, Breakfast Club!) It has all the earmarks of a neat-o *Goonies *style nostalgia-fest, but you don’t have any treats for me!
I understand you may not have scads of old footage lying around and that last thing Ally Sheedy wants to do now that she’s a Serious Indy Actress is admit she was in a John Hughes flick 20 years ago by doing a current interview. And it’s likely they were all high on coke, so no one can remember enough of the filming to do a commentary. That’s OK. So just release the darn movie in a plain darn cover without a misleading “Craptacular Super Dooper Edition” blaze on it!
DVDs with long, crappy animation sequences in the menus.
I’m a huge fan of the BBC show Spooks, which is something like 24, to give you a quick comparison. I love it so much that I bought seasons 1 & 2 on DVD from the UK. You can have them when you pull them from my cold, dead fingers.
But the freakin’ menus are annoying. There’s this looooonnnnnggg (1-2 minute) scene where a guy dressed in all-black - Ninja-style - breaks in to MI5 headquarters. So you’re forced to watch him sneak down hallways, avoid video cameras, slide through doors, etc. When he finally gets to someone’s desk, you’re actually at (the completely non-intuitive) menu. You have to click on this rack of CD-ROMs on the desktop to get to the episode listing, and when you finally figure out which episode you want to watch and click on it, the guy sllllloooowwwllly takes the episode out of the rack, opens the case and puts it into the desktop computer’s CD-ROM drive.
It drives me nuts. Sure, it’s sort of fun the first time. But any time thereafter I just sit there, grinding my teeth, wishing I could just get a simple episode list that I could click on instead of some interface that looks like a bad CD-ROM version of a game about the show.
To make matters even worse, I got one of the very first versions of the Season 2 box set which has episodes 1 & 2 on “Disc 2” and episodes 3 & 4 on “Disc 1”. At least that’s an honest mistake and not a “feature”. I coulda sent it back to Amazon UK for a replacement but didn’t wanna wait 6 weeks to get it back.
That still would not be “panned and scanned”, which refers to the 1.33:1 image actually moving back and forth across a widescreen field to follow the action. I even hesitate to call it a “cropped” image, because the menu designers are conscious that most screens showing the DVD will be 1.33:1, and they design the menus accordingly, as you say, to include all important information within that aspect ratio.
I feel your pain, Skott. I got the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer* on DVD for Christmas. There were some things that really annoyed me…
There’s a little sound clip that plays right when you start an episode. In a couple of cases, it gave away a key plot point. I wanted the first season on DVD because I’ve never seen the first season. Don’t give away plot points when I hit play!
When I press the “Top Menu” button on my DVD remote, I expect to be taken to the top menu. On the Buffy* DVD’s, it takes you to the top menu of that specific episode, and you have to navigate up from there.
If there’s only one set of special features on the disc, then put it in the top menu! The top menu shows four episodes. Go into any one of them, and you see a submenu that shows “play,” “pick a scene,” “special features,” etc. I went through the special features on the first episode, and then went to the second episode only to find they were the same bloody special features.
I want to know why nobody has made a player that ignores the broken FF and Menu button commands. They already have players that ignore region codes. How hard is it to not write the code that checks for allowable options on a given clip?
Some drone at Fye’s slapped the sale price stickers on Spiderman 2 DVDs in the upper left (i.e. right over the first part of the word “WIDESCREEN” or “FULLSCREEN”. To be fair, they didn’t have any problem with exchanging it when I came back.
Another related rant: Do not block out the top and bottom of the television image and call the result “widescreen”. This is how a bunch of scenes in the Babylon 5 DVDs were rendered in “widescreen” after it turned out that some putz at Warners’ had lost the SFX rendering files needed to redo the post-production for (proper) widescreen.
I think DVD Player manufacturers are equally at fault. STOP should never be locked out. In fact, my DVD player should do what I tell it, not what the disc tells it. I can do it on my computer, why not the standalone player?
Does anyone know of a DVD player that does this and will never say “That operation is prohibited in disc now”? Or one that has a “go to the movie right now dammit” button? Someone should make one, I’d be first in line.
Also, please make the menus clear and readable! Do not make the menu selections revolve so you see them backwards, then forwards.
I second the repetitive soundtrack on the menu, and the spoilers, and the damnannoyingstupidirrititating cut scenes every time you switch menus. What’s worse is when you accidentally click on the wrong menu, and have to go back.
Widescreen and fullscreen should always be available in the same package! You know, I like widescreen best, but occasionally I like certain scenes to be fullscreen. Anyway, I’m paying $20 + for it, so put them both in!
Also, I like subtitles, as long as I can get to the menu option. In almost every movie I’d say, there’s a line that’s muttered or shouted over swelling music, and you can never hear what they say!* I hate when they do’t have subtititles.
My favorite example of this: Indiana Jones and the last Crusade,when Marcus Brody is in Turkey, wandering through crowds of people, says “Water? No, no fish make love in it” in a very proper British accent that makes me crack up every time. I could never fully understand it before subtitles!
It’s probably not difficult at all, as there are certainly software players that do this already. However, it’s probably fear of reprisals from the MPAA that keeps them from doing this. Region-locked players are illegal in some countries (New Zealand, IIRC) which is part of the reason that region-free players are even made in the first place. And (as you probably already know) many region-free hardware players weren’t shipped that way, but can be made that way by entering a “secret menu” or from updated (illegal) firmware. Because it’s impractical to expect DVD hardware makers to actuallly produce 8 different players, they typically only make one player and set the region at the factory.
In Australia, the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) ruled that region coding was unfair to consumers and breached the Trades Practices Act (Word Doc). But it has no legal power behind it, it just gives DVD player distributors a good excuse to only sell region-free players and not be investigated over it. However, for some reason all the DVD-Roms I’ve encountered are still region-locked.
You rip out the extras? I’ve never understood people who do this. The whole point of DVDs is all those extra goodies! I do agree with you about the useless foreign language tracks…umm, your friend, that is.
Also…the layer break. I know that layer breaks can’t be avoided with double-layered DVDs, but can you at least make them less obtrusive? This isn’t as big a problem with movies as it is with music concerts – I hate jamming out with “Starship Trooper” or “Trial of Tears” when suddenly that 2-second pause kicks in, right in the middle of the song! How hard would it be to move the break another two minutes down the program so it occurs between songs instead?
Well, it depends on the movie. As you know, most feature films are on dual layer DVDs while most DVD burners are single layer (and even though dual layer burners are out there, blank DL media is still quite expensive).
Using a popular program that SHRINKs your DVDs (wink, wink) some films can have a decent bitrate left on them by just removing any extra sound tracks on them. Others (The Last Samurai, for one) take such a hit by converting them from dual to single layer that it’s best to ditch the extras and keep only the movie. On some discs (Kill Bill, Volume 1 comes to mind) almost half the DVD is dedicated to extras you might watch once; I prefer to keep the movie instead.
It’s all about your priorities, I guess. This is a zero-sum game, the zero-sum being the 4.7GB you can fit onto a single-layer DVD-R disc. You can keep the extras, and your movie will take a massive bitrate hit and not look as good. Or you can ditch the extras and have only a movie (but one that looks as good as the original). Take your pick.
Ooooo! Good point. It also brings to mind another problem that I’ve run into from time to time:
Let me access subtitles and alternate audio from within the movie! Most of you are okay, but I can’t believe that there are those of you that will actually prevent me from doing this on some DVDs! I press the button to change one or the other and a big red circle with a slash through it come up. What is it, sloppy programming? Why in the world would you not want me to be able to switch from commentary to commentary, or from english to french to spanish subtitles while I’m watching the movie? If I want to read what some actor is saying because of your sloppy sound editing, let me!
And, as some other people brought up…
Get rid of DVD region codes! Believe it or not, there is some quality films and programs from other countries. And I cannot watch them because of you (and my desire not to use a sodering iron)… and there are no plans to release them in my region. Has this business model made you one more red cent? It prevents me from watching many of my DVDs with my Spanish-only friends and family. The fact that region-free DVD players have found a business niche show just how dumb this idea was.
Layer breaks are chosen at a chapter stop. Chapter stops are chosen for different reasons than a layer break, so sometimes there is a difficult decision to make in what’s the most appropriate.
Not true…though I wish it was! All concert DVDs I’ve seen have each song as a separate chapter.
One DVD where this is important is Criterion’s edition of The Tin Drum. The two audio tracks (original mono and 5.1 remastered) are “timed” differently, so there’s a different subtitle track for each. Not sure why that matters or if it even does, but they have an explicit warning not to play the wrong subtitle track for each audio track.
Ooh, ooh I thought of another one! NO TIME DISPLAY! Quite a few DVDs only read -:–:-- when you play the extras! That is SO annoying because I always hit “Time Remaining” when I’m watching something really boring, or if I need to stop the DVD for some reason. Rarely you’ll get one with the movie itself affected, but they are very common on the extras (the Futurama box set, in particular.) What on earth could disable the time function, anyway?
I’m not sure if I can quite explain this - I have a widescreen set. I have the DVD player plugged into one of the composite inputs. The TV has different modes for display. Since about all of the DVD’s we watch are widescreen in one format or another, I leave it set up for widescreen. On a lot of the movies, that means that when the menu is on screen, there are menu items that are off the top or bottom. I wind up having to switch the display to a different format sometimes if I want to get to the extras. It’s a real minor thing, but it annoys me a little.
Well, I won’t argue that with you personally. I hate the region system. But with Hollywood it all comes down to money. They still make a huge amount of money off the box office, so they’d rather an Australian family of four actually go to the cinema to see a movie than order the DVD off Amazon. For blockbuster films, Hollywood can charge theatre owners up to 90% of the ticket price, so they make out like bandits on opening day (although to be fair to the studios, their vig decreases after the first weekend, and for most movies Hollywood’s take is far less - but still a substantial part of your ticket price). Anyway, if we assume a 50% take on 4 $10 tickets, that’s $20 versus the $5 - $7 they’ll make on the DVD.
Also, you probably already know that DVDs are more expensive in places outside of North America, even when taking into account exchange rates and taxation. One of Hollywood’s greatest fears is that people all over the world would start ordering DVDs from Amazon or wherever instead of paying $5 more for each of them at their local shops. Of course, this also works the other way - people in “developed countries” buying DVDs from overseas for cheap instead of paying more money for them at Blockbuster or Best Buy. Take South Korea - they use the same NTSC system we do and certain types of DVDs (like Superbit) are not region-encoded, so you could order the Superbit “Super Deluxe Version” of Black Hawk Down for around $22 shipped, while Amazon wanted $39.99 for it. I know 'cos I did.
One thing you’ve also got to take into account is not only the region system, but the different video format as well. Just because a player is region-free doesn’t mean that it can automatically play PAL discs, especially anamorphic ones. That’s why I bought a DVD player with two chips - one to handle the PAL>NTSC conversion and another to deal with the anamorphic aspect. So just having a region-free player is not enough. And yes, I actually had a friend that bought a cheap-ass DVD player from somewhere that was region-free but could not play PAL discs… I wonder how many region 2 NTSC discs floating around out there…
Having said all of that, I still agree with you - region code SUCK! RCE sucks too!
Commentary timing. I can’t stand the commentaries that are a few seconds behind what is going on on-screen. Take an hour and edit the comments so they line up with what’s going on. I hate having to reverse my DVD to catch that funny thing that happened in the background that I wasn’t told about until after it’s happened.
And for those companies that put TV shows on DVD, allow me to give you the standard set up for chapter breaks, OK?
Any warnings, or messages. CHAPTER STOP
Opening Credits. CHAPTER STOP
Segment 1 CHAPTER STOP (at the commercial break).
Segment 2 CHAPTER STOP (at the commercial break).
Segment 3 CHAPTER STOP (at the commercial break).
End credits.
I can’t stand TV series that can’t get this right! If I’m going to watch a full season of some beloved 70s sitcom, I do not need to sit through the full opening and closing credits for every episode!
