I’m looking at you, Stargate SG1. :mad:
And speaking of subtitles (I am also a fan of them) have you noticed that when you select the subtitle choice from the menu that it always defaults to being off in the next menu. WTF. Default to English or something. Why would I select subtitles if I didn’t want them?
And Futurama, and Monk, and…
For that matter, I hate movies with as few as eight chapter breaks in the whole thing. Of course, on the other side of the coin there’s Awakenings, which has a whopping SIXTY-THREE chapters! That’s almost a chapter for every camera angle!
FYI: Japan uses the NTSC system, and is region 2. So, anything made for the Japanese market will work.
Amen! I recently got the Pee Wee’s Playhouse DVD set, and it’s set up so that if you attempt to skip through the nearly three minute long opening, you fly right into the middle of the episode. The Pee Wee song is great, but I forgot how LONG it was. There’s almost a minute’s worth of that hawaiian music before the Ragtime song even starts!
The most amazingly bad DVD interface I’ve ever is for “The Order, From Cremaster 3.” If you don’t know, “the Cremaster Cycle” is a series of super-pretentious abstract art films, and “The Order” is the only DVD available of anything from the cycle. The DVD’s interface is basically an obtuse piece of abstract art - there are no labels or instructions or anything. If you want to hear some hilariously infuriated reactions, go here.
Here’s one that’s really driven me nuts lately - on TV show DVD’s, I’d like to be able to select “play all” as an option
without starting at the first episode. The aforementioned Pee-Wee discs cram almost 10 episodes onto each disc, and it’s irritating to keep being sent back to the menu when one episode finishes because there’s no way to do “play all” starting from, say, the third episode on the disc onward.
I live quite a distance from the town where my video store is, so I can’t rent a movie for a long weekend without incurring a late fee.
So, I rent the movie on Friday afternoon, rip the DVD to my laptop, return the disk, and watch the movie at leisure over the weekend. I don’t have a DVD burner, so I can’t make a copy (there really aren’t many movies I want to keep, anyway), but, my laptop’s hard drive is small enough that I generally run it through the shrink program anyway, to bring it down to 4.75 gigs.
On several occasions I have compared the unshrunk and the shrunk versions, and I can’t see a noticeable difference at compression rates up to 50%.
Works for me.
If you’re going to release a super deluxe edition of every episode of a long runnug TV show, why oh why do you have to put every single disc in a full sized case? I don’t need to take up two feet of shelf space to store The Avengers or Monty Pyhton. What’s wrong with slim cases or special packaging such as Babylon 5???
In Futurma’s defense, though, it does have a changing opening, with the opening tag and the closing classic cartoon. Monk probably has the same thing, with special guest appearances appearing in the opening credits. And, call me weird, but if MST3K didn’t have the opening song for each of its episodes, I’d probably be mad 
(although my wife would be happier).
However, not having appropriate chapter breaks to allow people to skip past repetitive theme songs and imagery is really inexcusable. I’ve been renting the Lupin III DVDs and they seem to have it right: Chapter break right after the the opening, breaks surrounding the commercial intros, a break at the end credits, and a break at the next episode preview.
I picked up the DVD of Macross: Love–Do You Remember? (the movie version of the TV series that became the first part of ROBOTECH) last year. If I recall correctly, not only did that disc have a high number of chapter stops, it had no chapter menu. I found this out the hard way when, the second time I put it into the good old PS2, I had to repeatedly hit the next chapter button to pick up where I left off.
What were they thinking?
Most anime DVDs I’ve picked up, both Region 2J and Region 1, have the chapter stops so that you can skip the opening sequence easily. One company (AnimEigo) did a series box set that cut the OP and ED out of every episode but the first, and found to their surprise that there was a large group of people who insisted on having it on every episode. So, on their Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV box set, they somehow managed to program an option in the menus to skip the opening and ending automatically.
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Ah, Lupin III. Today I managed to pick up a Lupin III Zippo lighter for about $4 American. Gotta love Japanese arcades, they have the best prizes in those “claw games.”
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Yeah, that bugs me too. The best workaround I’ve found is this: each episode tends to be in a separate “title” from the others. So, pick “play all”, then after the first episode begins, use your remote to skip from title 1 to title 3 (or wherever you want to begin). For most discs, this means your player will remember the “play all” instruction and proceed through the episodes from wherever you began.
Failing that, I chapter-skip through the first episodes until I get to where I want to be.
AMEN! The worst use of this is in the DVD for Snow White. The menu has the mirror-on-the wall saying stupid things over and over and over. So here you have a nice, sweet movie that reminds you of the old days followed by a menu that keeps repeating things like “Make a selection. I don’t have all day. I’m just hanging around …” Ugh
I wish all DVDs had a “play all” feature with each section of special features. No, I do not want to have to select each and every deleted scene. I’m pretty sure no one has ever wanted such a thing. About 40% of the movies I’ve rented lately have been lacking this simple feature.
Furthermore, I am not going to watch the entire movie with commentary. Doesn’t interest me to have someone randomly talking over the scenes. I know some people are into that, so by all means, include it as an option. However, the special features should contain only the relevant scenes with commentary so I can watch just that. Doesn’t seem to be a common practice yet.
If we’re going to be picking on movies/TV shows with inadequate chapter stops, I submit 24. In season one (I don’t know about the other seasons as I haven’t watched them) there are no chapter stops. This is an enormous pain in the *ss when the disk becomes scratched (as popular rentals seem to do) and you can’t skip to the next chapter and rewind to after the scratched part. Also, if there’s a scratch 35 minutes into the episode which jumps you back to minute 2, you have to fast forward 33 minutes (which takes some time) and then hope the disk doesn’t get hung up again and bounce you back to minute 2 again.
Jesus freaking bad names…
Tenebras
The worst of the worst for insufficient chapter stops is Mulholland Dr.
One. Fucking. Chapter.