Man, that is one weird DVD. Anyone been through the second disc??
Do you like that strange navigation or did you find it annoying? I’m leaning toward annoying, myself.
and where the heck is the “extra footage” that is advertized???
I found it! I found it! It’s a huge pain in the ass but I found it!
Warner Brothers doesn’t exactly have a spiffy track record when it comes to producing DVDs, and I was hoping they would break that trend with the “Harry Potter” DVD.
They let me down. Don’t get me wrong…I’m glad to have this DVD (in widescreen format, of course), but jeez, the second disc is so bloody annoying, and the vast majority of the material on it could only have appeal to someone under the age of 10.
The second-disc navigation is definitely annoying, and finding the deleted scenes is a pain in the ass.
For those who are wondering how to find the scenes and would rather not spend an hour or two looking for them, this page on the official Harry Potter website will give you the step-by-step directions.
Wish I’d found that before I did it all myself. I documented my process in my journal here: http://www.livejournal.com/talkpost.bml?journal=opalcat&itemid=837772
Hmm. Seems their way is different from mine. And easier.
There’s two ways to get there. I tried the hard way first with the potions class and eventually gave up when I had to go through it several times. (as there’s more than one right answer to the last question if you look in the book, a fact which annoyed me greatly) My younger brother eventually took over and went through all the menus…which annoyed me even more because I’m the big fan of the house, not him.
I hate the layout…absolutely hate it. Though I do like watching the deleted scenes, so I suffer through it anyway.
jessica
Thank you!!! I’ve been going mad trying to figure out where the extra footage was!!
I hated the 2nd disc layout and just gave up on it the second I realised I’d have to do these silly steps to get to the stuff I wanted. I’ll look at them now as the instructions are given but it’s a waste of time IMO and I really hope that it’s a one off and it doesn’t become common with other DVD’s
Hehe! My mom was going nuts, too. I was IMing with her and she mentioned it, so I broke out my copy, which I hadn’t really gone through before, and my husband and I sat there until we figured it out.
Amazingly the first place I got stopped was on the third potion–and I didn’t even look anything up! Of course on that one, I think I tried every possible combination there was before I hit on the correct one 
Hi Opalcat!
Just checking in with a related point- how good the sound was on the DVD. I have a pretty decent system- and the clarity of the sound, and the use of the surround sound speakers was outstanding.
However, the Menu’s did leave much to be desired.
Yes the sound was awesome. The Quiddich game was awesome in surround sound.
Anything that keeps my kids entertained as long as it did is not a bad thing in my book, and since I bought it for them, not me, I was happy with it.
THANK YOU!
I was going nuts trying to find the deleted scenes. My daughter just got this on DVD; she specifically asked for DVD instead of VHS for all the extras, and damned if I could find them. I think she was about to cry because her idiot mother couldn’t find the deleted scenes.
I hope they don’t do this again for future DVDs.
[off-topic mini-rant]
We just got a DVD player at Christmas, and I really hate how they’re packaged so differently from CDs. I can pop a CD out easily, but not DVDs. This one was especially hard.
It was all I could do to get the daggone disc out of the frigging box without breaking it. Why are CDs so easy to get out, and DVDs so hard to get out? I hate those little indentations around the edge that make you think you can grab the disc. What moron thought those were a good idea?
[/off-topic mini-rant]
On the second disc, what do you do with the owls? When you click on an owl it tells you a sentence or two about it. But can you actually pick one? I tried going back to Gringott’s to pick up the “buttered toast” jelly bean, but apparently when you click on it you eat it – so I couldn’t give “buttered toast” to the snowy owl as the narrator hinted.
So can you “buy” an owl? Or can you only look at them?
You can only look at the owls. Owls are not needed for the Deleted Scenes Quest™.
Unfortunately, all you can do is look at them. I was rather not happy that I wasted all that time clicking on owls and I couldn’t even get them.
jessica
I viewed finding the Deleted Scenes on the second disc as a sort of challenge. Obviously, they intended it as such, though most people don’t seem to pick up on that right away (probably due to poor design, though it didn’t get to me). I got it, though, and figured out how to get to the deleted scenes in about 30 minutes, late on the first night we got it. I din’t mind at all, once I understood that they weren’t just going to “give” them to us.
Then the next day, I had some fun “coaching” my two older daughters on how to find them. To give them credit, they found most of it themselves! My seven-year-old figured it out first… she’s our smart one. She reads all the time, and she remembered most of the Potions stuff from the first book, so that helped too.
Anyway, as Arden Ranger said, it helped keep them occupied, and it was fun for them and for me. I had no problems with it.
I can see why they dumped most of those scenes, though I wish they had kept the “what are friends for?” scene after the troll, and I really don’t understand why they didn’t keep the extended version of Snape’s first Potions class. That confrontation between Harry and Snape really sets up their characters better.
Well, that bites. Why have them if you can’t do anything with them? I wasted a bit of time trying to figure out how to get the owl.
I did find the extra footage. I went to the Potions class and took the quiz. It took me a while since it’s been quite a long time since I’ve read the book (and the answer to one of the questions is in one of the deleted scenes). I didn’t mind having to solve a puzzle to find the extra scenes and the interview, but it would have been nice if it had a “Muggle Menu”.
So has anyone played with the CD-ROM? Anything good on it?