Comment by gwbas1c
8 hours ago
> Modern DVDs and Blu-ray menus alike are often little more than an image or video with a generic menu atop it. It is understandable. Physical media as a whole is less popular with the mass adoption of streaming services;
I disagree; it's because we prefer disks with very simple menus, and care very little about the special features.
Let's think about the alternatives:
VHS: No menus; it would just start the ^%$^# movie (or would have trailers that were easy to fast forward through.)
Streaming: Standard menu no matter what you're watching, and then just starts the ^%$#^$ movie.
FWIW: Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube are all much "faster" than my BluRay player when it comes to getting to the actual content.
Regarding the special features: They were very cool on late 1990s and early 2000s disks, because most of them were promotional bits that would air on TV to promote the movie. They quickly devolved to be more like home movies filmed on the set where the cast and crew would just slap each others' backs for an hour. Useful maybe if you were cast or crew reminiscing, but otherwise rather boring compared to a planned interview or documentary.
I liked features like director commentary and deleted scenes (usually deleted for good reason but still interesting)
A few years ago I hurt one of my shoulders pretty badly, so I could barely move and had to sleep in a sitting / reclined position for almost a week. No keyboards, no computers.
Boy oh boy did that LotR premium extended something-something edition on DVD turn out to be a godsend with the countless hours of behind the scenes footage and interviews, and director's commentary. I watched it all.
Did you find the easter egg with the Elijah Wood prank interview? That's the kind of stuff modern media lacks.
One of my first DVD experiences was the original Blade film, and it had an alternate ending available to play.
That blew my mind and was an awesome experience. In the age of dial-up internet it wasn't like you could find and / or watch that online.
Yeah, early on in the DVD era having deleted scenes and commentary tracks was totally new and a big deal for a lot of us.
In the peak of the DVD era my SO and I were both big movie fans, and at one point had watched literally everything the Blockbuster and Hollywood video in our neighborhood had. There just wasn't the embarrassment of riches of the post youtube world.
DVD supports an absolute amazing amount of features many of which were rarely if ever used, and some never implemented on most players, likely.
2 replies →
I love special features, to me it is one of the biggest selling points of Blu-rays
Are you only buying disks for the features? (And otherwise just streaming / pirating the movie if the disk isn't interesting?)
I've found that now they're a crapshoot, some disks come with great special features, and some don't.
IE, The box set for The Shield had a "back slapping" "home movie" special feature with each season, but the two special feature disks were loaded with cast and crew interviews, panels, and detailed teardowns of scenes. It was really well done.
The Martian also had a 2nd disk with great special features, including a panel and a documentary on how "real" a trip to Mars could be.
But I don't buy the disks for the features, plenty of my disks either don't have them, just have a trailer or two (which I enjoy), or a "back slapping" "home movie".
> I've found that now they're a crapshoot, some disks come with great special features, and some don't.
Back in the day special features often had some budget and effort put into them but these days, outside of a few specialty publishers who focus on curation, restoration, etc, special features have largely become a marketing checkbox most studios put little to no effort into. Often they'll just include EPK (Electronic Press Kit) materials created solely to market the film, which are widely available on YouTube prior the film's release anyway.
There are notable exceptions however. An influential director and/or stars can contractually require a studio to not cheap out, and in those cases, special features and audio commentaries can actually still be quite "special." Other exceptions include re-issues of older films which can include special features made back when most special features had real budgets and historically notable films which can have modern retrospectives featuring cast, crew and even historians or other famous directors commenting on the film.
This is why it's always worth checking reviews to see what "Special Features" actually means in a disc release. Notable examples include "Blade Runner: Dangerous Days" (https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/Dangerous_Days:_Making_B...). The entire five disc Blade Runner 25th Anniversary 2007 Blu-Ray boxed set is pretty amazing. In their release of "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946), although the original filmmakers are gone, Criterion found a long-lost 1980s interview with the director and has a lengthy commentary by Martin Scorsese, who as a young filmmaker was inspired by the film, and has become quite an expert on it. There are also notable audio commentaries that rise above the norm. One of my favorites is the Tropic Thunder commentary, both because the cast is hilarious riffing off each other and because Robert Downey, Jr insisted on doing the entire commentary as his character from the movie (backstory: his character in the film is a pretentious method actor who refuses to ever come out of character).
2 replies →
I do buy the discs for the special features. And usually they list on the back what those special features are.
Disagree with your disagree. I still get DVDs/Blurays from the library, and I always check out the special features.
And I liked creative menus.
Haha, not starting the movie when the disk loads is one of my pet peeves. When I burn DVDs for friends I still put in a menu to facilitate chapter or episode selection. But, I set the menu to only load after the movie has completed or the user pushes the menu button on their remote. For episodic disks all of the episodes will play before the menu appears.
2000s disk special features started getting a little wild. Who wants to play a "game" as a special feature with their DVD remote? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
I recently tried out some of my old dvds, and i have to admit I cant stand the quality of it on even my 27'' monitor, much less my 65'' tv. I'm giving blu ray a try though, can get disks for as low as $1-$3 on the used market.
What do you use to author DVDs?
DVDStyler - free, simple, cross-platform, and open-source.
VHS to me was the best in usability, put the tape into the VCR and it turned the VCR on and start playing, also (this is true for European TVs connected with the SCART connector) it would switch the TV to the correct input (and in some TVs even switch on the TV itself) because SCART used a +12V signal in addiction to the video to control automatic video switching (something I miss these days in HDMI, yes there is CEC but I was never able to make it work like the old SCART, and it's quite frankly a mess). And when you finished you turned off your VCR and it started playing TV again.
And controls were basic, play, stop, forward and back, nothing else. You could operate it with 4 buttons on the player without the need for a remote. It was as simple as operating a audio cassette player. Something that was easy to understand even for my grandparents, that after VHS gave up recording and playing stuff because DVDs, BluRay, etc were too complex for them to use (understand about menu and stuff they were not used to, instead of just putting the tape into the VCR and start watching).
VHS has annoyances too. No scene selection and no chapters meant you were almost always forced to FF through trailers and ads to get the show to start and you could overshoot and have to rewind again to get to where you wanted. Pause and frame forward didn't quite work right, and stopping a movie once the credits started to roll meant that the next time you wanted to watch the move you had to sit there for 10 minutes while you rewound the entire length of the film. That annoyance was only made slightly better if you bought an entire separate device for rewinding tapes at faster speeds (at the risk of breaking them as they got older)
So the best solution would be Video CD. The original VCD worked like an audio CD: random access, time search, chapters, trick play (in forward).
Later on, they added menus, called Playback Control, but many players let you turn that off.
You knew the movie was about to begin because there usually was a copyright slide before the actual movie would start (anyone remember the scary FBI warnings?).
So it was a sign to stop the fast forward and get ready to watch the movie.
Either way it was honestly pretty fun. It was simple, cozy and slow, not in a bad way. When you got together to watch a movie with friends or family, it was the moment when anticipation was building up.
None of that exists with streaming.
2 replies →
Surprising response from someone claiming to be in the gwbasic timeline, where movie special features were oft highly anticipated reasons to buy a DVD.
It always seemed to me that (for the most part) the anticipation of special features was just because they were so hyped by the manufacturers as selling points. Kind of like when Apple makes such a big deal about the new colors their products are available in (and this is coming from an Apple fan). The one exception would be Criterion Collection DVDs which actually had worthwhile special features most of the time.
Not everyone is like that. Some just wants to watch the movie.
the 2 disc DVD set for Contact was the first title I purchased. It set the standard for behind the scenes moving making special content.
Streaming could be so much better with the accuracy of their skip features. How many times have you hit skip opening for it to jump with 10s of the opening yet to play out? How many times have you seen the skip to next well into the credits making it pretty much pointless. The exact root cause of the inaccuracies is not known to me, but I'd assume laziness on the part of those creating the times. Whether it's just a generic :60s from the beginning on the assumption the opening is always exactly the same length or some other bit of just not caring to do it right. Either way it's annoying AF to see a recap of the episode you just finished watching 5s prior or forced to watch footage you're about to watch immediately.
I foolishly purchased the Blu-Ray remaster of Battlestar Galactica and every damn episode begins with the same introduction from Ronald Moore talking about sound quality.
To your earlier points about VHS and Streaming, both of those formats allow the user to pause and resume at a later time. DVD players don't provide this.
My DVD player provides it. Must be a special feature.
It's not at all. It's really common. PS3 does it and has resumed discs I played years ago. Blu-ray is more hit or miss because BD-J mucks it all up. Titles without that tend to work, but big studio releases tend to have it so...
Think it’s standard these days
2 replies →
> To your earlier points about VHS and Streaming, both of those formats allow the user to pause and resume at a later time. DVD players don't provide this.
...that was one of the most hated aspects of videocassettes. If you asked anyone at the time whether they'd prefer a medium that rewound itself, they would have told you "of course" while giving you, at best, a very funny look.
Where a menu might help is a list of the titles and chapters, although such things can also be printed on the box and selected directly by numeric entry (in which case the menu is not needed, but can be helpful in case you do not have the box). Subtitles, audio, etc can usually be selected by other functions in the DVD player. (Sometimes there are other functions as well, but mostly it should be good enough to just select titles and chapters by numeric entry. DVD players ought to have the option that you can disable unwanted functions in order to just play the selected title directly.) VHS also has index marks but those are mostly used for making your own recording rather than movies.
I loved the interactive DVD menu's. The deleted scenes and director commentaries or alternate endings were such a bonus. I miss those
I love special features! The interviews with the crew as well as how scenes came together is something I seek out.
Personally I love special features and creative menus.
The really impressive and ironic self-own on most DVD and Blu-ray discs is the unskippable copyright message that basically advertises piracy. "If only you'd pirated this movie you wouldn't be forced to wait through all this boring shit".