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Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

Having a DVD library is tempting. Physical media that you own and is easy to rip digitally, etc. However I popped in a disc recently and was reminded of how bad the dvd experience was. It just stopped playing two scenes in. Took it out, the disk looked perfect. Tried again, stopped at the exact same moment. There goes that disk I guess, it was probably 20 years old to be fair but thats true for most dvds you’d find in the used bin.

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I regularly discover that even new DVDs won't play. It's a crap shoot.

Then there's the menu system on it. Every DVD has to re-invent menus, usually badly. For example, they often do not display what options are actually set or not. Sometimes it's even hard to find the cursor.

The only good thing about DVDs is you can turn on the Eddie Mueller commentary for film noir movies. That man is an unending gold mine of snark, wit, and funny/interesting comments. He's often more interesting than the movie.

13 Years later and Jame Rolfe's rant on DVDs still rings true

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdzaEVeFEE

He makes a great point at then end when comparing VHS to DVD: Its like we are moving forward in technology but moving backwards in the amount of BS we have to put up with just to enjoy what we paid for. The VCR gave you more control compared to DVD players.

Things haven't improved with Blue-Ray

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetXKdi9U3c

Streaming has eliminated many of these pain points in exchange for freedom to truly own your media.

The best way to fight back is to buy the Blu-Ray, rip it using MakeMKV thereby creating an MKV file that contains the ability to jump chapter by chapter, have any audio track you want, etc but with none of the junk that you are forced to use when you pop the Blue-Ray into the player. The best of all worlds.

It's been at least 15 years since I've touched a DVD, but I recall the menu system to be the worst feature of it. I've never once wanted anything but the main feature. Also may the product people who decided on "unskippable scenes" go to a purgatory where they're surrounded by nothing but copyright notices for eternity.

> Also may the product people who decided on "unskippable scenes" go to a purgatory where they're surrounded by nothing but copyright notices for eternity.

The first time I used Netflix about a decade ago I was surprised how fast play worked.

Now that you mention that, I was coming from a world of DVD menus and unskippable notices. So the Netflix UX was a great improvement.

I use VLC for the very few movies I watch so can't say if it works on all movies. Most of the time you can just select "No disc menus" and it goes directly to the movie. Then you can select language and subs as you want in the normal windows style menus in VLC.

I'm surprised someone hasn't threatened to sue them for allowing people to skip unskippable items.

Since I bought the DVD, it's mine to do whatever I want to be able to see the movie. If I decide not to watch the adverticement, there isn't something they can do about it.

Good luck arguing that in court, no matter how correct you are. Lawyers cost a lot of money.

Still, no one's going to sue you personally for this. However, there have been cases of legal action against those who make "hacking tools" available. I believe there was a case against Apex for their cheap DVD players that ignored region codes, for instance.

Anyway, the keyword here is "threatened". Corporate lawyers make all kinds of baseless legal threats all the time. It should be illegal.

Since the creators of VLC are also the maintainers of libdvdcss I don't think getting sued over letting people skip unwanted content is their primary concern. They seem to be doing alright legally - probably helps to not be US-based.

Purgatory usually has a temporary connotation, eternity would imply hell.

Tangentially related: the 1999 movie Purgatory [0] is actually pretty good.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0158131/

Whoops, my bad. I'll be sure to get my condemnation right next time I find a class of deserving product-folk.

> Every DVD has to re-invent menus, usually badly.

My favorite one is the Fifth Element DVD. It has menus implemented as options flying towards you in a loop and you need to press the OK button on the remote just when the right one is passing by. Works great if you have a DVD player with a slightly laggy CPU and an IR remote. It always reminds of that "the worst volume control UI" website that was doing rounds on social media a while back.

Here's a link to a compilation of those "worst volume control UIs": https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world...

I’d give the first price for worse DVD UX to the original Harry Potter 1 DVD menu.

In order to see the deleted scenes you had to race a broom through a maze in the forbidden forest selecting the correct way each time.

Ha found it, amazing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCKiH9XaRhE

Consider that the player may be at fault.

Almost 2 decades ago, when I was considering getting a DVD+RW drive for my PC, I thoroughly researched them and found they all had differing error correction algorithms, and it made a world of a difference. I got one known for this, and it often played DVDs that neither my standalone DVD player nor my roommate's DVD player on his PC could play.

I would have thought that by now they'd all be good at this, but it seems not.

I remember reading reviews of DVD players to find the ones that "slipped through" testing with things like ad skip and "direct to menu" and "direct to feature" options that you could enable.

Those players were always the best.

The commentary tracks on DVDs could be quite good at best--even if they were also hit or miss. Unfortunately they seem to have pretty much vanished. I assume that the volume of DVDs these days doesn't justify the cost/effort of recording these any longer.

My impression is that a bunch of it has to do with "4K UHD" Blu-Ray uses just about all the space for the main feature and required languages per region and has very little spare room. (As did "3D" Blu-Ray, though those are mostly extinct today.) The early solution to that was "4K UHD" releases were all expensive "Collector's Editions" that bundled a standard Blu-Ray and/or DVD with all the "special features" including commentaries (increasing the marginal costs of all the packaging by including multiple discs). The late solution today seems to be to just ignore all the "special features" entirely, planning only for the lowest common denominator amount of extra space, and things like commentaries are slowly disappearing as an expected bonus feature (again; it's not like these features existed in VHS or Laserdisc; DVD was its own weird golden age).

Laserdiscs had extra audio tracks with commentary on some discs as I recall. (But the stack of LDs I have is in the garage and it's too cold to check :-)) An audio track shouldn't take much room. But not sure about actual numbers.

Huh, all the normal non-collectors UHD releases I got so far still come with a HD Blu-Ray. If that has changed it must be recent enough that I haven't run into it yet.

I don't think it is a universal shift yet (or even a Universal shift, either), just something I've noticed a few times now here and there.

Laptops partially fixed this issue - you can just skip the bad parts.

Higher end dvd players used to do the same, but players are a vanishing breed and consoles are not much more than dumb players usually.

Ofc it would be nice if there were just no skipping - there were a number of technologies being employed back when DVD was the pretty much the only format in town, I suspect the data redundancy may have been traded for cramming more features on a disk.

Back when ripping (my own) disks was a thing, you could compress a movie to half its size on disk (no coded compression just more intensive picture compression) and burn it twice to the same disk...

Ofc the problem with that was the consumer burnable disks use a degrading chemistry unlike stamped copies, so they would last 3-4 years before undergoing significant corruption.

I tried watching Terminator 2 with my son the other day, we'd had the DVD for ages to eventually watch. The mint looking DVD refused to load in the DVD player so we pirated it to watch instead.

It's a good idea to try ripping the DVD anyway... often ripping software is more tolerant (better at correcting/retrying/skipping) errors than the players. And as I think you're implying, once ripped you don't have to worry about THAT physical media.

You remind me. I have some DVDs I need to rip (before they go bad)!

DVDs are great entire because I rip them immediately to get rid of the menu and governmental mandatory ads. The DVD box gets stored in a bin.

> governmental mandatory ads

Do you mean the annoying FBI Anti-Piracy warning? If so, that's actually a voluntary thing the publisher added.[^1]

[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2012-16506/p-8

That's never been my experience. I get my DVDs almost exclusively from the library - not once has one ever failed to play for me.

> I get my DVDs almost exclusively from the library - not once has one ever failed to play for me.

Over the last few years, the experience with DVDs/Blu-Rays from the library has been trending downwards. I would say about a quarter of the movies I check out from the library have some problem somewhere in the movie where the player either gets stuck or skips.

To be fair that seems to happen quite regularly for me on Netflix and Prime. The encoder hits a bug and the whole app crashes. Fortunately it's usually random and you can just restart the app.

Never seems to happen with pirated videos & VLC though.

As usual, the user experience (UX) with piracy is generally superior. No unskippable features, no FBI copyright warnings, no region restrictions, ...

Yeah the only thing I've found I miss in the world of piracy is reliable subtitles (sometimes they just don't bother with foreign bits) and Amazon's X-ray thing that shows you who the actors are. It's pretty useful occasionally.

Yeah, subtitles are very hit-or-miss. Some pirate groups do a great job of including every subtitle track available, others cut out everything except the one they're interested in (usually English, but sometimes Italian etc. so you have to watch out which torrent you get).

Consistency is definitely one big problem with piracy; some stuff is just done better than others, and it's hard to tell what's what.

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