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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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