I remember watching the DVD of Memento, and using the secret DVD menu button combination to enable watching the film backwards scene by scene. I remember thinking that was amazing and we were entering a new era of creative movie distribution. Shame that sort of thing didnt really catch on.
This reminds me of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVD my friend had. There was an option to Play All on the main menu and it would simultaneously play all the episodes at once on the screen, each in their own box.
Whoa, TIL!
I love Christopher Nolan films.
I'm guessing there might be an OSS toolkit or multimodal LLM able to do this kind of de/reconstruction with an avi or whatever file format.
Related tangent (creativity assoc w a Nolan film), one of my all-time favorite web pages is this interactive visualization of Inception^1 which makes the levels of dreaming and the related slowing of time intuitive. Sadly it's desktop-only, but well worth it.
Memento is one of the few movies in history where out-of-order watching would even make sense, possibly the only one. Much like 3D TVs, it didn't catch on because people don't actually want to consume media that way.
> 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 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.
Back in High School me and my friends made a zombie movie over summer vacation, and I had so much fun making overly-complicated DVD menus for it using a pirated copy of DVD Studio Pro.
Full of stylized video transitions, menu selections that were fully graphical (not using the 2-bit overlays, DVD Studio Pro supported Photoshop layers), pointless special features (gotta fill out that list on the back of the box), poorly-translated subtitle tracks, and easter eggs in various menus when you hit a special button combination on your remote.
I remember the first Harry Potter DVD had its special features hidden in a sort of maze game that presumably used the DVD menu system. It was an interesting idea, but I found it too difficult to navigate/play. One part I remember was you had to tap the bricks outside The Leaky Cauldron in a special order to enter Diagon Alley and then what happened I don't recall.
I also had this idea for a home work out DVD that would give you different "random" workouts based on the timing of when you clicked menu options. There would be predefined playlists of different workout routines. Each video segment in the list would be a set of one kind of exercise. And the playlists would contain different collections of sets. I wonder if I could have made it work, I think DVD technology would support it.
I was just thinking back to how fun the DVD menus were as a kid. Sometimes you'd even have games on them, not that they played very well at all or I never used the right remote. I wish Plex had a feature of dropping an iso, and being able to get the whole dvd/blu-ray menu experience.
> Despite being a much more capable format from a technical perspective, with high-resolution media, menu layers, everything offered by Blu-ray Disc Java (BD-J) and more, Blu-rays unfortunately very rarely see impressive menu presentations.
Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do. Authoring a Blu-Ray from scratch also involves testing your code on a ton of different players, often with incompatible Java implementations. As a result, the studios just use the same simple menu templates over and over rather than creating new menus for each title.
> Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do.
Product design centered around corporate identity/branding did the rest.
Yeah, I remember DVD menus (and the rare Blu-ray that employs "interesting" menus) being fun, but even the fun ones would get in the way of actually wanting to watch the movie or TV episode at hand.
They might be bland and boring, but the menus employed today by the vast majority of discs produced are infinitely preferable in my opinion. Play Movie/Episode, Audio, Subtitles, Special Features. They're made from just a few templates and generally work the same across all discs from a studio. Doesn't bog you down with cutesy animations or wild layout choices, lets you just watch your movie in peace.
I can understand the argument of simplicity and consistency for something productivity-related, or whatever, but when watching a DVD it is almost always for the purpose of entertainment. A fun and intnrnsting menu feels like part of the experience. It is a bit more of an event with all the little added flourishes.
One of the many reason I stopped buying dvds. The adverts (unskippable), the cognitive bones etc get through to the play, some disks would even have spoilers for the film.
I've never played with these DVD menus, but I do remember the days when people took advantage of YouTube annotations and interactive elements to make choose your own adventure style videos!
Despite the fact that a lot of dvd menus were confusing to navigate and / or outright ugly, it's a shame that it became another lost art form.
The bad ones were often spectacularly bad, though lol
The battle between form and function was never clearer than in the era of DVD menus. The viewers function objective (start watching the movie as quickly as possible) is at direct odds with the creator's form objective (steal the viewer's time to expose them to my "creation")
There was a period before 24/7 internet access when some of us were bored enough to sit and explore DVD menus because there wasn't anything else to do.
I’ve never had the fortune to see beautifully designed DVD menus. I’ve seen the Shrek 2 DVD menu, but it didn’t strike me as good.
The only use I had for DVD menus is adjusting subtitles and dubbing. I found that changing the language in the video was a good way to study a foreign language.
Got to question the reasoning behind Fastplay. If it was "Designed to make their DVDs more accessible, especially to children potentially unable to manage the remote" are those really the target audience for "it often plays trailers before the feature presentation"?
The late '90s had some fun ones, like the Austin Powers DVD that had secret menus and extra scenes (some extremely early on in the movie that went unused). That was a ton of fun and I wish more studios did it like that.
Also many had fun easter eggs. One of my favorites was galaxy quest. You had to watch the movie then after you watched it there was a new option to watch the movie in the alien dialect. Now some menus are just 'in the way'. Usually some blurb about whatever concerned some lawyer and a good 15-30 second block on continuing on, or even worse a set of commercials for other movies that are unskippable. The newer menus are very basic and straight to the point. The older ones were 'fun' in a way that usually mimicked whatever the movie was doing. Adding to the movie. I think one of the fight club releases even had the 'wrong' menu just to mess with people.
I used to specifically re-rip DVDs that had menus. They were hideously designed, overly complex, or just pointless when I just wanted the content to start when I put the disc in. Why?
1. Because it would cause confusion with my kids when they were trying to watch movies in the car as toddlers.
2. It was an annoyance when we were watching a movie at home.
I am finding a similar annoyance w/AppleTV's content ad/preview, recap, and intro skips. Like, for fucks sake, just play the episode already.
I tried Apple TV's free trial and it really gets in the way of everything, so much so that I canceled. It's pretty annoying how modern streaming platforms try to ruin the vanilla viewing experience as much as possible. If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime which you have to click out of to hide. Like hey, I just watched a feature-length film. Let me watch the credits in peace.
> If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime
It took a lot of work but I was able to do it... once. Then it turned itself back on. Damnit, I'm watching an anime, I want to hear the ending song, it's a banger!
I can understand the nostalgia, but my experience with these menus always brought me to the absolute brink of sudoku.
I was just utterly incapable of conducting business in these screens, but it could have been a massive web of combinatronics between poorly engineered hardware in the form of remote control buttons, low patience, and some cognitive dissonance after so many years of downloading warez films on Limewire.
Sudoku is a number grid game. Surely you used the wrong term...
Secondly, I'm assuming you're just too young to understand/appreciate DVD menus. Your wording sounds like you are of later Gen Z age and therefore couldn't have had the frame of reference to respect the history and progression.
I've also been wishing Jellyfin has this. I've not tested it myself but a friend shared this plex competitor which apparently supports DVD menus: https://ampchor.com/
some software could just open a DVD ISO, so I used that as the backup format when I wanted to retain menus. XBMC and it's derivatives could open them over the network share iirc.
in the history of technology, I can't recall anything as universally bad as the DVD menus. What a terrible mess. The only thing this had to do was highlight something when you pressed a button, and it was utterly incapable of doing that.
The player could decode high quality MPEG2, but it couldn't let you select a freaking item.
Ugh and don't get me started on setting up languages and subtitles...
I get the love for vinyls, I get the nostalgia for 8-track tape cassettes. But you can't just miss everything from the past. This truly and totally sucked.
I remember watching the DVD of Memento, and using the secret DVD menu button combination to enable watching the film backwards scene by scene. I remember thinking that was amazing and we were entering a new era of creative movie distribution. Shame that sort of thing didnt really catch on.
This reminds me of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVD my friend had. There was an option to Play All on the main menu and it would simultaneously play all the episodes at once on the screen, each in their own box.
Whoa, TIL! I love Christopher Nolan films. I'm guessing there might be an OSS toolkit or multimodal LLM able to do this kind of de/reconstruction with an avi or whatever file format.
Related tangent (creativity assoc w a Nolan film), one of my all-time favorite web pages is this interactive visualization of Inception^1 which makes the levels of dreaming and the related slowing of time intuitive. Sadly it's desktop-only, but well worth it.
1. http://www.inception-explained.com
Memento is one of the few movies in history where out-of-order watching would even make sense, possibly the only one. Much like 3D TVs, it didn't catch on because people don't actually want to consume media that way.
> 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 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.
Back in High School me and my friends made a zombie movie over summer vacation, and I had so much fun making overly-complicated DVD menus for it using a pirated copy of DVD Studio Pro.
Full of stylized video transitions, menu selections that were fully graphical (not using the 2-bit overlays, DVD Studio Pro supported Photoshop layers), pointless special features (gotta fill out that list on the back of the box), poorly-translated subtitle tracks, and easter eggs in various menus when you hit a special button combination on your remote.
It was a really fun format to mess around with!
I remember the first Harry Potter DVD had its special features hidden in a sort of maze game that presumably used the DVD menu system. It was an interesting idea, but I found it too difficult to navigate/play. One part I remember was you had to tap the bricks outside The Leaky Cauldron in a special order to enter Diagon Alley and then what happened I don't recall.
I also had this idea for a home work out DVD that would give you different "random" workouts based on the timing of when you clicked menu options. There would be predefined playlists of different workout routines. Each video segment in the list would be a set of one kind of exercise. And the playlists would contain different collections of sets. I wonder if I could have made it work, I think DVD technology would support it.
> I also had this idea for a home work out DVD that would give you different "random" workouts based on the timing of when you clicked menu options
I like it, kind of the 2000's version of parallel grooves on vinyl records
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unusual_types_of_gramophone_re...
I was just thinking back to how fun the DVD menus were as a kid. Sometimes you'd even have games on them, not that they played very well at all or I never used the right remote. I wish Plex had a feature of dropping an iso, and being able to get the whole dvd/blu-ray menu experience.
> Despite being a much more capable format from a technical perspective, with high-resolution media, menu layers, everything offered by Blu-ray Disc Java (BD-J) and more, Blu-rays unfortunately very rarely see impressive menu presentations.
There's a good Reddit comment here from someone who worked on authoring Blu-Rays that explains why this happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vdrbr/hey_reddit_its...
Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do. Authoring a Blu-Ray from scratch also involves testing your code on a ton of different players, often with incompatible Java implementations. As a result, the studios just use the same simple menu templates over and over rather than creating new menus for each title.
> Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do.
Product design centered around corporate identity/branding did the rest.
Yeah, I remember DVD menus (and the rare Blu-ray that employs "interesting" menus) being fun, but even the fun ones would get in the way of actually wanting to watch the movie or TV episode at hand.
They might be bland and boring, but the menus employed today by the vast majority of discs produced are infinitely preferable in my opinion. Play Movie/Episode, Audio, Subtitles, Special Features. They're made from just a few templates and generally work the same across all discs from a studio. Doesn't bog you down with cutesy animations or wild layout choices, lets you just watch your movie in peace.
I can understand the argument of simplicity and consistency for something productivity-related, or whatever, but when watching a DVD it is almost always for the purpose of entertainment. A fun and intnrnsting menu feels like part of the experience. It is a bit more of an event with all the little added flourishes.
One of the many reason I stopped buying dvds. The adverts (unskippable), the cognitive bones etc get through to the play, some disks would even have spoilers for the film.
Just buy them and rip them. This is Hacker News, after all.
It sounds like a Flash intro for a website...
I specifically remember Shrek 1's DVD menu was a work of art and nearly a complete multimedia experience on its own.
It's ironic that the author chose the much simpler/inferior Shrek 2 DVD menu to showcase.
Wow you're right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cQHZUKCo9A
Insanely impressive
I've never played with these DVD menus, but I do remember the days when people took advantage of YouTube annotations and interactive elements to make choose your own adventure style videos!
Despite the fact that a lot of dvd menus were confusing to navigate and / or outright ugly, it's a shame that it became another lost art form. The bad ones were often spectacularly bad, though lol
The battle between form and function was never clearer than in the era of DVD menus. The viewers function objective (start watching the movie as quickly as possible) is at direct odds with the creator's form objective (steal the viewer's time to expose them to my "creation")
There was a period before 24/7 internet access when some of us were bored enough to sit and explore DVD menus because there wasn't anything else to do.
It was a huge upgrade from sitting and exploring TeleText https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
I’ve never had the fortune to see beautifully designed DVD menus. I’ve seen the Shrek 2 DVD menu, but it didn’t strike me as good.
The only use I had for DVD menus is adjusting subtitles and dubbing. I found that changing the language in the video was a good way to study a foreign language.
Never seen Shrek 2 menu, but Shrek 1 had a really good one.
Got to question the reasoning behind Fastplay. If it was "Designed to make their DVDs more accessible, especially to children potentially unable to manage the remote" are those really the target audience for "it often plays trailers before the feature presentation"?
Standards authors provide ways to enhance user experience, developers use it to insert more ads. A tale as old as time.
The late '90s had some fun ones, like the Austin Powers DVD that had secret menus and extra scenes (some extremely early on in the movie that went unused). That was a ton of fun and I wish more studios did it like that.
Also many had fun easter eggs. One of my favorites was galaxy quest. You had to watch the movie then after you watched it there was a new option to watch the movie in the alien dialect. Now some menus are just 'in the way'. Usually some blurb about whatever concerned some lawyer and a good 15-30 second block on continuing on, or even worse a set of commercials for other movies that are unskippable. The newer menus are very basic and straight to the point. The older ones were 'fun' in a way that usually mimicked whatever the movie was doing. Adding to the movie. I think one of the fight club releases even had the 'wrong' menu just to mess with people.
"Beauty" wouldn't be my word of choice for these.
I used to specifically re-rip DVDs that had menus. They were hideously designed, overly complex, or just pointless when I just wanted the content to start when I put the disc in. Why?
1. Because it would cause confusion with my kids when they were trying to watch movies in the car as toddlers.
2. It was an annoyance when we were watching a movie at home.
I am finding a similar annoyance w/AppleTV's content ad/preview, recap, and intro skips. Like, for fucks sake, just play the episode already.
Yeah, I saw this similar "DVD menu" topic come up on Reddit as well.
I was surprised how many people expressed disappointment or annoyance at the lack of these menus when it came to streaming.
While I specifically remember the lack of these menus (and how slow they were) being something I was thrilled to have when streaming was introduced.
I tried Apple TV's free trial and it really gets in the way of everything, so much so that I canceled. It's pretty annoying how modern streaming platforms try to ruin the vanilla viewing experience as much as possible. If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime which you have to click out of to hide. Like hey, I just watched a feature-length film. Let me watch the credits in peace.
> If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime
It took a lot of work but I was able to do it... once. Then it turned itself back on. Damnit, I'm watching an anime, I want to hear the ending song, it's a banger!
- "secret" menus
- randomized menu backgrounds/environments
I can understand the nostalgia, but my experience with these menus always brought me to the absolute brink of sudoku.
I was just utterly incapable of conducting business in these screens, but it could have been a massive web of combinatronics between poorly engineered hardware in the form of remote control buttons, low patience, and some cognitive dissonance after so many years of downloading warez films on Limewire.
Seppuku?
Though the idea of being so frustrated that you must solve a sudoku is kind of funny.
It's a common intentional misspelling/euphemism: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/commit-sudoku
Sudoku is a number grid game. Surely you used the wrong term...
Secondly, I'm assuming you're just too young to understand/appreciate DVD menus. Your wording sounds like you are of later Gen Z age and therefore couldn't have had the frame of reference to respect the history and progression.
I'm 45, I hated DVD menus. I mean, maybe 5% were cool but 95% were awful.
Of course, even worse than the menus was when companies realised they could give you unskippable adverts and trailers on your DVDs.
I’m an old millennial. I was tired of dvd menus in the 90s
The easy path should have the ability to start playing with a second of inserting the disc.
Yeah, too bad Jellyfin doesnt have a way to parse a DVD and make menus. That way, I could be a better archivalist.
Normally I just convert the largest title too the name of the movie, and put the rest in extras, so Jelly can pick all the extra content up.
I've also been wishing Jellyfin has this. I've not tested it myself but a friend shared this plex competitor which apparently supports DVD menus: https://ampchor.com/
some software could just open a DVD ISO, so I used that as the backup format when I wanted to retain menus. XBMC and it's derivatives could open them over the network share iirc.
VLC can do DVD menus as well, either from an ISO or a VIDEO_TS folder.
Kodi can remotely play DVD ISOs. It does mean you get no compression though.
I never quite understood who made those menus. I think 95% of them were absolutely hideous, just like early webdesign.
I used to love the iDVD - part of Apple's iLife (I think?) - that let you make your own DVD menus for your home-made videos.
I used it exactly once though, when I made a DVD for our high school. But I looked like a wizard.
...I see last release was _2024_? Is this... correct? Wow. I would have guessed 2014.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/106536
edit: oh no, it's just wrong date on the page. Last release was 2011. Yeah makes more sense.
in the history of technology, I can't recall anything as universally bad as the DVD menus. What a terrible mess. The only thing this had to do was highlight something when you pressed a button, and it was utterly incapable of doing that.
The player could decode high quality MPEG2, but it couldn't let you select a freaking item.
Ugh and don't get me started on setting up languages and subtitles...
I get the love for vinyls, I get the nostalgia for 8-track tape cassettes. But you can't just miss everything from the past. This truly and totally sucked.