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.
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 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.
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 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.
Though the idea of being so frustrated that you must solve a sudoku is kind of funny.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's ironic that the author chose the much simpler/inferior Shrek 2 DVD menu to showcase.
Insanely impressive
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.
- randomized menu backgrounds/environments
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.
spiderfarmer•34m ago