> 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.
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.
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.
It's why the original Matrix DVD dual layer release was so hard to duplicate / replicate by pirates/"enthusiasts" in a way that would fit on single layer DVDs. One of those was a secret "follow the white rabbit" mode that lead to hidden content.
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).
On the original 2001 DVD there was a great speech by Author C. Clarke.
Unfortunately, the DVD was letterboxed, so I later replaced it with a widescreen DVD and then a 4k disk. None of them have the speech.
I really want to go back and hear it again. He spoke about being convinced there was intelligent life elsewhere, and wondering how similar or different they were to us.
I would think any clip of ACC saying something significant on camera that was ever distributed publicly would have been posted on YouTube or Archive.org.
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.
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)
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.
Even going to a video store and picking a movie off the shelf to take home and watch was more fun than browsing streaming services. Streaming services have basically gone out of their way to make selecting a movie annoying and frustrating.
Besides prime, which is an ad infested minefield of "Pay us more to watch this on top of what you already pay us every month to watch this", Netflix has to be the worst. They've expressed that they'd rather just pick what you're going to watch and so their last major redesign intentionally hid most of the titles from your view and they relentlessly push what they want to you watch by showing them in ad banners, in full screen ads, and by inserting them over and over again in whatever random categories they decide to let you pick form.
If you defy them and ignore what they choose for you they'll punish you by forcing you scroll past bullshit categories like "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", or "Cool Mustaches" when all you really want is "Continue Watching", "New", and "Leaving Soon" (which they refuse to give you) followed by the usual genres.
With all the telemetry they should get a clue that the experience is bad when my wife and I navigate a bit around, watch a few trailers, and then give up after 10min.
And that's us wanting to watch something! But the experience is so bland they're just consistently good at ruining the mood.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
I think all the recollections above may be correct. IIRC, the DVD spec allows a disc to override some stored user preferences, skip to main menu (ignoring auto-play intro content) and play main content (skipping the menus), but not all DVD players had those user pref options - earlier models often didn't. That could definitely be annoying because some studios loved to force ads, trailers, warnings, etc to play.
Some DVD players, especially later, off-brand models, would ignore a disc's instruction to override the user preference. I remember the presence of these capabilities being a key feature in forum reviews of DVD players. Back then, the holy grail was an inexpensive player that had quick load and seek times, ignored region codes, respected user preferences and had analog component output (or a good composite/S-Video encoder chip). Based on these detailed user reviews, the community would arrive at a handful of players that were worth getting. These lists would be regularly updated as models would change firmware or chips and be sold under different brand names in different regions.
> 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.
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".
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.
I was a DVD programmer for just under 10 years. Some titles naturally allowed for more creativity in the menus. For one easter egg, I programmed a feature accessible after an up-up-down-down-left-right-enter navigation from a specific button. Pretty sure the marketing team "leaked" it on some forum for it to be discovered.
Pretty sure it was Lupin, but couldn't tell you which of the plethora of them. I'd guess it was an Extras menu, but it went to a bit of the actor doing a goofy bit as the character not at all part of the actual content. Just the cast/crew having fun.
By nature of DVD menus and a remote with number keys, you can just add 6 to the number of buttons on the menu to type in the specific button on screen. Then again, not many consumer remotes had those.
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.
If you have the DVD, or have ripped it with chapter markings it would be super easy: you just need to change the chapters order, like in a playlist (that's basically what the original DVD did, IIRC)
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.
Not exactly the same, but some creative things similar to this are happening in the video game space. There have been a number of recent video games that primarily consist of watching a movie and discovering little hints here and there that let you unlock more of the movie through the user-interface. Sam Barlow has been a pioneer here, "Immortality" from 2022 is probably the most innovative example of this approach to interactive movie-watching.
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.
I've been collecting DVD menus. I maybe have somewhere in the vicinity of 250 on my computer. Some are quite large (>1GB) because the menus themselves have videos that need to play to operate and some are like quite long movies. I use a method which strips out any actual video content (the movie and any special features), so if you click on an item which would take you to a video it craps out, but otherwise the menus do completely work most of the time. It just depends on the structure of the DVD (I _think_ it is basically whether some of the menu images or videos are encoded in the movie vob file itself? I haven't gotten around exploring the actual structure of the ifo/vob files).
I find DVDs to be an interesting technology all the way down to the often absurd special features they have (my favorite? On the Tango & Cash DVD they have actor biographies in which they mispell Jack Palance's birthname).
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 have PTSD from trying to navigate some of these menus, not just because of the UI itself but the bad remote control button qualities paired with a really slow DVD reader that took 2 seconds to register every time you push a button.
So on one hand, yeah I see some of these and I get some kind of nostalgia, but as it happens with nostalgia, it's wasn't all that good haha
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.
The feeling I get with DVD menus is that I sometimes feel like watching some classic movie, and so I put on the DVD. But then the DVD menu already shows all the classic scenes and characters, so when I finally have navigated all the menus and started the movie, I no longer want to watch the movie. The DVD menu clips have completely refreshed my memory of what the movie was like, so I can no longer re-watch it with satisfaction.
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.
Wow this takes me back to the days of the Sonic HD DVD authoring system. I designed and authored several big titles back then and menu design was always the heaviest lift. Fascinating that this article is interesting enough so many years later to people to rank this high on HN.
I seem to remember a hidden menu option in Monty Python and the Holy Grail's DVD menu labeled something like "Menu Reader for the Hard of Hearing" that, when selected, had a cast member start shouting the menu options at you. It was quite humorous to me as a kid.
> 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.
My favourite was Mulholland Drive DVD menu - it felt like you were watching LA in real time from the hills, while listening to eerie synth music. Pure art.
The Twin Peaks Gold Box DVD menus are one of my favorites for the same reason. The backgrounds are just extended shots of places in Twin Peaks. The first disc, for instance, is almost all long, well-looped clips of saw blades cutting logs at the mill, sound included.
I have fond memories of DVD menus from back in the day. I specifically remember getting my hands on an early release of 300 that was made for reviewers and was blown away by the beauty of the menu especially considering that menu was maybe meant to be seen by a couple thousand people at best.
I wish I still had access to it because looking now it was distinctly different from the actual release DVD menu.
* The IT crowd season 1 had leetspeak and base64 encoded subtitles (won't spoil what the encoding decodes to).
* Goodfellas has a commentary track with the central criminal and the FBI agent who arrested him.
* The Simpsons (around season 9 if I recall) has a hidden commentary track (not accessable by menus) where two of the writers fairly candidly explain the quality dip that was to follow, and have an impromptu phone call with the illusive John Swartzwelder.
I’m not sure the Simpsons one was hidden. I watched all the commentaries a while back and if I remember correctly the one with the John Swartzwelder call was accessed just through the ordinary menu.
For anyone interested, interactive DVD menus can be pretty easily made with spumux and dvdauthor. I used them a few years ago to make a silly DVD-menu game at a game jam, heavily inspired by these "looping clips and audio that don’t quite seamlessly repeat or have abrupt endings": https://dos.itch.io/pipe-inspector
The problem is that there really is limited space in a DVD, and if you care about the actual movie, you want as much bitrate as possible. Some DVDs can look almost HD with enough bitrate.
So no, I don't want animated menus or worthless features. Put a commentary track - that has high extra value to size ratio - but leave it to that.
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
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!
The DVD menu for Requiem for a Dream will always be imprinted in my mind. I remember being young and setting it up for some friends and I kept flipping sources past what I thought was just an infomercial only to realize it was a brilliant little DVD menu.
DVD menus honestly just tend to piss me off. I can tell that someone somewhere had a lot of fun making some of them, but if I can't skip past them and get to the point where I can start the show it really just gets in the way. What is the point in making me wait for 30 seconds while a bunch of graphics float around into place. It just adds to the already obnoxious list of other things that you can't skip past. FBI warning, ads, disclaimers about commentary, corporate logos, it's all disrespectful of my time. DVD is better about it than bluray which usually has even more things you can't skip plus a bunch of other intrusive garbage like massive progress bars (which sometimes remain on screen when paused obscuring content/subtitles) and scene thumbnails that cover a quarter of the screen as you rewind or fast forward.
A good DVD/bluray menu is the one that I can skip past immediately and has "play move" selected by default.
Pure nostalgia looking at the Shrek menu. It makes you wonder if the designs are actually good or if nostalgia is convincing us that they are good. Some definitely are well made and thought out, but others seemed like they just made them fancy because they could. Shrek 1's menu was a whole experience.
I don't see much beauty in the menus. Most are poorly designed. Most make it unable to determine if a feature (like subtitles) are on or off. Some are so clever it's unclear what to click on.
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"?
I'm surprised we haven't seen a Plex-like front end app for Apple TV that faithfully runs the full DVD menu experience from your (legally owned and manually backed-up) DVD disk images.
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.
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'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!
Glad to see some attention given to this so-quickly-forgotten and so-long-besmirched chapter of human creativity. When it was bad it was SO bad. The good ones stood out by soaking you in the verve around a film.
They were especially doomed by being constrained to that Cold War dinosaur: the infra-red remote, with its overpopulated slimy-sticky buttons. All its failure modes. No one misses those except those who stopped learning.
I don't miss the art form. But I recognize the charm. And more notably, I see them as marker in the cultural landscape sliding out from us. We used to have patient engagement with our art. We'd treasure the physical artifact, be it book or vinyl. DVD menus were that early step away from this. Not physical, but made by folks who either made or used to appreciate the physical.
Now, we just want everything to go away so we can get wherever we think we're going. All of life, an intro to be skipped.
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.
Not really menus, but related to the “programmability” of DVDs, my “favourite” “feature” was unskippable videos which would show before the feature.
This was used to reward people who had actually paid for the movie with being forced to endure obnoxious and long “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy appeals before they could watch the main feature.
An interesting effect of them doing this is that it made the pirated version of the product objectively better than the legal version. Great thinking by movie studios.
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.
My wife and I both agree that we miss DVD menus. They felt like artistic expressions made with pride (in some cases). New movies would come out and break the mold and deliver a new flashy menu experience. I looked forward to popping in a new DVD and hoping, pleading to the universe, please...give me a great DVD menu! Mini-games, Easter eggs, and the like...
This is a thing I want to try and do. I do the same thing as you are the moment (mainly to convert things to the much more efficient mp4 instead of what you natively get from, e.g., MakeMKV) just throw the movie in as a single file, and then all the rest into appropriately named extras.
But I do try and save the (usually pretty small) menus just in case I can figure out how to get them running at some point. VLC can run the menu with the large videos stripped out. I still need to check, but I assume I could create a single iso file that would run as a "menu." I guess I'll see.
I worked on this problem a little bit. Unfortunately, it's not really a matter of simple "parsing" - the DVD menu is really a program with an entire virtual machine (IMO overly confusing and complicated).
You basically have to implement the VM, which may lead to legal problems (?)
But, VLC does this (via libdvdnav and libdvdread), so I'm not sure why more don't.
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.
One dvd menu game I remember fondly from when I was a kid was the games in Robots (2005).
IIRC there was a game (maybe more than one?) about picking parts as they went by on a conveyor belt in order to build a robot. At the end it would play a little animation based on the parts you chose, if you missed parts or chose bad/incompatible parts, the robot would break down in hilarious fashion.
> In NTSC regions video on DVD almost always has a resolution of 720 × 480 pixels
This always irritated me. So presumably, television content was mastered and broadcast at 640x480, and then the x axis was scaled by a factor of 1.125 to fit 720 columns?
>The Rocky Horror Picture Show DVD opens with the iconic lips welcoming you to the DVD. After which you’re presented with the main menu, where a disembodied pair of legs wearing heels and fishnets walks in, kicking around one of the menu items, which begins flipped the wrong way around. The extra features are numerous and play into Rocky Horror’s cult status. Some menu options are accompanied by a large switch which animates when flicked. Throughout much of the menu the lips continue speaking while songs from the film play in the background. The 16:9-only portion of the screen is occupied by red curtains, which slide in and out again when ‘Play Movie’ is selected.
Wow, the Rocky Horror Picture Show interactive DVD menu is thrilling, chilling, and fulfilling!
The Rocky Horror Picture Show 2000 DVD Menu walkthrough (Disc 1)
When Tim Curry died, I went looking for the fishnet stockings bootleg Rocky Horror Picture Show source code I found decades ago in the MIT-AI Lab's HUMOR directory. I finally dug up this old archive where the body was buried:
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.
> 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.
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.
It's why the original Matrix DVD dual layer release was so hard to duplicate / replicate by pirates/"enthusiasts" in a way that would fit on single layer DVDs. One of those was a secret "follow the white rabbit" mode that lead to hidden content.
doom9 had reams of guides dedicate to the matter: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=313722
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).
On the original 2001 DVD there was a great speech by Author C. Clarke.
Unfortunately, the DVD was letterboxed, so I later replaced it with a widescreen DVD and then a 4k disk. None of them have the speech.
I really want to go back and hear it again. He spoke about being convinced there was intelligent life elsewhere, and wondering how similar or different they were to us.
I would think any clip of ACC saying something significant on camera that was ever distributed publicly would have been posted on YouTube or Archive.org.
I do buy the discs for the special features. And usually they list on the back what those special features are.
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.
Even going to a video store and picking a movie off the shelf to take home and watch was more fun than browsing streaming services. Streaming services have basically gone out of their way to make selecting a movie annoying and frustrating.
Besides prime, which is an ad infested minefield of "Pay us more to watch this on top of what you already pay us every month to watch this", Netflix has to be the worst. They've expressed that they'd rather just pick what you're going to watch and so their last major redesign intentionally hid most of the titles from your view and they relentlessly push what they want to you watch by showing them in ad banners, in full screen ads, and by inserting them over and over again in whatever random categories they decide to let you pick form.
If you defy them and ignore what they choose for you they'll punish you by forcing you scroll past bullshit categories like "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", or "Cool Mustaches" when all you really want is "Continue Watching", "New", and "Leaving Soon" (which they refuse to give you) followed by the usual genres.
With all the telemetry they should get a clue that the experience is bad when my wife and I navigate a bit around, watch a few trailers, and then give up after 10min.
And that's us wanting to watch something! But the experience is so bland they're just consistently good at ruining the mood.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
Unfortunately, it depends on the disc. Some discs always start from barely skippable junk.
I think all the recollections above may be correct. IIRC, the DVD spec allows a disc to override some stored user preferences, skip to main menu (ignoring auto-play intro content) and play main content (skipping the menus), but not all DVD players had those user pref options - earlier models often didn't. That could definitely be annoying because some studios loved to force ads, trailers, warnings, etc to play.
Some DVD players, especially later, off-brand models, would ignore a disc's instruction to override the user preference. I remember the presence of these capabilities being a key feature in forum reviews of DVD players. Back then, the holy grail was an inexpensive player that had quick load and seek times, ignored region codes, respected user preferences and had analog component output (or a good composite/S-Video encoder chip). Based on these detailed user reviews, the community would arrive at a handful of players that were worth getting. These lists would be regularly updated as models would change firmware or chips and be sold under different brand names in different regions.
> 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.
I love special features! The interviews with the crew as well as how scenes came together is something I seek out.
I loved the interactive DVD menu's. The deleted scenes and director commentaries or alternate endings were such a bonus. I miss those
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".
Personally I love special features and creative menus.
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.
I was a DVD programmer for just under 10 years. Some titles naturally allowed for more creativity in the menus. For one easter egg, I programmed a feature accessible after an up-up-down-down-left-right-enter navigation from a specific button. Pretty sure the marketing team "leaked" it on some forum for it to be discovered.
Any chance you remember what the title was?
Pretty sure it was Lupin, but couldn't tell you which of the plethora of them. I'd guess it was an Extras menu, but it went to a bit of the actor doing a goofy bit as the character not at all part of the actual content. Just the cast/crew having fun.
By nature of DVD menus and a remote with number keys, you can just add 6 to the number of buttons on the menu to type in the specific button on screen. Then again, not many consumer remotes had those.
It might have been discovered by people ripping the dvd. iirc the rip software detected the chapters
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
If you have the DVD, or have ripped it with chapter markings it would be super easy: you just need to change the chapters order, like in a playlist (that's basically what the original DVD did, IIRC)
Something like this for Tenet would be great. There are plenty of explainers, but not as well designed & interactive.
Agreed! FWIW, here's an analysis of the techniques it uses: https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/how-they-did-it-inception-exp...
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.
> Shame that sort of thing didnt really catch on.
Not exactly the same, but some creative things similar to this are happening in the video game space. There have been a number of recent video games that primarily consist of watching a movie and discovering little hints here and there that let you unlock more of the movie through the user-interface. Sam Barlow has been a pioneer here, "Immortality" from 2022 is probably the most innovative example of this approach to interactive movie-watching.
It's a very fuzzy genre, but you can find some more examples with varying levels of interactivity by heading to the most recent titles here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interactive_films
Loved the fact that DVDs had the ability to create those kinds of features. New and clever.
Sadly, I thought Memento in chronological order was completely boring.
Fight Club had a couple of features/easter eggs in their DVDs as well.
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.
Pulp Fiction?
We watched and all wrote about Momento in our language arts program in high school.
The character Fuchs in Barry reminds of Sammy Jankiss.
I don't think anyone in our class had found that feature of the Memento DVD menu?
Bank then before YouTube, there were properly-tracked copies of Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz on the internet.
Another weird thing about Memento,
If you train a neural network on videos of fluids in reverse, can it recover or reconstruct the parameters of the fluid?
I've been collecting DVD menus. I maybe have somewhere in the vicinity of 250 on my computer. Some are quite large (>1GB) because the menus themselves have videos that need to play to operate and some are like quite long movies. I use a method which strips out any actual video content (the movie and any special features), so if you click on an item which would take you to a video it craps out, but otherwise the menus do completely work most of the time. It just depends on the structure of the DVD (I _think_ it is basically whether some of the menu images or videos are encoded in the movie vob file itself? I haven't gotten around exploring the actual structure of the ifo/vob files).
I find DVDs to be an interesting technology all the way down to the often absurd special features they have (my favorite? On the Tango & Cash DVD they have actor biographies in which they mispell Jack Palance's birthname).
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 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
Yes! My siblings and I used to play on the menu before the movie started. We'd excitedly cheer and laugh when we got the pigs to talk.
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...
Disney - and others - absolutely disgusting behaviour making children watch almost an hour of ads before showing a movie.
The Internet video store gave a much better product.
When you paid for the product, you were exploited.
I have PTSD from trying to navigate some of these menus, not just because of the UI itself but the bad remote control button qualities paired with a really slow DVD reader that took 2 seconds to register every time you push a button.
So on one hand, yeah I see some of these and I get some kind of nostalgia, but as it happens with nostalgia, it's wasn't all that good haha
Yeah, same. It was quite punishing to mix a bad DVD UI with a bad DVD player/remote!
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.
Who's ripping DVDs in 2026? Just print a photo of each frame and flick through.
It sounds like a Flash intro for a website...
I hated DVD menus. I preferred discs that would pop directly into the movie.
The menus were often slow and buggy, and sometimes broke on specific players.
Some discs would also try to block skipping ads.
The feeling I get with DVD menus is that I sometimes feel like watching some classic movie, and so I put on the DVD. But then the DVD menu already shows all the classic scenes and characters, so when I finally have navigated all the menus and started the movie, I no longer want to watch the movie. The DVD menu clips have completely refreshed my memory of what the movie was like, so I can no longer re-watch it with satisfaction.
(Re-post: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41801993>)
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.
Wow this takes me back to the days of the Sonic HD DVD authoring system. I designed and authored several big titles back then and menu design was always the heaviest lift. Fascinating that this article is interesting enough so many years later to people to rank this high on HN.
The only beauty in DVD Menus was that watching them meant we actually owned the content and nobody could remotely pull the plug on it.
I seem to remember a hidden menu option in Monty Python and the Holy Grail's DVD menu labeled something like "Menu Reader for the Hard of Hearing" that, when selected, had a cast member start shouting the menu options at you. It was quite humorous to me as a kid.
> 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.
My favourite was Mulholland Drive DVD menu - it felt like you were watching LA in real time from the hills, while listening to eerie synth music. Pure art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMztEUXXF00
The Twin Peaks Gold Box DVD menus are one of my favorites for the same reason. The backgrounds are just extended shots of places in Twin Peaks. The first disc, for instance, is almost all long, well-looped clips of saw blades cutting logs at the mill, sound included.
I have fond memories of DVD menus from back in the day. I specifically remember getting my hands on an early release of 300 that was made for reviewers and was blown away by the beauty of the menu especially considering that menu was maybe meant to be seen by a couple thousand people at best.
I wish I still had access to it because looking now it was distinctly different from the actual release DVD menu.
Notable special features I've seen on DVDs:
* The IT crowd season 1 had leetspeak and base64 encoded subtitles (won't spoil what the encoding decodes to).
* Goodfellas has a commentary track with the central criminal and the FBI agent who arrested him.
* The Simpsons (around season 9 if I recall) has a hidden commentary track (not accessable by menus) where two of the writers fairly candidly explain the quality dip that was to follow, and have an impromptu phone call with the illusive John Swartzwelder.
There are a few episodes of the Simpsons over various seasons that have extra bonus hidden commentary tracks.
I’m not sure the Simpsons one was hidden. I watched all the commentaries a while back and if I remember correctly the one with the John Swartzwelder call was accessed just through the ordinary menu.
I’ll have to check out the Goodfellas one though.
You might be right, it was a while ago.
For anyone interested, interactive DVD menus can be pretty easily made with spumux and dvdauthor. I used them a few years ago to make a silly DVD-menu game at a game jam, heavily inspired by these "looping clips and audio that don’t quite seamlessly repeat or have abrupt endings": https://dos.itch.io/pipe-inspector
The problem is that there really is limited space in a DVD, and if you care about the actual movie, you want as much bitrate as possible. Some DVDs can look almost HD with enough bitrate.
So no, I don't want animated menus or worthless features. Put a commentary track - that has high extra value to size ratio - but leave it to that.
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
> this really means that it often plays trailers before the feature presentation
This is totally normal, compared to VHS that often had trailers before the feature.
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!
The DVD menu for Requiem for a Dream will always be imprinted in my mind. I remember being young and setting it up for some friends and I kept flipping sources past what I thought was just an infomercial only to realize it was a brilliant little DVD menu.
DVD menus honestly just tend to piss me off. I can tell that someone somewhere had a lot of fun making some of them, but if I can't skip past them and get to the point where I can start the show it really just gets in the way. What is the point in making me wait for 30 seconds while a bunch of graphics float around into place. It just adds to the already obnoxious list of other things that you can't skip past. FBI warning, ads, disclaimers about commentary, corporate logos, it's all disrespectful of my time. DVD is better about it than bluray which usually has even more things you can't skip plus a bunch of other intrusive garbage like massive progress bars (which sometimes remain on screen when paused obscuring content/subtitles) and scene thumbnails that cover a quarter of the screen as you rewind or fast forward.
A good DVD/bluray menu is the one that I can skip past immediately and has "play move" selected by default.
Or, the bit that I find fascinating, The DVD menu VM.
I can't find the actual spec, but there is libdvdnav with a reverse engineered implementation. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libdvdnav.git
Pure nostalgia looking at the Shrek menu. It makes you wonder if the designs are actually good or if nostalgia is convincing us that they are good. Some definitely are well made and thought out, but others seemed like they just made them fancy because they could. Shrek 1's menu was a whole experience.
Even better, the Shrek DVD came with software you could run on the computer, including a tool to dub lines and play them back. Good fun as a kid!
"Beauty" wouldn't be my word of choice for these.
I don't see much beauty in the menus. Most are poorly designed. Most make it unable to determine if a feature (like subtitles) are on or off. Some are so clever it's unclear what to click on.
If the site's owner here, here's how it looks in an older Firefox - https://i.postimg.cc/ThMcK0bW/vale.jpg - just FYI.
I’ve been trying to see if there was ever a demoscene for the DVD VM, but alas this has not happened yet.
Finding Nemo was the first DVD i got from my parents. great stuff on Disc 2!
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.
I'm surprised we haven't seen a Plex-like front end app for Apple TV that faithfully runs the full DVD menu experience from your (legally owned and manually backed-up) DVD disk images.
Kodi does support playing DVD backups (.iso or VIDEO_TS) with menus and everything.
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.
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'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!
Glad to see some attention given to this so-quickly-forgotten and so-long-besmirched chapter of human creativity. When it was bad it was SO bad. The good ones stood out by soaking you in the verve around a film.
They were especially doomed by being constrained to that Cold War dinosaur: the infra-red remote, with its overpopulated slimy-sticky buttons. All its failure modes. No one misses those except those who stopped learning.
I don't miss the art form. But I recognize the charm. And more notably, I see them as marker in the cultural landscape sliding out from us. We used to have patient engagement with our art. We'd treasure the physical artifact, be it book or vinyl. DVD menus were that early step away from this. Not physical, but made by folks who either made or used to appreciate the physical.
Now, we just want everything to go away so we can get wherever we think we're going. All of life, an intro to be skipped.
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
Can't (directly) suggest harm on the internet or you could get in trouble. Everyone knows this. You have to do it using cutesy words, and memes.
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.
Not really menus, but related to the “programmability” of DVDs, my “favourite” “feature” was unskippable videos which would show before the feature.
This was used to reward people who had actually paid for the movie with being forced to endure obnoxious and long “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy appeals before they could watch the main feature.
An interesting effect of them doing this is that it made the pirated version of the product objectively better than the legal version. Great thinking by movie studios.
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
My wife and I both agree that we miss DVD menus. They felt like artistic expressions made with pride (in some cases). New movies would come out and break the mold and deliver a new flashy menu experience. I looked forward to popping in a new DVD and hoping, pleading to the universe, please...give me a great DVD menu! Mini-games, Easter eggs, and the like...
I miss them.
Case in point: The Shrek DVD had an Easter Egg hidden in the menu that made the three little pigs interactive.
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.
This is a thing I want to try and do. I do the same thing as you are the moment (mainly to convert things to the much more efficient mp4 instead of what you natively get from, e.g., MakeMKV) just throw the movie in as a single file, and then all the rest into appropriately named extras.
But I do try and save the (usually pretty small) menus just in case I can figure out how to get them running at some point. VLC can run the menu with the large videos stripped out. I still need to check, but I assume I could create a single iso file that would run as a "menu." I guess I'll see.
I worked on this problem a little bit. Unfortunately, it's not really a matter of simple "parsing" - the DVD menu is really a program with an entire virtual machine (IMO overly confusing and complicated).
You basically have to implement the VM, which may lead to legal problems (?)
But, VLC does this (via libdvdnav and libdvdread), so I'm not sure why more don't.
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.
- "secret" menus
- randomized menu backgrounds/environments
One dvd menu game I remember fondly from when I was a kid was the games in Robots (2005).
IIRC there was a game (maybe more than one?) about picking parts as they went by on a conveyor belt in order to build a robot. At the end it would play a little animation based on the parts you chose, if you missed parts or chose bad/incompatible parts, the robot would break down in hilarious fashion.
Tangentially, Is it possible to lase circuits with a LightScribe DVD burner?
> In NTSC regions video on DVD almost always has a resolution of 720 × 480 pixels
This always irritated me. So presumably, television content was mastered and broadcast at 640x480, and then the x axis was scaled by a factor of 1.125 to fit 720 columns?
I never quite understood who made those menus. I think 95% of them were absolutely hideous, just like early webdesign.
>The Rocky Horror Picture Show DVD opens with the iconic lips welcoming you to the DVD. After which you’re presented with the main menu, where a disembodied pair of legs wearing heels and fishnets walks in, kicking around one of the menu items, which begins flipped the wrong way around. The extra features are numerous and play into Rocky Horror’s cult status. Some menu options are accompanied by a large switch which animates when flicked. Throughout much of the menu the lips continue speaking while songs from the film play in the background. The 16:9-only portion of the screen is occupied by red curtains, which slide in and out again when ‘Play Movie’ is selected.
Wow, the Rocky Horror Picture Show interactive DVD menu is thrilling, chilling, and fulfilling!
The Rocky Horror Picture Show 2000 DVD Menu walkthrough (Disc 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s3h_NCl9sY
The end credits kick:
https://youtu.be/1s3h_NCl9sY
When Tim Curry died, I went looking for the fishnet stockings bootleg Rocky Horror Picture Show source code I found decades ago in the MIT-AI Lab's HUMOR directory. I finally dug up this old archive where the body was buried:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/humor/...
Right there along with the rest of the original AI:HUMOR; directory:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/tree/master/files/humor
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.