- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
lobsters score: 1 · tags: art
You must log in or register to comment.
Something I miss from peak DVD was Easter eggs. When I was a teenager and I bought or borrowed a new DVD, I’d go to eeggs.com to see whether there was any hidden content and I’d do a little hunting myself. It was a magical time.
To this day, I press the arrow keys on the edges of Blu-ray menus just in case, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across an Easter egg on a Blu-ray. I’m sure there are some, and now I’m thinking I should go hunting once more.
score 1 · canonical
Oh about 20 years ago I made a stab at dvd authoring for a local sports thing. Used a program with KDE. I can barely remember the details now but recall actually having a hard time making the text look good on an actual screen. It would so often come out blurry and just boring. Probably needed an artistic touch I lacked to work with the mpeg compression. And the article talking about the limited palette of interactive bits was a thing too. Golly, I wish my memory worked better here, I mostly just remember it being weird. I guess a lot of the limitations just trying to make the most of the hardware when it came out while being focused on the video playback. You had to define dvd chapters (or something like that) for the menu to play and then could draw simple overlays, with transitions being other little videos you’d embed.
I tried it once and did not try it again; I did a poor job at it.
score 1 · canonical
My grandpa DJs at his senior center and films different (e.g. dance) groups. He used to make beautiful DVDs, with menus, custom fonts etc. and even did a few for museums etc. but was tethered to IIRC Ubuntu 14 as the last OS which still supported Bombono, which hasn’t been updated in 10 years (though is still up). At some more recent point, many people stopped having DVD players and he came to just post a maze of youtube links in whatsapp; the phone is a much worse experience for these technically literate 80 year-olds with poor eyesight.
score 1 · canonical
I’ll be that guy: eventually DVD menus got in the way of what I bought to watch. At least you could skip previews usually, but it was usually not allowed to skip some animated lead-in to each submenu. I liked Superbit DVD menus best because they got straight to the point, which was to play the damn movie.
score 1 · canonical
Yeah, I think this is very much a case of effort being spent where people would have preferred none at all, and I think most didn’t appreciate the effort. I remember back in the day getting DVDs instead of VHSes were annoying because of unskippable warnings and trailers. 99% of the time I also just want to watch the movie, and the 1% of the time that I care about special features or chapter select, I’m OK with something more austere.
score 1 · canonical
Also, the DVD player usually had a built in UI for chapter select. Same with subtitles. The menu kind of made you think you had to go through it, which was also annoying.
score 1 · canonical
FWIW, I suspect DVD menu design might have earlier CD-ROM based efforts from i.e. Voyager (who are related to Criterion; Bob Stein founded both around the same time). Cathode Ray Dude has a good video showing some early attempts; the one for Spinal Tap has huge DVD menu energy in particular.
score 1 · canonical