HN

Comments (125)

• Menu

  gwbas1c
  > 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.
• Menu

  alt227
  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.
• SeaGully
  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).
• luqtas
  Finding Nemo was the first DVD i got from my parents. great stuff on Disc 2!
• kalleboo
  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!
• Menu

  VCFundedGenYer
  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.
• Menu

  waltbosz
  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.
• Menu

  chungy
  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.
• asveikau
  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.
• LluisGerard
  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
• Juvination
  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.
• disillusionist
  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.
• KazaNLP
  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.
• dkenyser
  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.
• Menu

  liampulles
  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.
• xattt
  I’ve been trying to see if there was ever a demoscene for the DVD VM, but alas this has not happened yet.
• Menu

  ndiddy
  > 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.
• seba_dos1
  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
• pa7ch
  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.
• Menu

  armcat
  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
• liampulles
  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.
• somat
  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
• WalterBright
  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.
• amelius
  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.
• autoexec
  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.
• tantalor
  > this really means that it often plays trailers before the feature presentationThis is totally normal, compared to VHS that often had trailers before the feature.
• Menu

  DrProfresher
  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.
• drooopy
  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
• Menu

  garciasn
  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.
• clircle
  "Beauty" wouldn't be my word of choice for these.
• huhtenberg
  If the site's owner here, here's how it looks in an older Firefox - https://i.postimg.cc/ThMcK0bW/vale.jpg - just FYI.
• pkamb
  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.
• Menu

  zapkyeskrill
  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"?
• Menu

  kccqzy
  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.
• jmaw
  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!
• Menu

  hed
  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.
• gausswho
  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.
• Menu

  pelagicAustral
  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.
• jonathanlydall
  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.
• Menu

  dcw303
  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")
• Menu

  SpaceL10n
  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.
• Menu

  nekusar
  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.
• valgaze
  - "secret" menus- randomized menu backgrounds/environments
• jedbrooke
  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.
• westurner
  Tangentially, Is it possible to lase circuits with a LightScribe DVD burner?
• Menu

  functionmouse
  > In NTSC regions video on DVD almost always has a resolution of 720 × 480 pixelsThis 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?
• spiderfarmer
  I never quite understood who made those menus. I think 95% of them were absolutely hideous, just like early webdesign.
• DonHopkins
  >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_NCl9sYThe end credits kick:https://youtu.be/1s3h_NCl9sYWhen 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
• karel-3d
  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/106536edit: oh no, it's just wrong date on the page. Last release was 2011. Yeah makes more sense.
• d--b
  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.