Beauty in DVD Menus

spiderfarmer

I never quite understood who made those menus. I think 95% of them were absolutely hideous, just like early webdesign.

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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!

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.

clircle

"Beauty" wouldn't be my word of choice for these.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

valgaze

- "secret" menus - randomized menu backgrounds/environments

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")

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/106536 edit: oh no, it's just wrong date on the page. Last release was 2011. Yeah makes more sense.

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.

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.