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.
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.
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.
doom9 had reams of guides dedicate to the matter: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=313722
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".
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).
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.
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.
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).
Later on, they added menus, called Playback Control, but many players let you turn that off.
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.
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.
And I liked creative menus.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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
Sadly, I thought Memento in chronological order was completely boring.
Fight Club had a couple of features/easter eggs in their DVDs as well.
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?
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 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).
It's ironic that the author chose the much simpler/inferior Shrek 2 DVD menu to showcase.
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 like it, kind of the 2000's version of parallel grooves on vinyl records
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unusual_types_of_gramophone_re...
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.
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
The menus were often slow and buggy, and sometimes broke on specific players.
Some discs would also try to block skipping ads.
(Re-post: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41801993>)
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.
Product design centered around corporate identity/branding did the rest.
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’ll have to check out the Goodfellas one though.
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.
This is totally normal, compared to VHS that often had trailers before the feature.
I can't find the actual spec, but there is libdvdnav with a reverse engineered implementation. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libdvdnav.git
A good DVD/bluray menu is the one that I can skip past immediately and has "play move" selected by default.
1. Because it would cause confusion with my kids when they were trying to watch movies in the car as toddlers.
2. It was an annoyance when we were watching a movie at home.
I am finding a similar annoyance w/AppleTV's content ad/preview, recap, and intro skips. Like, for fucks sake, just play the episode already.
I was surprised how many people expressed disappointment or annoyance at the lack of these menus when it came to streaming.
While I specifically remember the lack of these menus (and how slow they were) being something I was thrilled to have when streaming was introduced.
It took a lot of work but I was able to do it... once. Then it turned itself back on. Damnit, I'm watching an anime, I want to hear the ending song, it's a banger!
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.
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 was just utterly incapable of conducting business in these screens, but it could have been a massive web of combinatronics between poorly engineered hardware in the form of remote control buttons, low patience, and some cognitive dissonance after so many years of downloading warez films on Limewire.
Though the idea of being so frustrated that you must solve a sudoku is kind of funny.
Secondly, I'm assuming you're just too young to understand/appreciate DVD menus. Your wording sounds like you are of later Gen Z age and therefore couldn't have had the frame of reference to respect the history and progression.
Of course, even worse than the menus was when companies realised they could give you unskippable adverts and trailers on your DVDs.
The easy path should have the ability to start playing with a second of inserting the disc.
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.
It was a huge upgrade from sitting and exploring TeleText https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
I miss them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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:
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.
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.
