YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

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.

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 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.

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"?

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.

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’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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

- "secret" menus

- randomized menu backgrounds/environments

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")

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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!

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Tangentially, Is it possible to lase circuits with a LightScribe DVD burner?

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.

> 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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.