DVD, a falling angel
I meant to write a blog entry last night, but instead I decided to watch Alien versus Predator, which Matt and Kath had gotten me for my birthday (excellent choice, thanks very much!). This neatly and concisely leads me to something of a rant. 
Some DVDs are really starting to get on my nerves for two reasons, both of which boil down to time wasting.
Lets put aside for the moment the stupid un-skipable copyright warnings because, for all their annoyance factor, I can understand why they are none skipable, and I can go put the kettle on while it’s blathering away to itself. No, what’s really starting to bug me is something which I think was a dying wish of VHS’s. “DVD my son, bend closer… *gasp, wheeze* I can go to my resting place happily if you will promise me one last thing. I know this isn’t something you’ve done before, but there is a legacy that must be passed on. Son, before you play any movie, you must play at least five trailers for other films. *gasp,splutter* Promise me you will do this… *death*”.
I dislike that I have paid money to be advertised at, and dislike it even more when many of those adverts are for films I have no intention of ever watching in my life, and many of which have nothing to do with the film on the DVD. I can almost understand there being adverts on the ‘cheap as chips’ DVDs, they help reduce the cost of those single disk DVD editions. What I do not want, and what I am starting to see too often, are the ‘collectors edition’ double disk sets, for which you pay a premium also being infested with adverts. Stop wasting my time dammit!
Falling into a similar category of ‘how to annoy people’ are overly-long DVD menu animations. I want to put my DVD in the drive and watch my movie. I do not want to wait ten minutes for the copyright notice and subsequent adverts to play, get to the menu and wait another minute for the damned menu to finish playing, which looks ugly as sin, and is violating a dozen well established Accessibility and User Interface rules. Let me watch my movie! Your menu is trite and lame, no DVD menu is ever cool. It’s a menu, not a piece of entertainment. Don’t try making it anything other than it is - an access point to the content of the DVD.
Those menu’s are the DVD equivalent of none-skipable flash intro’s on websites - which are a sure fire way of getting your visitor to close the browser before they see any of your content.
End rant.
Entry Information
- Posted:
- Wed, 16th Mar 2005 at 10:03 UTC
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Comments
skip to comment forminteresting comments, especially seeing as I’m in the process of creating a DVD menu!
I was only fuming to myself about the non-skipable trailers the other night. I think it’s just another argument to buy ripped off DVD’s.
Groups such as the Recording Industry Association of America and British Phonographic Industy are extremely talented at shooting themselfs in the foot. If only they realised what it was people want out of their entertainment media, the problem of piracy would be so much less.
i have to disagree, i used to love HIRING a DVD and watching the trailers. but i do agree that when i buy a DVD i dont wanna c them, it annoys you when you come back years later to watch a film and then realise how old it is by the adverts there