Beauty in DVD Menus

35 points | by speckx an hour ago

8 comments

  • pelagicAustral 6 minutes ago

    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.

      jonhohle 3 minutes ago

      Seppuku?

      Though the idea of being so frustrated that you must solve a sudoku is kind of funny.

  • nekusar 10 minutes ago

    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.

      floydnoel 5 minutes ago

      some software could just open a DVD ISO, so I used that as the backup format when I wanted to retain menus. XBMC and it's derivatives could open them over the network share iirc.

  • garciasn 8 minutes ago

    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.

      usui 5 minutes ago

      Yeah, I tried Apple TV's free trial and it really gets in the way of everything, so much so that I canceled. It's pretty annoying how modern streaming platforms try to ruin the vanilla viewing experience as much as possible. If I remember correctly it's also impossible to disable the automatic "next episode" preview in Amazon Prime which you have to click out of to hide. Like holy shit, I just watched a feature-length film. Let me watch the credits in peace.

      Goronmon 5 minutes ago

      Yeah, I saw this similar "DVD menu" topic come up on Reddit as well.

      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.

  • spiderfarmer 12 minutes ago

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