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.

Wow this takes me back to the days of the Sonic HD DVD authoring system. I designed and authored several big titles back then and menu design was always the heaviest lift. Fascinating that this article is interesting enough so many years later to people to rank this high on HN.

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.

I seem to remember a hidden menu option in Monty Python and the Holy Grail's DVD menu labeled something like "Menu Reader for the Hard of Hearing" that, when selected, had a cast member start shouting the menu options at you. It was quite humorous to me as a kid.

> 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 have fond memories of DVD menus from back in the day. I specifically remember getting my hands on an early release of 300 that was made for reviewers and was blown away by the beauty of the menu especially considering that menu was maybe meant to be seen by a couple thousand people at best.

I wish I still had access to it because looking now it was distinctly different from the actual release DVD menu.

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

Notable special features I've seen on DVDs:

* 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.

For anyone interested, interactive DVD menus can be pretty easily made with spumux and dvdauthor. I used them a few years ago to make a silly DVD-menu game at a game jam, heavily inspired by these "looping clips and audio that don’t quite seamlessly repeat or have abrupt endings": https://dos.itch.io/pipe-inspector

The problem is that there really is limited space in a DVD, and if you care about the actual movie, you want as much bitrate as possible. Some DVDs can look almost HD with enough bitrate.

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.