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.

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.

> 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.

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.

The DVD menu for Requiem for a Dream will always be imprinted in my mind. I remember being young and setting it up for some friends and I kept flipping sources past what I thought was just an infomercial only to realize it was a brilliant little DVD menu.

Or, the bit that I find fascinating, The DVD menu VM.

I can't find the actual spec, but there is libdvdnav with a reverse engineered implementation. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libdvdnav.git

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

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.

Disney - and others - absolutely disgusting behaviour making children watch almost an hour of ads before showing a movie.

The Internet video store gave a much better product.

When you paid for the product, you were exploited.

I don't see much beauty in the menus. Most are poorly designed. Most make it unable to determine if a feature (like subtitles) are on or off. Some are so clever it's unclear what to click on.