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.

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.

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")

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.

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.

- "secret" menus

- randomized menu backgrounds/environments

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.

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

> 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?

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