DVDs. So much better than VHS was and so many useful features. All that space on a disc. Usually filled with crap, mind you. If I never watch a 'making of' documentary again I reckon I'd learn as much more about films than I would if I watched a hundred. They are so pointless and dull.
What's more annoying about DVDs, though, is the control the disc can take of your player to make you watch stuff you never want to. Corporate logos, for example.
Farscape is one bad example of that. You have to sit through about 8 corporate logos before you can watch an episode. The production company's,
the authoring company's, the film company's, the original TV stations involved etc, etc. And you can't skip over any of the damned things. Or play them on fast forward.
Then there's the thrill of reading copyright warnings. In some cases in about every language on the planet. Multi-region discs with lazy encoders just trawl through the things for
every region you
might want to watch your disc in. Often these days that's backed up with a preachy film about how piracy is "A Bad Thing" and will result in another 9/11, the raping of your children and the end of civilisation as we know it. You can't skip of fast-forward that, either. Next comes the animated introduction to the menu, which some prat decided could be used as a marketing tool and classed as a 'special feature'.
Special, my arse!
All they do is add another 30 seconds loading time and anything up to two minutes watching the crap before you can begin the feature you actually bought the disc for and
want to watch. At least these can usually be skipped over, but not always. And don't even get me started on trailers. The longer DVDs are on the market, the more of these irritating features are being foisted upon us. The copyright notice is probably the worst and most pointless.
It's illegal to copy or transmit any such material in pretty much every country in the world. The minute something has a copyright it's protected. Putting multiple versions of a piece of legalese on the screen for the
amount of time it would take a three year old to read it doesn't make copying it any less legal. And those who were going to copy it and pirate it certainly aren't intimidated by it. All it does is annoy the rest of us.
These notices and logos were all on VHS tapes and we all just fast-forwarded through them. Did it make them any less legally binding? Of course it didn't. So why do we need to be hectored about them nowadays? Copying a VHS was a lot easier than copying a DVD is.
By the time you've waited through all this crap it can be easily 5 minutes. Much more if you've sat through half a dozen trailers. Maybe all you had time for was a quick episode of
Scrubs before you went out. It's 25 minutes long.
So here's a request to the DVD producers:
Please stop telling us who you are and nagging us about both your future products and how butch you are in enforcing your rights. We don't care how big your nuts are or how high up the wall your pee reaches. We just want to watch the films for which you took our money. Pirates will steal your work regardless of what you say to the rest of us and usually have their discs out months before you do. If you must insist on these notices being present at least let us skip them. We know they're there and you can slap us on the wrist whether we've read them or not.
That
rant's been coming for a long time. It was
precipitated today by having 5 minutes spare time and watching
Battlestar Galactica last night. Some twat has decided that the select episode feature will operate on a
slideshow. This means you have to wait until the episode you want comes up on screen to press 'play'. Miss it and you have to wait until it comes around again. Whoever decided on that one needs to be shoved out the nearest airlock.
