It's already been eleven years since DVDs came on the market. Although business pundits grumble about the current slow growth of the format, nobody disputes the claim that the little silver discs are still the biggest new product of the millennium years. I remember when Laserdiscs were the hot ticket in Hollywood home theater boutiques. In 1996 the proprietor of the most successful Laserdiscs store sent out communiqués from the trade-show front lines, reporting that he'd seen demo DVD discs and that they had serious drawbacks: the image didn't begin to approach Laserdisc quality; DVD playback was plagued by artifacts; there were weird motion disturbances, etc. In his opinion the technology was a long way from being ready, perhaps years away.

When DVD premiered the next March, that little store begrudged the format a little rack along the back wall. Only a few months later, DVDs had taken over. Unlike Laserdiscs, DVDs were marketed to a mass consumer base and could be bought cheaply at many venues, including on the internet.

It really was no contest. Although less bulky to store, Lasers were inferior to DVDs in almost every respect. They were big and heavy and needed to be flipped unless one had a $500 double-sided player. Any movie over two hours required two flip interruptions. Although the information on the DVDs was digitally compressed, after a number of miserable early encodings (I've saved an old Image Entertainment disc of RoboCop to serve as a bad example) DVDs by and large looked far better than Lasers. The use of 16:9 squeezed "anamorphic" encoding pushed the resolution advantage even farther.

Movies with a NASA Control Panel

Most exciting of all, DVDs didn't play like Lasers. DVDs played like high-tech computer programs, introducing new functions like on-screen chapter search. An exotic new remote function was "Angle." The machines could play back a choice of angles on the same action, if content providers wanted to make programs to fit. That feature was explored almost exclusively by porn producers, but just lately, discs from Legend Films have been using it to let you switch back and forth between color and black-and-white encodings of Legend's colorized movies.

As for extra content -- featurettes, commentaries, etc. -- only a couple of studios embraced those immediately. I was at MGM and did my best to promote the idea of special content for discs. The general corporate attitude was that extras were fine, so long as they cost nothing and required no legal clearances. We heard speeches about the DVD revolution, but putting a trailer on a disc was considered a big deal. Meanwhile, studios such as Warner Brothers and New Line were going full speed on all kinds of creative and innovative content.

It was fun seeing the invention of basic DVD features we now take for granted. Graphics artist Sharon Braun had a mind for computer work, and laid out the basic menu system for "chapter search" using screen grabs as scene choice buttons. Sharon was soon tapped to oversee the production of introductory menu animations that would "welcome" the viewer to the main disc menu. MGM's first round of fancy James Bond special editions lured many first-time buyers into the world of DVD. Sharon's complicated opening animation sequences were built on the conceit that viewers were entering a special hi-tech digital dossier on 007, through what looked like the opening of some kind of futuristic vault.

DVD menu layouts have evolved in the last ten years, bowing to viewer likes and dislikes but mostly adjusting for the convenience of the studio. For instance, elaborate opening animations are no longer common, not only because they're expensive to create but because consumers got sick of sitting through them, or having to hit five menu buttons just to get to the point where they can watch the movie.

On certain elaborate, special-edition DVDs, Disney employed a tedious set of animations that moved the viewer through a sequence of opening curtains. Make a mistake, and it was like losing at a game of Myst (remember Myst?). The person manning the remote had to be sober and patient ... picking one's way through Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is like filling out a tax form.

Here are some things we like and dislike about DVD navigation layouts. As most of them serve the general priorities of DVD companies, I wouldn't expect many to change:

Frills are nice, but we want a fast route to playing the disc contents. Opening animations can be exciting, but after a viewing or two it's nice to be able to hit "Menu" or "Chapter Forward" and go directly to where we can start the darn movie we paid to see. At this moment the only company showing particular concern for this issue is Warner Home Video. One can interrupt the Warner shield and fanfare to jump right to a "Play Feature" choice. Warners is consistently user-friendly in this regard. If you're playing a disc for a small child (or an invalid), just loading the disc in the player will get the ball rolling. The Warners main menu will recycle an audio cue a few times, and then start the movie without the need for additional menu commands.

Ads burn us up big time. Nothing's more galling than watching TV commercials or public service messages in a movie theater, right? The fact that theater audiences don't boo and throw things has always mystified me. Pernicious studio promos and trailer tie-ins are just as unwelcome on DVDs, where marketing maniacs have seemingly been given free reign. Discs often list these advertising promos as extras. Things like chapter stops are sometimes called extras as well. The practice warrants a George Orwell award for double-talk.

Anti-piracy propaganda is an insult. How would you like stores to greet customers by saying, "Good morning, please don't shoplift anything today"? That's how I feel every time 20th Century Fox's "You wouldn't steal a car" piece comes on. The "public service" announcements were eventually discontinued but are still guaranteed to make us angry. The same campaign included theatrical announcements as well, in which studio workers pleaded for us to not pirate discs so they wouldn't lose their jobs. The real message of the ads was that studios were holding film industry workers hostage against profits.

For at least a year Fox placed the 60-second spots on almost everything, beginning every disc with the same grating rock guitar blast. It makes no sense at all to place this teen-oriented plea on the front of a Betty Grable or Don Ameche movie ... how many nascent disc-rippers want to snatch The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? Get real.

My pal Rocco Gioffre broke us up with his reaction to the anti-piracy ads: "Yes, I'd never steal a car, but what if a friend said, Hey, want me to rip you a copy of my BMW? That would be pretty tempting!"

Forced viewing: welcome to the DVD Gulag. All of the unwanted content above -- ads, trailers, public service spots -- are bad enough, but they become infuriating when the disc encoders disable our ability to skip them. Usually this causes s minor inconvenience, as when the "Menu" button won't work but the "Chapter Forward" button will. But sometimes all user choices are disabled, and we're forced to sit through minutes of captive sales pitches.

This practice pops up occasionally on Disney discs. The Mouse Factory's Ministry of Mind Control (marketing, for short) specializes in inconveniencing viewers. Their misleading "Fast Play" option feeds the DVD viewer a full stack of promos and plugs. But a disc from some other company took the prize a few weeks ago. Every attempt to circumvent its five trailers resulted in being returned to the top of the stack again. It was like being caught in an endless loop at the DMV.

Once again, our hero in this regard is Warner Home Video. It's the only company that seems to believe that FBI threats, copyright entreaties and Interpol harangues belong at the back of the disc, along with the credit for the disc encoding company. Almost every company forces us to sit through cards of legal-speak that regard us as intellectual property thieves instead of customers. The toothless "FBI Warning" cards glare at us from the front position on everything, even lowercase DVD releases of public domain movies.

Spoilers. This isn't as big of an issue, but it needs to be addressed in the spirit of Good Disc Manners. We've all watched mysteries where the visuals on the menus reveal the identity of the film's crazed killer. An otherwise visually superb Criterion disc of Fiend Without a Face ruins what is probably the only real thrill in that humble monster romp, the reveal of the film's scary atomic monsters (showcased in their cerebral glory at the top of this page).

This happens all the time, unfortunately. The otherwise beautiful Paramount disc of The High and the Mighty launches with a John Wayne promo that spoils several of the film's highlights. It takes practice to figure out how to skip over it.

A personal annoyance with this viewer is the ongoing bad practice of underscoring a disc's main menu with the film's main theme, thereby spoiling the impact of the music in the film itself. The Hitchcock movie North by Northwest begins with an unforgettable Bernard Herrmann theme. Part of the pleasure of the film is anticipating its entrance, looming behind the roar of the MGM lion. But on disc the same cue plays over the menu, spoiling the surprise. Some disc producers understand this issue and employ a secondary theme under the menus instead. DVD producers should design their discs as if they were personally going to audition them before the film's director.

Blu-ray Menus Go Ballistic

What Brave New Interface innovations lie in the future? The menus for Blu-ray discs have become even more complicated, at least on shows that offer a wealth of extra content. The new Sony Blu-ray of Starship Troopers has a feature called "Blu Wizard," an "extras management page" that allows the user to customize playback, bookmark features and check off those already viewed. Push a button and the HD screen fills with choices. I only wish that more movies had special content worthy of that kind of detailed analysis.

What have I missed? What kinds of "systemic" features do you hate on DVDs, and which would you like to see more of? I have my own preferences for extras (I like to watch films I've seen before with both a commentary and trivia track running simultaneously), but that's another subject. Any disc or company that you think has the perfect menu format? The comments section awaits below.

Glenn Erickson
reviews online at DVD Savant

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