An Open Letter To DVD Producers
December 23, 2006
I think I speak for all consumers when I say… we hate your menus.
You know what? When I plop down $10, $15, even $20 for a movie… you know what I’m interested in?
THE MOVIE!
Not the 15 minutes of menu introduction with swooshes and bangs and clips from the movies and pretty music. Nor the lousy video game graphics. If I wanted a video game, I would not have bought…
A MOVIE!
Now, it’s forgivable if I can hit the skip-forward button and get to the guts of the menu. To Disney… kudos to you for making sure we can skip previews and the lengthy menus. To the rest… shame on you!
My kids just acquired an old movie about a certain rangifer with a nasal disorder. Just like many of their other movies… there were several previews that could not be skipped, and a lengthy (though not the longest I’ve seen) menu which could not be skipped either!
I dare say if we could find the people who produce these things, put them in a room with a whiny child eager to watch a movie, and give them their own DVD to start - things would change.
Please, please! If you produce DVD’s and are responsible for these menus, read the DVD spec. Become familiar with the skip feature. Use it. Disney figured it out. You can, too!
The consumers of America would appreciate it.
December 24th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
You can count on my signature on that petition… Until then, Hollywood has left me no choice but to use DVDShrink with the “remove prohibited user operations” setting enabled.
I have noticed a lot of videos for kids have all the terrible ads AFTER the main feature, but Evan gets noticably upset at the blatant advertisements. He repeats “Bow wow, bow wow?” until we restart his Wiggles