More DVD Usability Tips
Category: Design...
Posted Monday, January 03, 2005 at 10:02 PM [GMT-6]

Note: This is a follow-up post to a similar rant from a year ago.

I've been watching quite a few movies on DVD lately, as the winter weather is limiting my outdoor workouts. I continue to be unimpressed with the common sense exercised by those who design DVD user interfaces. Here are a couple of new pet peeves:

  • When a user selects the option for Subtitles/Closed Captioning (assuming she can find that option, given the wide variety of labels used for this feature), why is the default selection "None"? Doesn't it make sense to assume that someone selecting this option does so because they want some kind of captioning option? Why not make the default one of the language options, perhaps based on DVD region code?


  • It's probably not reasonable to expect that DVD makers would ever agree on a standard set of labels for the various setup and viewing options...but we can still dream. In some designs, for examplel, the caption/subtitle option is found in the Setup menu item; in others, it's in the Audio menu; for a wonderful few, it's actually in its own category.

    If I was king, here are the menu categories I'd mandate for every DVD: Play Movie; Audio Options; Video Options (primarily for those DVDs which offer a choice of 4:3 or 16:9 formats on the same disc); Subtitles; Scene Selection; and Special Features (where applicable).

I can't resist sending one last message to the studios who put their movies on DVDs: putting trailers of other movies at the beginning of a disk is not only annoying (especially when you disable the "skip" function), but illogical. "Coming soon" will inevitably become irrelevant and untrue with the passage of time. Stop it.

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Comments

Wellllll. . . I guess I have little cause to complain since most of the dvds we have are pirated copies. BUT, my dvd pet peeve is when the box and the seller assures us the movie is in English, and then we get home and it's not. . .

I think we bought 5 copies of Modniya Mat (Fashionable Mother, aka Raising Helen) before we found one that was *really* in English.

As reform spreads throughout Ukraine, I truly hope that eventually it will impact the illegal copying and distribution of cds and dvds. It'll be best for the country and Europe as a whole.

But, I must say, I'll miss how easy and cheap it is to buy them. . .

Posted by: TulipGirl at January 4, 2005 11:31 AM

There is some justification for the captioning default if it is defaulting to the current mode. If you have "English" selected and when you go to the menu to find "None" highlighted, then that is broken. That is why I always select my subtitles and languages with the "Audio" and "Subtitle" functions of the DVD player and ignore the DVD menus.

There used to be a way to make Apex (and other brands) unlock the controls so that skip and such couldn't be disabled, but I haven't checked in a while. I generally try a DVD out on Netflix and then buy if I like it, and if it is put together with "piss off the consumer" features, I don't buy it. Therefore, I don't tend to have that happen over and over.

Posted by: Phelps at January 4, 2005 11:53 AM

TG, I guess that understanding of and respect for personal property ownership rights is probably a foundational aspect of a free society. The illegal downloading that goes on in the USA may be yet another symptom of a crumbling moral infrastructure.

Phelps, while I may rant about the lack of usability of DVDs, I don't think I'd ever refuse to buy a movie that I liked because of those problems. I'm not that dogmatic!

Posted by: Eric at January 4, 2005 03:04 PM

"putting trailers of other movies at the beginning of a disk is not only annoying (especially when you disable the "skip" function), but illogical.

...except when you're a greedy studio trying to shove even more advertising onto the consumer.

It's becoming a real problem with some DVDs. The way some of them are coded, the trailers are pre-set as the default. If you're lucky, the studio graciously "allows" you to skip them by going to the root or chapter menue. Some don't.

But every time you put that DVD in, you're going to have to hit play, wait for all the hard-coded copy warnings are done, and then hit skip just as the first trailer starts.

I like Phelps' approach. Rent then buy (maybe).

It's not just DVDs, either. Some new PC games have trailers and promos built in to the game intro sequence.

Posted by: Mr. Freen at January 4, 2005 04:51 PM

"It's not just DVDs, either. Some new PC games..."

It's not just DVDs, indeed - video tapes (remember VHS?) have had ads at the front for years.

Posted by: John Anderson at January 5, 2005 10:55 AM

I had forgotten that...and they were really hard to bypass!

We get spoiled quickly.

Posted by: Eric at January 5, 2005 11:04 AM
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