3 ms·

I never understood why they had video media ship their own UI. It’s usually annoying to figure out and sometimes absolutely idiotic (like The Fifth Element that

by avian 7y ago

I never understood why they had video media ship their own UI. It’s usually annoying to figure out and sometimes absolutely idiotic (like The Fifth Element that forces you to “catch” menu entries by timing your keypresses). It’s like if music CD would have you argue with the band before you could hear the music, instead of just pressing “play”.

johnchristopher 7y ago
Oh, I can shed some light on that ! In another life I did a stint in the subtitle industry (right around the glorious DVD boom and before the arrival of Blue-Ray). Execs from distributors would sit down in a room once a movie had been subbed and played around the UI to see if "every language can be selected". How to spice up that job and make it look like indispensable ? Become an UI expert in the shades of faux shadow TIFF pictures overlay and timing in sound loop in menus. The fact that magazines were grading DVD's menus and UI also helped. "It's part of the experience". From then on you could not not provide fancy menus. The funny part ? We had to purposefully disable built-in functionalities (soundtrack switching, subtitles switching, scene skipping, etc.) to enforce some "entertaining" loading times (and the usual anti-piracy scheme). So that the exec can sit in the room discussing for three hours how a menu DVD should look and sound to "give a mood". Rinse and repeat, you got a job. Fun fact: the whole operation relied heavily on DVD shrink which we used to remove those limitations. Some took the habit to introduce hidden code to disable stuff or still allow skipping. I am a bit bitter about it but I acknowledge that for most people it's part of the experience and it's expected. But forcing it on people who don't like it ? Bummer. edit: I don't remember the name of the major software used to produce DVD menus (it was a tool chain anyway) (sonic something ?) but it was horrible compared to flash and flash mx from the mid 2000's. Think: timeline, b-frame based loop, on a slow media, still frame for background, simple transparent overlay TIFF files to render highlighted menu items, the editor was basically a vid and audio track editor with loops and skip points. No code. Mac and Windows versions not compatible. Adobe had a good hobbyist software but there were small showstoppers problems I can't remember. Anyway, it went all downhill really fast as the money needed to get a studio on track to do the authoring went from hundred of thousand of euros for hardware to a PC with early NAS and cheap HDD. A guy could set up his own subtitling and authoring studio on a dime. But you needed connections with distributors to make some money.

by avian 7y ago

johnchristopher 7y ago

Oh, I can shed some light on that ! In another life I did a stint in the subtitle industry (right around the glorious DVD boom and before the arrival of Blue-Ray). Execs from distributors would sit down in a room once a movie had been subbed and played around the UI to see if "every language can be selected". How to spice up that job and make it look like indispensable ? Become an UI expert in the shades of faux shadow TIFF pictures overlay and timing in sound loop in menus. The fact that magazines were grading DVD's menus and UI also helped. "It's part of the experience". From then on you could not not provide fancy menus. The funny part ? We had to purposefully disable built-in functionalities (soundtrack switching, subtitles switching, scene skipping, etc.) to enforce some "entertaining" loading times (and the usual anti-piracy scheme). So that the exec can sit in the room discussing for three hours how a menu DVD should look and sound to "give a mood". Rinse and repeat, you got a job. Fun fact: the whole operation relied heavily on DVD shrink which we used to remove those limitations. Some took the habit to introduce hidden code to disable stuff or still allow skipping. I am a bit bitter about it but I acknowledge that for most people it's part of the experience and it's expected. But forcing it on people who don't like it ? Bummer. edit: I don't remember the name of the major software used to produce DVD menus (it was a tool chain anyway) (sonic something ?) but it was horrible compared to flash and flash mx from the mid 2000's. Think: timeline, b-frame based loop, on a slow media, still frame for background, simple transparent overlay TIFF files to render highlighted menu items, the editor was basically a vid and audio track editor with loops and skip points. No code. Mac and Windows versions not compatible. Adobe had a good hobbyist software but there were small showstoppers problems I can't remember. Anyway, it went all downhill really fast as the money needed to get a studio on track to do the authoring went from hundred of thousand of euros for hardware to a PC with early NAS and cheap HDD. A guy could set up his own subtitling and authoring studio on a dime. But you needed connections with distributors to make some money.