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Menus, of course. Commercially people did use DVD menus to make interactive trivia games. There was some fairly sophisticated linking possible between differe

Menus, of course. Commercially people did use DVD menus to make interactive trivia games. There was some fairly sophisticated linking possible between different menus and videos.

dylan604 5y ago
Okay, but a menu is just a still image or a piece of looping video. The UI portion is the same overlays as the subtitles. It just had a layer of buttons added to the video. In fact, we used to program easter eggs by adding hidden buttons to the main content portion of the video so that if you hit the right button on the remote during the right scene something would happen. I've programmed many interactive games, but the DVD spec is a very poor choice for any requirements for random. It all comes down to the DVD player manufactures and the cheap commodity players that became available. These low end players didn't really have a random function. Instead, they had a preset randomized list. We built a test disc for this to see which players offered true random. Some players would choose the exact same random order every time you restarted. If you think something was fairly sophisticated then that was a well done disc, because there was very little sophistication under the hood. The space was very confined, and became even more narrow if you used an abstraction layer system like DVD-Studio Pro. So the DVD UI phrase is a confusing term to me as there really isn't one.
- xattt 5y ago
  Thanks for that glimpse behind disc authoring. Yes, I did mean the menus. I just don’t have the vocabulary about what else to call that interactive later that’s omnipresent in DVDs.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    It was a "fun" trip down memory lane. I haven't thought about the inner workings of shiny round discs since 2007 when I programmed the last title of consequence. Got out of that biz as the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD war was still raging, and never looked back. Good gawd, I just did the math on how long ago that was.

Menus, of course. Commercially people did use DVD menus to make interactive trivia games. There was some fairly sophisticated linking possible between different menus and videos.

dylan604 5y ago

Okay, but a menu is just a still image or a piece of looping video. The UI portion is the same overlays as the subtitles. It just had a layer of buttons added to the video. In fact, we used to program easter eggs by adding hidden buttons to the main content portion of the video so that if you hit the right button on the remote during the right scene something would happen. I've programmed many interactive games, but the DVD spec is a very poor choice for any requirements for random. It all comes down to the DVD player manufactures and the cheap commodity players that became available. These low end players didn't really have a random function. Instead, they had a preset randomized list. We built a test disc for this to see which players offered true random. Some players would choose the exact same random order every time you restarted. If you think something was fairly sophisticated then that was a well done disc, because there was very little sophistication under the hood. The space was very confined, and became even more narrow if you used an abstraction layer system like DVD-Studio Pro. So the DVD UI phrase is a confusing term to me as there really isn't one.

xattt 5y ago
Thanks for that glimpse behind disc authoring. Yes, I did mean the menus. I just don’t have the vocabulary about what else to call that interactive later that’s omnipresent in DVDs.
- dylan604 5y ago
  It was a "fun" trip down memory lane. I haven't thought about the inner workings of shiny round discs since 2007 when I programmed the last title of consequence. Got out of that biz as the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD war was still raging, and never looked back. Good gawd, I just did the math on how long ago that was.