Blu-ray Is Starting to Piss Me Off
I love the picture quality of Blu-ray. Love the sound, love the fact that they can cram untold extras into the massive storage capacity. It’s a movie-lover’s dream format. So why am I getting ready to chuck my Blu-ray player out a third-story window?
It’s because Blu-ray is so damned consumer-unfriendly these days. I don’t know if the movie studios are trying to punish us for participating in that whole HD-DVD/Blu-ray format war, or if they’re tired of shelling out for HD transfers of their movies and they hope we’ll switch back to standard DVD, but they clearly don’t want us to enjoy watching our Blu-rays. Exhibit A: a little something I like to call Leadershit.
You’ve all experienced Leadershit. You pop in a disc and then have to sit a slew of trailers, studio logos, THX and Dolby pimp screens, Blu-ray rah-rah shorts, and all sorts of other crap. Disney specializes in this sort of thing: Coming soon to theaters; Coming soon to DVD; Coming soon to Blu-ray; Now playing in theaters; Now available on DVD; Now available on Blu-ray; Soon returning to DVD; Soon retiring from DVD; and on and on it goes. And while you can, thankfully, skip through much of this mess, each trailer is its own chapter stop, so you have to hammer the Chapter Skip button roughly thirty times before you can even get to a menu.
Ah, the menus. If ever there was a case of “Look at the cool stuff we can do,” it has to be Blu-ray menus. 3-D animation! Internet connectivity! Multiple levels of navigation, each with its own 3-D animation and internet connectivity! And it all only takes twenty minutes to load and play! If I sit down to watch a movie, I just want to watch the damn movie. I don’t want to have to waste half my time waiting on all the whiz-bang graphics some studio paid for and, by God, we are going to watch. Case in point: I recently picked up Terminator 2: Judgment Day-Skynet Edition to replace my earlier T2 Blu-ray which I discovered did not have the extended cut of the film on it. (I have now officially purchased T2 more times than Star Wars.) Popped it in, and waited. And waited. And waited. I could not believe how long it took to actually get to the start of the film. I was so annoyed that I actually restarted the disc, grabbed a stopwatch and a pen, and took some notes. Here’s the tally:
- Load time to first frame of anything: 30 seconds
- Skynet Locating Our House animated menu: 20 seconds (minimum)
- Lionsgate 3-D studio logo animation: 30 seconds
- Black screen/load time: 10 seconds
- Skynet loading screen: 15 seconds
- Main menu open animation before you can make a selection: 7 seconds
- Time it takes to input Extended Cut unlock code and watch remaining animation: 18 seconds
- DTS Audio pimp screen: 20 seconds
- THX Certified pimp screen: 50 seconds(!)
- Studio Canal Studio 3D animation: 25 seconds
- Black screen/load time: 10 seconds
There you have it. A whopping four minutes before you can even see a single frame of the actual film. And out of all of that delay, the only things you can skip through are the THX and Dolby animations. The rest you’re locked into for at least a minimum amount of time before you can continue or, in the case of the studio logos, the entire damned thing. At no point can you hit Main Menu or Pop-up Menu on your remote. You are going to sit there and watch every last frame of this crap. Maybe not so bad once, but it is if you have to watch it all repeatedly, which brings me to my biggest beef with Blu-ray: resume play.
My wife and I don’t usually have an entire night to sit and watch a movie start to finish. We have to watch it in chunks before real life intervenes and we have to go get busy with something else. So we’ll watch a movie over the course of several nights, stopping the disc each time we have to return to reality. On DVD, that’s never a problem. Sit down, press play, pick up where you left off. Blu-ray doesn’t do that. Blu-ray will return you to the main menu every single time you turn on the player. And when you have to wade through three to five minutes of Leadershit before you can even select the chapter where you stopped the night before, I start eyeing the balcony, plotting trajectories, and wondering just how far I can hurl ten pounds of plastic and circuitry.
So what’s the deal? Why is “the ultimate movie format” so hostile to actually watching the movie? Why can’t we skip straight to the menu? Why can’t we resume play in the middle? Why don’t we get all the extras that were included on the original DVD release when we rebuy the movie on Blu-ray? What’s the deal, movie studios? Did Blu-ray run over your dog or something? It’s gotten to the point where I’m seriously considering giving up on Blu for a while, stop rewarding studios for turning out this kind of crap, and just contenting myself with standard DVD. Or maybe just bagging on home video all together for a time. Go outside. Take a walk. Enjoy some sunshine.
While keeping one eye out for falling Blu-ray players.
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One Response to “Blu-ray Is Starting to Piss Me Off”
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June 23rd, 2009 at 7:29 pm
All right, I feel that it’s only fair to point out on this that the trend of “unskippable” opening material was a trend that started on the standard DVD format and has just continued and grow in blu-ray. Now, to be fair, I wrote up an article about it and probably contributed to your decision to by T2:Judgment Day AGAIN because I loved the Skynet Edition released on Blu-ray, but I agree that there are some annoyances in the menu system.
One I didn’t see you mention though is the one that caused me to waste the most time. I’ve noticed this on other DVDs in the past occasionally, but it was maddening on the Skynet Edition of T2. That is the menu to select which version of the film you want to watch: The Theatrical Cut, the Cut with the additional 16 minutes, the Cut with additional minutes of footage and the original ending and so on. The menu functions in such a manner that you highlight the selection and press “Enter” on the remote to start the feature. The problem is that after you press enter, right before the feature starts, the menu highlight moves down one on the menu screen and highlights the option BELOW the one you “think” you selected. So it starts and you don’t know…did I start the theatrical cut or the cut with the additional footage? I don’t know. The opening credits are the same. The chapter stops are the same, no where on the cool blu-ray “pop up” menus that you can access during the feature does it tell you what you’re watching. Well, I don’t know exactly all the footage that was added, do I have to get 45 minutes into the flick and guess if it skipped a scene I thought had been restored.
At first, I thought, okay, I must be fat fingering the menu and inadvertantly pushing the down arrow as I’m hitting enter, but nope…happened every time, and if I chose the bottom selection the highlight moved up to the top of the menu and the first selection before starting. WTF is that about? After 20 minutes of starting, stopping and selecting I finally decided to just give up and watch it without being sure. It turns out that the selection I thought I was making was correct, so I have no idea what type of brain trust designs a menu system where the menu selection icon or highlight spontaneously changes after you make your damned selection.