After years of streaming services reducing their quality and increasing their prices, physical media is coming back in a big way. I’m part of that wave, but that experience includes remembering some of the less-than-great qualities of the DVDs and Blu-rays we left behind.
Some DVDs Have Unskippable Ads
Sometimes when I decide to pop a disc into the circa-2013 Blu-ray player I picked up at my favorite thrift store, I encounter an unhappy prelude: movie trailers and other promotional presentations that can’t be skipped. The Skip button has been intentionally disabled for the duration of the trailer so that I have to watch it. The preview is always for content released long ago, so there’s nothing exciting to see, except maybe a fleeting sense of nostalgia for the hokey 2000s-era Hollywood vibe.
Pressing the skip button usually just gets you an icon of a circle with a line through it in the corner, or something similiar, to show that that action is not allowed. Of course, TV remote savants know that there’s always a Meu button that is supposed to take you straight to the disc menu where, in theory, you could just start the show. Unfortunately, disc authors were usually savvy enough to block that button from working too.
Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek
Your only option then was to press the fast-forward or speed-increase button and wait it out at the maximum speed. Even my fairly recent Dragged Across Concrete Blu-ray has this diabolical feature.
These trailers feel like the predecessors of the unskippable ads you see on YouTube and some streaming services today. You just want to get to the main content, but you’re forced to look at previews for stuff you don’t care about.
When you wanted to watch a DVD, the menu usually stood in the way between you and the feature presentation. If you wanted to do anything other than start the movie, you’d have to click around in it. Some menus were legitimately well-designed and fun to interact with. Shrek 2 and Memento menu experiences come to mind.
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Many, however, I’m not so fond of remembering. The most frustrating thing was usually figuring out what menu item was selected at any given moment, especially when there were only two options onscreen. Was the text in red that’s currently selected, or the text in blue? Sometimes it’d just a tiny color highlight on small-font text that you had to squint to see.
Modern-day streaming apps aren’t always marvels of visual engineering, either. At least, though, you can generally see what’s going on in a streaming app, even if it’s chaotic.
Movie Nights Were Easily Ruined by Scratched Discs
Corbin Davenport / How-To Geek
Thinking back to the days of renting DVDs from Blockbuster or later Redbox in preparation for an exciting movie night with friends or family, it’s easy to forget about the disappointments. When I take off my rose-tinted glasses, I can recall multiple nights that turned into letdowns thanks to DVDs’ tendency to get scratches.
You would put a movie in, and after say 30 minutes, just as the movie’s getting interesting: pixelated distortion. The movie stops playing. You take it out, blow on it, wipe it with a microfiber cloth and put it back in. No dice. If you’re lucky, it’s just a moment in the movie that you can skip over.
Often, though, a huge chunk would be unwatchable, so trying to finish would be pointless. Then you have to either switch up the vibe with a totally different movie or a board game.
I still run into this today, when I get a DVD from a thrift store, put it in, and am disappointed to learn I bought a dud, having stupidly forgotten to check for disc damage.
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Of course, even if you avoid ever scratching a disc, DVDs and Blu-rays are still prone to disc rot. In fact, it’s such a problem that Warner Bros. issued a statement earlier this year about a specific batch of DVDs being exceptionally prone to disc rot. That means the chances that something out of your old collection sitting in storage ruins a movie night are even higher now. If that happens, though, you should check the unofficial list of rot-prone titles to see it it’s one Warner Bros. will replace for you.
I Still Love Them
Of course, despite their many issues, I’m not forsaking my DVD and Blu-ray collection. It keeps growing, and when I have patience, it can actually be fun to explore those clunky DVD menus. Heck, even those old movie trailers are worth preserving too.
In fact, I’m such an enthusiast that I quit all my streaming subscriptions and I exclusively watch either the discs themselves or backup copies I made and keep on a private Jellyfin media server. Self-hosting that server, in fact, gets me the best of both worlds. I never see ads I can’t skip, and I don’t have to go through the work of finding a disc and putting it in the player if I don’t want to do that.
