> "This is to be expected, but DVD subtitles are crummy, with low-resolution text and unappealing typography."
DVD subtitles are encoded as images, not text, so in fact you can have any typography and style of typeface that you like, if you're willing to put some effort into it.
The first release of Ghostbusters on DVD abused a subtitle track to store a Mystery Science Theater style silhouette of the people doing the commentary track. It was very funny, but sadly only worked on the 4:3 version of the DVD.
It was removed from all later releases, but they never re-recorded the commentary track, which still contains references to things they are supposedly pointing at, even on the blu-ray releases.
DVD subtitles were worse than crummy. The highlights for the buttons used the same image formatting. The DVD could only use 4 colors in the sub/highlight. To make subtitle text legible, the black text on white background was posterized to 4 levels. Each of the posterized level was replaced in the authoring software so that each level was replaced with the corresponding transparency levels (100,66,33,0). It was janky as it sounds, but it looked so much better on low resoution TVs of the day. Once better HD screens came out, the crappiness was more noticeable.
Edit: To the dead comment about JVM shipping with DVD. No, you are confusing DVD with Blu-ray. You may use the terms interchangably conversationaly, but they are 2 totally different things. DVDs were quite simple, but that's what made them so effective. While Blu-ray used Java, HD-DVD used ECMA script. They were both overcomplications to a situation nobody really cared about, a solution looking for a problem if you will.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was great. 1995 era effects (vectorbobs, plasmas, Gouraud shading etc), but still neat to think of it running in the Java VM on whatever CPU a Blu-ray player houses. Also the author says you can use your remote to control some of the effects.
Oh yeah, it’s definitely going for oldschool appeal. There’s something oddly compelling about running demos in weird and ill-fitting places. Mac Classic[1], mIRC script[2], TI-83 graphing calculators[3]… it’s got to be a similar appeal to porting DOOM to MP3 players, or Bad Apple!! to Atari Lynx.
The Screener DVD production process is a curious bit of insanity. The "production" area[0] for this work is in a "secured" area of a "secure" facility. First, to enter the building, you must place any and all electronic devices in a locker. Once your credentials are approved, you then must be metal detector wanded before entering production floor. Once on the production floor, you must then enter a separate area from the rest of your co-workers that is secured even further by restricted access card readers and secure cage (I'm dead serious). Cameras, and I do mean multiple, are everywhere in this area, not that there aren't cameras in the rest of the place. If you've never been through an MPAA security audit, count your blessings.
Once inside, the production is not dissimilar to normal short run DVD production. Standard DVD authoring software. Standard DVD burners. There are a few additional steps during video encoding that includes forensic watermarking and the pain in the arse that entails to ensure each disc is uniquely identifiable. Once the disc is burned, qc'd, and packaged, the physical media is then handled in also ridiculously security theater fashion. Lots of signatures and timestamps.
To leave, you must once again pass through security to make sure you haven't succumbed to the temptation of walking out of the facility with more than you entered. You can return to your locker to retrieve your personal devices before finally being able to leave.
[0] There are more than one company that does this work, but this is the description of where I worked many many moons ago.
When I was first introduced to the forensic watermarking software, I was very skeptical. I, along with fellow curious coworkers, took it upon ourselves to see if we could circumvent it. We did all of the things their marketing people claimed it could do (inverting, flipping, scaling, skewing, combos of these, etc), and at the end of each of these tests, the ID could be read back.
There were of course a few things we could do to make the ID unreadable, however it resulted in an unwatchable bit of video that would no longer be meaningful.
The system does work. Every screener season I was involved, people were caught. They didn't always make the news because not everyone released to torrent sites. There are other screener "crimes" that don't involve the police but perhaps loose future screener privilages.
There are other forensic techniques for feature films screened in theaters to catch camcorders. Modified versions of the content could be sent to different regions of the globe. When a pirated copy was found, they could look for these modified portions of content to narrow down what region was copied. These are innocuous things like changing the color of something in the background that oridinary people wouldn't even notice if it was changed from shot to shot. You'd also have to see the content from multiple regions to even possibly know that it was done. This is just one example.
Not all production companies choose to do the forensic watermarking distribution method. Production companies are cheap summabitches. The main users of the forensic watermarking services were the Majors (the traditional studios, not these young upstarts).
It could very well be possible that nobody working for this company even knows it's possible to do this. It could be possible they know and decided it's not worth their money for it. I cannot provide the definitive answer.
If it is a pressed DVD release, then there is no way for each disc to be unique without each disc having a glass master created which is just beyond the realm of sanity. Even with Apple having more money that God, this particular silo of the Apple universe cannot tap into it willy-nilly for something like this.
Given that this movie is available to the public on AppleTV Plus, in high definition no less, I can see why you wouldn’t spend money preventing leakage of a standard definition DVD.
Except for the lazy. Gaining access to that higher quality streamed source is much more labor intensive (as far as using it for a source to pirate). A DVD is pretty much rippable by a 5th grader doing the math on pencil an paper ;-)
Maybe. These days a $30 random HDMI capture card can do an okay job. Won't be perfect and you'd need to play it in real time but better than a DVD. Could still probably be handled by a 5th grader.
As a follow up, I could think of one way that would make each disc identifiable, but not the content extracted from it, so it wouldn't realy make financial sense to me to do it. On the inner ring of the disc where the printing typically stopped could be placed a bar code or other type of marking that could ID the disc. All this would help find is someone in possession of something they were not issued, and trace back the person who did not follow screener policy of not letting unauthorized persons access to the content.
I have no definitive answer for you, but we can all spend some time coming up with plausible answers.
For the people that used to camcorder a theatrical showing, the studios cracked down on theaters to police themselves. Getting caught as your theater being the one allowing for this to happen would get your theater banned from receiving new content. Also, nobody wants these copies. They suck plain and simple. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
For the digital copies, other than the hacking examples like the Sony situation, most were rogue employees. Companies providing pre-release services have taken much more interest in their security both physical and network. Production companies have also become much more concious about who they work with and the threat of pre-release leaks is a big concern. If you're a service company chasing production company work, you're going to do what you need to make yourself a viable option.
The encryption system used for the hard drive deliveries in the cinemas is pretty locked down. The playback hardware also has anti-tamper stuff to put you off opening it and trying to rip it that way.
I understand all the copy protection that goes into screeners for first-run theatrical releases. The industry doesn't want their next $1b movie to hit torrent sites immediately on release. However it seems a little silly to put in all that work for movies that are already available to be watched at home and therefore can basically always be pirated from those sources which are usually much higher quality anyway.
Are you 100% positive that the video you are streaming while logged into your account with your email address and billing address attached is not receiving a uniquely encoded video JIT style with a forensically identifiable ID? I wouldn't be so sure, but that's just me. What do I know?
I’m pretty darn sure Netflix can’t do that. They would need to encode a different stream for each individual customer, and the encoding settings Netflix uses are far too cpu intensive for that to be practical.
Yeah, it's kind of like how ATT says they'll re-encode your HD video streams to SD to save money. What they actually mean is they'll throttle your connection to ensure you get the SD stream from those available in the HLS options.
I was confused by the “form over function” comment. The author commended Apple’s “prioritizing form over function” but then criticized the function of competing items, indirectly lauding the function of Apple’s product.
Do they just watch on DVD resolution to select special effect winner? 1080p resolution and Blu ray has been with us for 15 years and they are still on DVD?
The SD resolution of the DVD screener is part of the security. It's not dissimilar to changing the port of SSH. It's just one more thing to make the time less desirable to copy. After all, who wants to pirate/share/download/watch a crappy SD video?
I find it insane that DVDs are still so widely produced.
Who cares enough about movies that they want a physical copy, but not enough that watching standard def video blown up to 1080 or 4K is fine? That Venn diagram must overlap far more than I think it does.
There's also a lot more content released and available on DVD than is available on streaming platforms.
To expand, there is also tons more content only available on VHS than other formats. Straight-to-video was all the rage in the 80s/90s. Mind, that it's not necessarily good content.
I'll throw in a data point here: I dislike streaming services on general principles (I have HBO Max, but it came with my AT&T plan) and I'll pick DVD if there's a substantial cost difference on a movie I'm not sure about. Likewise, I'll gravitate to BD/DVD combo packs for movies I do want to see because pretty much anything plays DVDs nowadays and I might want to watch it on the road.
Also, upscalers matter. To my nearly half-century eyes Sony upscalers aren't too bad. No one is claiming they're in any respect hi-def, but they're also hardly a miserable experience. Craptastic upscalers, on the other hand, are craptastic, sometimes from major brands who cheaped out.
Then you obviously aren't the market that buys any physical disc. But if you have an optical drive bought anytime in the last 15 years, to use your number, odds are just about certain you can play a DVD in it.
Seems like it yep. At least every competitor is on the same playing ground video quality wise?
Also, OP article pointed out how most people screening these things "haven't touched their AV setups since 1999." Blu-Ray might be a nonstarter if you want to win the popularity contest. Lowest common denominator and all that.
I feel obligated to point out that every Mac still ships with a non-removable app called “DVD Player” preinstalled, so DVDs are still supported in the Apple ecosystem.
Coincidentally, at this very moment I'm ripping an old home video from DVD using an Apple SuperDrive on an M1 Mac.
The SuperDrive happily works with the M1, as long as it's connected via the little Apple adapter. When I try to use one from Anker or Amazon, the drive won't spin up, and macOS complains the device is drawing too much power.
I've ripped about 100 home movies for friends in the last couple of years. What I love about the SuperDrive is that even though it's old and slow, it is the most reliable piece of gear for this task.
Generally speaking, I start with a Pioneer Blu-Ray drive because it's fast fast fast. If that can't read the disc (because people are simply awful with the way they treat their most precious memories), then I try a Sony DVD drive. And if that fails, I go to the SuperDrive. So far, I've only had two discs that the SuperDrive couldn't read.
Thanks. In the CD ripping world, Exact Audio Copy does a lot of tricks in software, eg. I think it puts the drive in raw mode and will read slowly and several times, so you can get good results on arbitrary hardware. Does Handbrake do similar? Is there some fundamental difference with [the non-DRMed] DVDs where the hardware is more important, and software is less able to compensate?
No. It's unnecessary. The contents of a DVD are compressed, so any errors would be highly visible at playback time -- so the format has enough error correction built in to detect and correct errors. This is a fundamentally different approach from audio CD, which doesn't have sufficient error correction built in, but relies on the inherent resiliency of the raw audio format to conceal errors.
More practically, DVDs and blu-rays are files on a filesystem. An audio CD does not have a filesystem, it's a raw stream of pits and lands, which do not correspond directly to bits, they must be decoded first.
The reason why ripping an audio CD is such an "art" is that without a filesystem there's no easy way to tell where the laser actually is on the disc. If it jumps or skips you might not realise.
What I wonder is do they still actually make those or are they just burning through current supply? I can't imagine they still sell too many 10 years on...
I have a M1 Mac mini. It doesn't have a non-removable app called "DVD Player" on it. (Or, if it does, spotlight can't find it and I don't see it in the folder where I copied the 'apple droppings' apps to.)
I have an M1 MacBook Air. It exists - the easiest way to summon it is to put in a DVD, but it can also be found by perfectly typing “DVD Player” in Spotlight.
They might not have authored it, but they certainly had to be asked for their approval prior to sending anything out with an Apple logo prominently displayed and a [redacted]@apple.com in the letter. And it's not unreasonable to think that a company that is a lot about brand message and identity as Apple would have had some feedback/required changes prior to finalizing and printing these things.
> And it's not unreasonable to think that a company that is a lot about brand message and identity as Apple would have had some feedback/required changes prior to finalizing and printing these things.
Apple has style-guides for every product and everything Apple, which whatever external contracted agency is provided and will meticulously follow. Unless novel design is involved, review is expedient. Any that have had previous contracts will become efficient and accurate. I've seen it with my own eyes happening so fast and quietly, and periodically, it's like they didn't want anyone to know they were making money between periods of inactivity, or that Apple had been their only client for many Moons (unclear).
I am shocked that the enclosing letter to the DVD is typed in a standard Word template with a Calibri typeface, without attempts to create a consistent experience between the letter and the rest of the package.
Is this the modern-day equivalent of a handwritten letter?
It would stand to reason that all of Apple's subcontractors are under NDAs. But even if they weren't, it would be not just good policy, but natural, not to advertise what was going on.
My second job was working for a small marketing firm in the post-dawn hours of desktop publishing. There was the owner, who would scare up business, the artist, and myself, the graphic designer. We had one huge client, Siemens, which accounted for 90% of the firm's revenue, but this left us with plenty of time available to work for other clients. Most of the work we did was for other tiny clients until we exhausted ourselves and realized the only work we did that mattered to the business was for Siemans. Eventually we dropped all other clients but in theory remained open to working for a client as large as Siemans, which never presented itself. We had no NDA, but I can't imagine any of us told anyone we were working for Siemans. Maybe having Apple as a client is more bragworthy.
My first-hand experience regarding Apple subcontracting was as a resident IT specialist at offices and facilities of two businesses recently purchased by a large international corporation (my employer) that was in a period of acquiring other companies (as a business strategy, which works, but it kind of also proves executive incompetence). The two businesses were related, one was an engraver, printer and proofer (insanely professional and expensive color proofs, and the equipment was drool-worthy). The other was a design firm and, as far as I could tell, for years at least, subcontracted for Apple to design all their packaging for everything they sold. This was not International Paper or some huge packaging company, but a small firm, less than 10 employees, surprisingly enough. The nature of Apple being secretive about releases and the nature of the product this firm provided meant that many individuals not employed directly by Apple would be privy to information about upcoming products for which certain media outlets would pay. I can only assume they were under NDAs, but I was not. This design firm was moderately successful at maintaining secrecy from the vantage point of a local IT department of one that was not all that curious or suspicious of what anyone was working on, in fact, I am biased against wasting any time doing anything that was not work. I always felt that the best attitude to have in IT was having absolutely no interest whatsoever in what anyone was doing, but I still noticed and became aware without anyone actually saying so nor by way of being nosey. I accidentally saw the work (artwork and patterned die files for cutting boxes for iMacs) and immediately recognized what it was and its significance, and that they had not been doing much of anything at all for the previous 5 months informed me Apple was their only client.
DVD subtitles are encoded as images, not text, so in fact you can have any typography and style of typeface that you like, if you're willing to put some effort into it.
The first release of Ghostbusters on DVD abused a subtitle track to store a Mystery Science Theater style silhouette of the people doing the commentary track. It was very funny, but sadly only worked on the 4:3 version of the DVD.
It was removed from all later releases, but they never re-recorded the commentary track, which still contains references to things they are supposedly pointing at, even on the blu-ray releases.