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.
