Plaidophile: Blu-Ray annoyance

October 12, 2010

Blu-Ray annoyance (customer experience, media)

by fluffy at 8:20 AM

Why is it that when I watch a Blu-Ray disc on my Blu-Ray player, pretty much every single one starts out with an unskippable 10-minute sales pitch for how awesome Blu-Ray is? It's especially ludicrous when it's from a Sony Pictures film (for example, Moon) where I am watching it on a Sony Blu-Ray player on a brand-new Sony Bravia 3D TV. They can't get any more money from me on this!

I just want to be able to press "menu" and get right to the movie's menu, or better yet, just go straight to the movie, since it's not like Blu-Ray movies need any configuration most of the time (since it's not like the bad old days of DVD where the player didn't know what audio format to use or whatever, and some things were set up with the assumption that peoples' players didn't know how to downconvert 5.1 to 2.0 or whatever).

This is one of those things where it's gotten worse as the studios have gotten more format-savvy, and of course there's a visual aid. (Except it's even more ludicrous than that because the Blu-Ray ad is telling us how much better Blu-Ray is than DVD, which is why I have it on Blu-Ray already.)

Comments

#13457 10/12/2010 09:10 pm

AnyDVD HD can strip P-UOPs from Blu-rays (just as it can from regular DVDs), but sometimes the discs will employ malicious BD-J code which will crash or freeze in devious ways if a P-UOP is violated.

End result is that most of my Blu-ray ISO collection plays in PowerDVD, but not all. Some of it plays in TotalMedia Theatre, but not most. And some of it doesn't play in any player unless I load the .m2ts streams directly in Media Player Classic. Doing this requires the Haali splitter and several Windows codecs that magically appear on your system only after installing PowerDVD.

The things I do for 1080p.

#13469 10/14/2010 12:49 am

That's one of the reasons I held off getting DVDs for so long. I hate all the unskippable rubbish at the beginning.

I bought the bloody disk to watch the film, not to get subjected to 10 trailers at the start that I have to Fast forward through.

I have one pirate DVD, and that's fantastic. It's a copy of the DVD release, with all the rubbish stripped off. You put the disk in, and the film starts.

I've not gone BluRay yet, and I think I'll resist it for as long as I can if they're getting worse with it.

#13497 10/19/2010 12:39 pm

my wife has an exercise dvd where the woman blabs about how to use it for a few minutes before you can watch it, as if you forgot how to use it since the last time you watched. she puts it in then goes to get changed and get the water and such, then it's ready when she returns.
-bill