Un-skippable Bits On DVDs.

DVDs often stop me from fast-forwarding through the stuff that plays before the movie, and that sucks.

Apparently this is an example of User Operation Prohibitions, or UOPs. I'm forced to sit through studio branding, copyright warnings, government ads telling me that "piracy is stealing", and even the frickin' animations that introduce the menu.

What is the point of this? The movie studio must have some good reasons for preventing viewers from skipping those parts. Here's some reasons I can think of:

• by forcing me to watch the studio branding bit, where the camera zooms around inside some indistinguishable object, and eventually pulls back, revealing the object to be a big horse or a tree or something.. the studio is marketing itself to me.

Okay, but what's actually happening here is that the DVD I just bought is showing me the logo of a particular movie studio, and simultaneously pissing me off.

• by forcing me to watch a stupid ad where some Young Person is downloading a movie off the web, and cutting in scenes of people stealing cars and handbags and whatnot, and eventually showing the Young Person cancelling the download whilst telling me that "piracy is stealing", I'm less likely to watch pirated movies.

Firstly, why does the ad show someone downloading a movie? I've already got the movie, I'm watching it right now (or I would be, if I could skip over this crap). Surely it would be more useful to show someone not copying their DVD for their friends, rather than not downloading it.

I'm pretty sure that the people who are downloading movies already know that it's illegal. It doesn't help that the ad is trying to draw a parallel between copying movies and stealing cars, because apart from both being illegal, they're quite obviously different things. Copyright infringement is bad, but it's arguable whether it's "stealing" at all; most definitions of theft involve depriving the rightful owner of possession of the item.

There is one thing the ad does pretty well; if it hadn't occurred to someone that they could download movies from the web, they sure know it now. So at least it's educational.

• by forcing me to look at the copyright/FBI warning for 60 seconds, I might pay more attention to the information presented there.

Nnnnnnnope. Who reads that stuff? No-one, doesn't matter how long you leave it up on screen.

The only reason it is there is so if the studio want to charge someone with copyright infringement (or whatever it's called in the US now since the DMCA.. it's probably been renamed "treason against America" or something), the defendant can't claim that they never knew it was against the law. Okay, that's a good reason to have it there, but why stop me from skipping it?

• The little intro animation as the menu scrolls into view are, um, cute.

This is the best I can come up with, because there's no reason on earth to have the menu intro unskippable. My daughter watches Fairytopia five times a day! Do I have to watch Fairy Barbie flutter around the screen for thirty seconds every Fairy Freakin' time?

Stuart Little is even worse; even when the menu is completely showing and appears ready to use, you still have to wait for Stuart to finish saying something like "Hi there. Hope you enjoy the movie" before you can hit the Play Movie button.

While "researching" this article, I discovered that (according to Wikipedia) grey market DVD players often ignore UOPs, and let you skip whatever you like. So I'm off shopping today for a grey market DVD player. See what you've done, movie studio DVD divisons? You've forced me go and buy a player that ignores region coding and all that other stuff, just to be able to skip the pre-movie crap.

Not being able to skip pre-movie stuff sucks.

Why I Made This Site.

There's a moral to this site that might not be immediately obvious. That moral is:

Plenty of things that suck, don't have to.

I realised this truth when Google released Gmail. Up until then, webmail had sucked in several ways. For me the two biggest points of suckage were the interface, and what you got for free (from memory, Hotmail gave you 2Mb of storage).

Now, there were a few other things that happened to allow Google to make a great interface and give everyone a free 1Gb of mail storage, but the very first thing that had to happen was someone at Google had to say: "Geez, web-based email sucks in so many ways. What the hell were those guys thinking?"

It's surprising how well making a task not suck can predict the success of a product.

Before Google, you used AltaVista to search the web, and to find anything you had to refine your search fifty times over (often by adding stuff like "not including the word sex" to your search).

After Google, you entered a search term and got what you wanted.

Before iPod, you had all your digital music on your computer, and had to frick about loading up your portable player with the songs you think you might like to listen to today.

After iPod, you store your entire music collection on your player, and don't need to mess about with cables every morning.

Before Google Maps, online maps were shown in a tiny window surrounded by ads, and seeing what was just off screen meant a 10 second page reload.

After Google Maps, you have a big window and you just move the map til you're looking at what you want.

I guess the thing stopping lots of companies from bringing out a product that doesn't suck (and therefore becoming dominant in their market) is that it's hard for a corporation to realise that their current product sucks.

That's really the reason I started this site. I think it's our responsibility, as consumers, to clearly state when something sucks; it's rare that a company can realise it on their own.

And this leads me to the inspiration for this post. A reader sent me this link:
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/05/i_like_companie.html

..where Steve Rubel points out that the Yahoo 360 team is having one of those moments where someone realises that something about the product sucks.

That's step 1, Yahoo. Congratulations, you're one step ahead of MySpace.

English (United States).

Here's the first screen that iTune's installer showed me:


The dialogue box opens with "English (United States)" selected as the default.

Too many times I've been stuck with US paper sizes or measurement units, because I accepted defaults in an installation program -- so now when I see something like "English (United States)", I reflexively click to change it. Mostly there's an "English (British)" and sometimes I'm even granted the pleasure of an "English (Australian)".

Not this time. I guess you could say that the range of English variations iTunes offers is somewhat narrower than I expected.

As a "non-American" I'm quite accustomed to the fact that the English offered in computing products is Americanised; is it really necessary to rub it in like this?

iTunes doesn't suck (although it gets worse if you actually own an iPod), but this language selector sure sucks.