Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2024 September 3

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September 3

Are there mandatory DVD-Video Standard Features?

Are there any requirements in DVD-Video Specifications that require adding a user menu and title selections features on consumer DVDs at minimum?  Or, that movie scenes and show episodes play chronologically? What I mean to ask is, why don't companies just dump TV show episodes higgledy-piggledy onto a DVD or BluRay in random order without menus? 76.14.14.83 (talk) 01:47, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Presumably because no one would buy the product, so why would they even think to do that? Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:19, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

I have heard that the copyright notice at the start is compulsory. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:53, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

It was mandatory for works published between January 1, 1978 and March 1, 1989 in the United States. Since March 1, 1989, it has been optional with the understanding that failing to include a copyright notice will greatly limit the publisher's ability to protect the copyrighted material. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 12:25, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

• The DVD specifications are kept private and only available if you pay their $5,000 licensing fee. Even if someone paid for them, they wouldn't be able to tell you about them as their contents are under an NDA. So I doubt you're going to be able to get a definitive answer here. Whether or not forgoing the menu is compliant with the specifications or not, it's certainly technically possible. For example, here's a tutorial showing how to do it in DVDStyler. Pinguinn 🐧 09:04, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

It took a lot of hunting and I found a mention of it on some random message board... I remember a DVD that would often be marked as "defective" because it didn't have a menu. You pop it in. The movie starts. It isn't in our collections anymore, but I now know it was Ghost Dad. The official DVD had the movie, just the movie. Nothing else. No menu. No garbage. Because it didn't have a menu, people would check it out, I assume they watched the movie, and they would say it was broken because there was no menu. I remember it because I put it in my DVD player, the movie started, I pressed the menu button and no menu came up. There wasn't even a chapter listing. Just the movie. Surely this isn't the absolute only example of a commercial DVD with no menu, but it proves that at least one exists. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 10:27, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

The first DVD version was distributed by GoodTimes Entertainment, which was an incredibly low-budget operation. I found a picture of its back cover which shows a menu screenshot, but perhaps they weren't able to get it working. 2000 was still an early time for DVDs, after all. The second DVD release was by Universal, and while its back cover doesn't show a menu, it would surprise me if Universal of all people neglected to put one in. Pinguinn 🐧 13:17, 5 September 2024 (UTC)