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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)

September 5

Link to specific message on message board?

Hi everyone, Thank you for any help you can give me. I'm a librarian trying to help a student, but I'm a bit stumped on this one. The student is wondering about creating a link to a specific part of a message board so people don't have to dig through potentially thousands of other messages to get there. Since I'm not an expert on this, I was looking for some here. For more context, here is what he was asking:

"I am having trouble making clickable url links that, when my readers click on them, do not take them to a whole message board, causing my readers to hunt through a bewildering array of messages before they can get to one I am referencing. Rather, I would like to make clickable url links that take my readers to a specific post on, say, a message board, or, perhaps, a post on a chain of social media posts. This would make things a whole lot easier on my readers. I have tried to figure out ways to do this myself, but have been unsuccessful so far. What do you think? Is it possible to set up a url link in a reference list that takes one's readers to a specific post on a message board, or a social media chain, or another online dialogic format?"

I hope my question makes sense, and thank you for any help you can give me, it is most appreciated! 2601:19B:681:9910:A8B6:5E5:B728:F523 (talk) 17:31, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Whether you can create a direct link to a post in a message board is entirely dependent on the specific message board software or social media site the post is located on. Often a direct link is as simple as grabbing the address from the address bar of your browser while viewing the post, but that's isn't always possible. Occasional there will be an option on the post itself that will give you the correct address to link to it, but again this is dependent on the specific board being used. 161.11.160.60 (talk) 17:56, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

If the web page itself does not have link locations build into the web page, you can link to specific text on a web page in most web browsers using a content highlight function like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing#:~:text=question%20is%20unclear (I am assuming Wikipedia won't mangle that). 75.136.148.8 (talk) 21:56, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very, very much! I really appreciate this feedback -- I'll share it with my student! Again, my appreciation. 204.13.46.20 (talk) 01:05, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

See URI fragment -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 18:20, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

September 9

Can't keep track.

I've been using Google bookmarks on windows 10. I can't find a star or watchlist feature anywhere on the Wiki pages I visit. I signed up to edit once but I didn't proceed. Is there an easy way to keep track on Wikipedia itself? I'm a recurring donor. Deanprine (talk) 21:32, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I have no idea about Google bookmarks. There is a watchlist feature. In the Wikipedia skin I use it is on the top right corner. The button has three horizontal lines and a star. You can add a page to the list with a star icon on the header of the page. This is probably better explained at Help:Watchlist. --Error (talk) 23:05, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

As an aside, I imagine your browser has a History feature: Firefox has History > Show all history, with a search function which shows every Wikpedia page I have visited since 2021. By the way, when you donate through Wikipedia, you are actually giving your money to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which provides the internet access and servers on which all Wikipedia projects run. The WMF is in no way short of cash. This might sound ungrateful, but we are mostly all entirely unpaid volunteers, and some of us object to WP being used as a front for donations to the WMF, over whose coffers we have no control whatsoever. MinorProphet (talk) 18:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

September 12

Windows 11 24H2

In this page I noticed that 24H2 is released for final users, but I still on 23H2 22631.4169. When 24H2 will be released? Gatto bianco (talk) 14:32, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

See Windows 11, version 24H2 and don't trust software from random web pages. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 12:33, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

NO software in that page and this is NOT random web page, there are all Windows builds catalog! You have visited the page before comment? Gatto bianco (talk) 17:26, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

You are misreading the comment. Do you have any clue how many people search "Windows 11 24H2 download" and download fake updates from random websites because they can't wait for the official release? Imagine how many saw your question, thought "Wow! New version of Windows! Let me download it from any link I find online because everyone offering free software on the internet is completely honest and has my best interests in mind!" 75.136.148.8 (talk) 22:19, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

September 16

LaTeX backslash encoding

"The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e" tells the reader:

LaTeX supports the use of accents and special characters from many languages. Table 2.2 shows all sorts of accents being applied to the letter o. Naturally other letters work too.

The table shows them constructed via backslashes; so for example \"o produces ö. The same Table 2.2 also obligingly describes how to construct several o-irrelevant characters, such as å. But not all. (As an example, I happen to know something not in the table: \th produces þ.) Yes, the introduction goes on to say that now that "modern TEX engines [speak] UTF-8 natively" this cumbersome way of specifying characters can be avoided. Understood. But all the same I'd like to see a more comprehensive list or table of these recipes for single (Roman or Roman-derived) characters. Though we have an article "Percent-encoding", I can't find "backslash-encoding" here; and googling for this brings numerous pages on irrelevancies (notably how to produce backslashes that are just backslashes). Tips? -- Hoary (talk) 09:38, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Does The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List help? --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:53, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Blimey, Wrongfilter, I knew that a comprehensive list would be big, but I hadn't imagined that it would be that big. Excellent. This should answer all my questions, plus a few thousand more. -- Hoary (talk) 10:14, 16 September 2024 (UTC)