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Opening DVD Ad encodings - maddening and should be stopped. (1 Viewer)

widescreenforever

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Just picked up the MCA 1995 movie 'Babe' for my granddaughter and realized that Universal MCA has encoded this disc so you are forced to sit thru five minutes of their upcoming features. You can't stop the disc/ chapter forward the disc or even hit menu to get back to main menu.

The only way I could 'stop' this' was to fast forward 16 times thru the trailers.

What is the reason for this?

Is it an oversight? - if so let's get on the wagon here, and tell them that we will either stop buying their products, and/or burn their product to our discs to our satisfaction..

Is it to create future sales? - if so I will definitely boycott all product under MCA and others in future.. - Let's create a list of dvd's and manufacturers to avoid this practice. I mean, How dare you kidnap me, and my four year old grandchild in our own living room and force us to endure these practices?

This could be a legal case.

Am I the only one who is totally pi**ed at this ????
 

Scott-S

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I completely agree. This hostage taking is outrageous. We pay good money to watch a DVD partly because we dont want commercials, logos, pop-up ads etc. To be forced to watch an ad is a crime.

If they want to add commercials etc, they should give the DVDs away for free.

But, unfortunatly, there is nothing we can do. Just get out the Lube and take it. That is how we are viewed buy the Powers that Be.
 

JediFonger

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then it's a good thing i've upgraded my DVD player's firmware to play movie right away =). open source DVD players on *nix can also skip those.
 

Jon Martin

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Well, if you can fast forward through them, that isn't THAT bad.

Some of the opening logos CAN'T be fastforwarded through. Those are even worse.

Paramount puts out some great DVDs, yet the opening logos, and FBI warnings, legal notices and other disclaimers make it so it takes almost 2 minutes from when you put the DVD in to see the opening menu screen. None of those notices can be skipped or fast forwarded through. You have to watch them.

Then you have Criterion. No logos, just the menu screen.
 

Will_B

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Why do some DVD players lock out the user during these commercials? Why won't the skip-ahead button work during these commercials?

Which machine would you rather buy - one that doesn't allow you to skip commercials, or one that does? Manufacturers, take heed!
 

Charles Ellis

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And it's not just feature films, either! It's happened with TV show releases, and -ahem- mature DVD releases. Don't they realize they're slowly alienating us from buying more of their product if the continue to pull crap like this? Maybe there should be a class-action lawsuit against companies that force you through up to 10 minutes of promos and ads (even for consumer products that aren't in the realm of home video!) before you see the main menu.
 

Jesse Skeen

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Universal stopped doing this with the previews a while ago, titles released now let you hit the menu button during them. I quit buying their titles until that happened.

I've noticed though that more titles now don't let you skip the FBI warnings- that only makes people want to disobey it! The funny thing too is that in many cases, if you do things they don't want you to do with these discs, it results in one that CAN have this stuff skipped or completely removed!
 

MarkHastings

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No offense, but those are the kinds of tactics that the studios try to battle by making discs harder and harder to skip over menus, thus making those of us (with regular DVD players) get stuck with jumping through hoop after hoop to get to the play button.
 

Don Solosan

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"Why do some DVD players lock out the user during these commercials? Why won't the skip-ahead button work during these commercials?"

Because the disc is programmed to prevent it, and the player is obeying those instructions.
 

Chris*W

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Disney is one of the worst culprits for placing ads on their releases. They waste valuable disc space with that crap. And then there's that absolutely obnoxious anti-pirate ad that keeps appearing on new FOX releases... at least you can skip it.
 

David Allen

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No offense gang, but are you all new to the DVD format? I'm sure there are some old threads about this stuff somewhere on HTF- it should surprise no one that some discs (old ones especially) have forced material at the head. As for Disney DVDs, don't they have "Fast Play" now that lets you skip all that promo material? At least it's not as annoying as the VHS days when you had to physically fast forward past the stuff.

I'm looking forward to when HD-DVD and Blu-Ray authorers figure out new ways to annoy us with interactive HD advertising gimmicks.
 

Stephen Brooks

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No doubt! They'll probably come up with an "interactive product placement mode" or something, so when a character on screen, say, drinks Mountain Dew, a Mountain Dew commercial will pop up over the movie you're watching! And if you click on the ad in an attempt to close it, it will use your player's spiffy online connection to bill your credit card for 50 cases of Mountain Dew to be shipped to your house.
 

Jonathon M

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Hey, personally, I'd pay good money to get a copy of Grease with a Coca-Cola advert! :P
 

JediFonger

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you can skip to the commercials on Disney's. it's the paramount ones that are very troubling.
 

Josh Steinberg

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I'm not a big fan of the FBI warning or anything forced before the main menu. As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to this aspect of DVD authoring, no one does it better than Criterion.

Now, I understand that DVDs are copyrighted and that illegal copying is wrong. I know it's against the law. But I almost feel like I'm being treated like a criminal whenever I go to start a DVD and it won't let me.

I wonder if anyone, in the history of the universe, has ever popped in a DVD, seen the FBI warning, and said, "Well, I was going to copy this, but hell, I didn't realize it was illegal! If it wasn't for that warning I might have actually copied it!"

People who copy this stuff illegally know what they're doing. A warning isn't going to stop them. So the people stuck watching it are the people who do buy the DVDs legally.

At the end of the day, it's a minor annoyance not really worth getting too upset about -- but if you're someone who studies films, or watches multi-disc TV sets, it's a pain that every time you change a disc it takes so long to start up. Ironically, when I was in film school, this led me to copy sections of the discs onto a tape when giving a presentation because there just wasn't time to waste five minutes every time I wanted to show a 15 second clip (except for Criterion discs, which were just popped into the player). Had they not wasted my time with that locked-in FBI warning, I wouldn't have had to copy anything! How's that for the definition of irony?
 

Chris Bardon

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You're not the only ones who are a little pissed off at this, and I've noticed it's happening more and more. Worst offender that I can think of of the top of my head is Finding Neverland, which plays a truck commercial when you pop the disc in. Not only annoying, but not related in the slightest to the film!

Is there space for this kind of thing in the Blu-ray and HDDVD specs? I remember reading that the intent was to create an unskippable track for the FBI warning, but these recent uses of the lockouts really abuse its intent.
 

Will_B

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Plus, that FBI logo uses the standard default Photoshop background texture known as "Craquelure".

Anyone who uses Photoshop regularly, as I do, can't help but notice that whoever made that logo didn't spend 2 minutes on the background. Cheap!
 

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