Will Disney Pixar do a recall on STD Ratatouille?? (1 Viewer)

[Josh Steinberg]

Umm... the studios do have a right to do that. It's their product. As long as it conforms to the DVD spec, they can design the navigation and functionality any way they want.

The trailers on Disney DVDs have been skippable for quite some time. There was a period around 1999-2000 (I remember "The Sixth Sense" being one of the offenders) where it was impossible to do anything, but the current Disney menus say pretty clearly that you can press "menu" on your remote to skip ahead. Disney calls their menu navigation on family films something like "Fast Play", which is designed to allow children to be able to pop the disc into the player without parental supervision and have it play through the trailers and start the movie without any button pushing. For movies like Ratatouille and Cars, they're not movies that people will watch one time; they're movies that kids will most likely play again and again, and it's even more likely that most of those viewings will happen on a regular TV set and not a high-end home theater system. A 2.0 stereo track can sound better on a regular stereo TV than a downmixed 5.1 track, so if the makers of the DVD are figuring that more people will watch it on a TV than on a home theater setup, it makes sense that they would default to 2.0. I know if you have kids, or babysit kids, it's a nice convenience that they can put the DVD on by themselves.

Yes, you have a right to be peeved by the choices that Disney made in authoring the DVD; no one is saying otherwise. Personally, I'm not a fan of animated menus at all, and prefer the static, silent type that Criterion used to go for. But just because you don't like it doesn't automatically means that it's defective and that the studio is obligated to do a recall and change it to your standards, particularly when everything you want does exist on the disc -- you just have to set it up yourself. Frivolous and rudely worded demands are probably part of the reason that fewer studios choose to participate on HTF these days.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Nice! I'm not alone!

 

[Jesse Skeen]

If someone would return a disc for bad sound quality, they ought to know enough about what sound system they're playing it through to know if that's a factor or not.

Odd that the Pro-Logic tracks on these are on Audio 2, yet that's still the track they default to.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Odd but not unprecedented. Offhand, I remember that the DVD of the "Untitled" cut of "Almost Famous" has the commentary on audio track 1, with the 5.1 audio on track 2. Pressing play defaults it to the 5.1.

 

[Douglas Monce]

The vast majority of people watching these movies don't have a clue about audio systems. They are playing them on a 27inch TV with sound through the TV speakers. More often than not a 2.0 mix is going to sound much better and the dialog is going to be more intelligible in this situation than a down mixed 5.1 soundtrack.

I doubt most people watching these films even know there is more than one audio track.

Doug

 

[Douglas Monce]

It seems that Disney has slipped back to their old ways with Blu-ray. You can't push a menu button and skip the trailers. You have to use the jump button to jump to the next item. The problem is that with a Disney blu-ray, that means there are 7 or 8 trailers that you have to do this with before you can even think about watching the movie.

Doug

 

[Arild]

How true. I've encountered a number of people who complained about "missing dialogue" on their DVDs when watching it with the 5.1 output through their TV with mono speakers... Even when the DVD in question had a 2.0 track included (but defaulted to 5.1).

 

[widescreenforever]

I'll bet they are the same people who hook up the DVD player via RCA jacks to their VCR's which are in turn connected via coaxial cable to channel three on these same TV's ...

 

[Roogs Benoit]

Many people have come to the conclusion that this is a choice by Disney and Pixar because the majority of people watching these discs are watching them on non 5.1 playback systems. You would be 100% correct.
Aren't the savvy audio people the ones with nice 5.1 and beyond systems?

I guess Disney doesn't want to make the kids or the housewife to dig through menus that they don't even know exist to get the dvd to playback properly in their Lo-Fi environment.

Those of us who are lucky enough to own a 5.1 or even more bitchen playback system have the knowledge (or should have) to navigate the dvd to your optimum preferred track.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the 5.1 EX near field mix on the dvd.
Aren't you happy that it uses a -31 dialog norm setting?
The EX flag is active so you don't have to push a button to turn it on if your system is set-up that way.

Bottom line is that Disney doesn't want the kids and inexperienced users listening to the wrong track. Most of the Pixar mixes have the dialog panning all over the place (more so than most films) and the 2.0 track is better suited to handle those issues than the down-mix from the 5.1.

Hopefully Disney will make the Audio change option active on their future discs. But it's not due to laziness or carelessness. Sometimes there are issues and reasons that a function is off or will not work properly. Maybe Disney wanted that function to be available but something in the authoring kept it from happening. They have much more to take into consideration than you can even imagine.

Now I have to email BMW because I have to take my foot off the gas,
push in the clutch,
Move the stick to the gear I want,
let out the clutch,
and hit the gas again.
It would be so much easier if it was automatic like my other cars.
Maybe they should recall it?