F1 2000 Season DVD - comments and glitch (1 Viewer)

Okay, first off this disc is a killer concept.
Your main menu is 2 pages of flags representing the host countries for each race of the 2000 circuit - 17 races as I recall. You can select any of those races.
For each race you get about 8-10 minutes of summary of the race. BUT it's not as plain as that.
The first menu for each race is a choice between continuous and interactive. What does that mean? Well, for each race we have a "Super" review with commentary by Murray Walker (at least it sure sounds like him) and various appropriate footage. But each race is broken into chapters and any one of those chapters can have several alternate bits of footage. Those catagories are Track camera, In-Car (:cool , Pits camera (watch these guys react to good and bad breaks in the race), Data chart (actual captures of CPU monitor driver listing of positions and times as they are changing for that moment being shown). As each chapter runs you have icons in the top left telling you your alternate choices. Click In-Car and you restart that chapter with the In-Car view. Once that ends you restart the chapter with the Super view.
Only the Super view is guaranteed for each chapter, so some chapters have no in-car version. But the cool thing is that the icons let you know which options are there.
That is the interactive method. Continuous allows you to watch a continuous flow of any of these views. Like all the In-Cars for the race right in a row, all the Pits, etc.
The interface for all this is extremely easy and I caught on to it within a few minutes without reading a bloody thing.
And the surrounds are well utilized. Go to the in-car and your rears pick up all the engine noise suddenly. You are instantly placed in the car (and what a sound that is!). The only drawback is that the recorded sound often gets bursts of interferance on the transmission from jostles, etc. But that is minor to some BEAUTIFUL SHOTS that capture the very life of these F1 races.
Being an Indy guy I naturally went straight to the USGP and I can say that it had all the highlights that I remembered from the race, yet they looked so much better here than from my seat .
However, I did find one bug I think. I have a Pioneer 525 going to a Denon 3801. Using the Interactive I jumped to the In-Car view on the victory lap of the USGP (looking sidewase at Schuey driving slow, pumping his fist). Just as a car goes by him there is some interferance and whatever comes over the digital bitstream turns my Denon into some semi-standby mode and I have to turn it off and back on again. I repeated many times. Could be just my disc, but I suspect that it's not an authoring flaw but rather in the audio bitstream.
Note that it played through the (I assume) same footage when in Continuous mode (In-Car selected). If anyone else can duplicate this I'd like to hear about it.
Anyway, don't let that discourage you. I found no other problems and that was teeny-tiny, especially compared to the pure awesomeness of what is offered on this DVD. Sure it's only 8 minute capsules of these races, but it's some pretty good footage and sound. Better footage than Super Speedway and better sound (sans music) than SS as well, at least if you want to feel that raw force of the F1 car.
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Greetings from the Humungus! The Lord Humungus!
The Warrior of the Wasteland!
The Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah!

Thanks for the input - I'd been debating whether to get this DVD, but now I definitely will.
So you guys know about Murray Walker over in the States? I thought he was purely a Brit phenomenon. Incidentally, he retires this weekend - the US GP will be his last.

"If I'm not mistaken, I am very much mistaken"
Thanks for the review, I'll be buying this for sure.
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Paul Wu
"There are three kinds of people in this world; those that can count and those that can't."

Any brick and mortar sources for this one? I forgot to order it, and I want it, like, tonite!
Oh, and go JPM!

Seth, is yours the R2 version or had it been released in R1? I have the R2 version and I don't have that glitch at all. That's a scene I've watched several times so I would have noticed it. It;s just so cool to see Schu on the in car camera and Reubens's drives up close and they both point at each other.
This is an amazing DVD folks. If you have a chance to pick it up, and you are a fan of F1, please pick it up. You will not be disappointed.
As a side note, glad I remembered to set my Tivo today. Speedvision is showing 4 hours of practice from the US GP. They had great coverage last year.

The R1 version is available as I picked it up 2 days ago. The only complain I've is there is no option to play all the races all the way through. Other than that, I think it's quite good. What would be better of course, is having complete races.

Ah, ok. I wasn't aware the R1 was released. Another neat option is if you watch it on a PC, there are little buttons on the top of the screen where you can change the cameras like OBC (on board camera) and pit cam.