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They cannot help themselves. Just like buying and watching a DVD/bluray was much worse than a pirated copy, as the DVD/bluray made you sit through an increasing amount of unskippable content. From "do not steal this" to "not for kids" or, worst of all, "did you see this other content?".

Btw. Ads in front of streaming content I just selected, to tell me about other streaming content on the same service I did NOT select should also be on the NO list.


I worked for a while in the DVD authoring industry and we always left a secret code (always the same) to bypass mandatory clips. I don't know if it carry on to BR but I don't see why it wouldn't (until everyone got on the Internet and then clients hear of it and check for the code themselves).
This is DVD Player dependent and no it didn't carry over to the BR.

My favorite videos for all the problems with DVD and BR: AVGN's You Know Whats BS series: (warning a lot of cussing in the following videos)

[1: DVD]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdzaEVeFEE

[2: BR]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetXKdi9U3c

My favorites quote at the end when he was comparing DVDs to VCRs: "Its like we are going forward in technology but only making our lives bullshittier"

> This is DVD Player dependent

If you mean the unskippable content then no, it's not DVD player independent.

You are going to need to provide some proof regarding that.

A set top unit typically respects the blocks put in place by the DVD author (some rare models have a hidden menu provided by the manufacturer that can bypass things like region coding and this).

Most software players(VLC for example) totally ignore any rules placed on the dvd and allow the user to do whatever they want.

> You are going to need to provide some proof regarding that.

That's gonna be hard to come by, I left that job more than twenty years ago and short of digging an authoring tool and making one DVD I don't see how I could convince you. Provided I even remember how the damn thing even worked.

Here's what I remember:

- around 2004-2005 (checking movies I remember posters in the hallway it's more likely to be early 2004) ?

- the studio had three authoring computers, two macos8 and one windows machine

- couldn't upgrade to macos8 because authoring software wasn't supported on macos9

- authoring consisted in linking b-frame and a-frame as entry and exit points for chunks of video

- programming was a mix of drawing video blocks, mapping some keys to them, building some loops into a kind of finite-state machine

- we used dvdshrink a lot internally to move the movie between authoring guys and color/effects/editing guys

- video blocks were overlayed with TIFF pictures to create menus effect

- subtitles were rendered as TIFF at some points in the process, explained the rough edges (I remember I was surprised it wasn't a txt file or something but DVD players hadn't the processing power to render the overlay of arbitrary text so TIFF files were generated and it could overlay them over the video)

- I remember the distributor representatives coming to check out the final master of the DVD: they would sit in a corner of the room in front of the TV and plays the menu to see if everything was right. We made fun of them because they claimed to check the DVD for quality but the TV was too crappy to actually display colours and play sounds right. Now that I think about it I believe they were more likely to check if subtitles and languages options were in accordance with the distributor's rights. They usually watched the whole movie ^^.

Concerning UOP:

- I don't remember if you could input the combination while the unskippable content was playing, I think it was something you had to do before that to disable UOP on the next block

- But it definitely was like something described in that article https://lifehacker.com/hit-stop-stop-play-and-other-tricks-t...

> These tricks may not work every time and with every DVD, but thank god for the times they do. Got a trick of your own that does the trick?

The fact it doesn't always work is because the authoring didn't always put them in.

Your second paragraph is why BBC radio is unlistenable to me. The source of the advertising is only a minor piece of the irritation - it's still painful to listen to the same ads and jingles multiple times in an hour.
> Btw. Ads in front of streaming content I just selected, to tell me about other streaming content on the same service I did NOT select should also be on the NO list.

I'm looking at you, Apple TV+.

Wait there was unskippable content on DVD/Bluray??

What nonsense is that. That makes no sense at all.

Even allowing for exaggeration, some DVDs had a horrifying amount of non-skippable content.

For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/nx3o1/since_when_di...

But at the minimum, the piracy notices are 20 seconds long now. For an item you paid for instead of pirating.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/10/2238258/dvds-blu-ray...

The worst part of it was when it was time-based advertising content. We were forced to watch commercials for "coming soon" content that was going through a marketing cycle but often turned out to be garbage.

So before you even get to the launch menu for this specific movie you selected, you're subjected to a trailer for a 20 year old movie with a 24% on rotten tomatoes. And an advertisement for a pizza restaurant. And a threat that the film company is going to take all their movies and put them in a vault for 10 years so you really need to go buy more DVDs from them.

The person is acting like it's several minutes. It's maybe 20 seconds at most. A studio logo or some piracy warning. You can buy Blu Ray players that let you skip it though. Much worse is minutes of ads throughout what you watch.
it's still not okay on a bluray

you bought the thing, you should be able to use it however you want

and putting ads into a bluray you already bought for a probably not so small price is ridiculous

And if you skip some epilepsy warning then that is your responsibility, same with when you pirated it and get caught.

Also why force me to see anti-piracy propaganda (and that's what it is, nothing else, sometime also legally misinforming) when I already DIDN'T pirate it or a logo I already know from the packaging of the bluray (because if I did pirate it I already would have skipped it).

it's just a ridiculous dictation of behavior in context of a bought physical product

A studio logo and some piracy warning and ads for other movies and opening animations and...

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