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A Random Exclamation of Frustration

September 11th, 2010 by |

About The Losers DVD from Netflix.

Twenty minutes of previews that I can neither fast forward through nor skip and then the main menu doesn’t have any chapter selections?  When did that become a thing?  I noticed that on two separate Matt Damon movies.  When did people become too cheap to include even a chapter selection option on their DVDs?  This is a travesty!  What ever happened to standards.  We switched to DVDs so we didn’t have to watch all that crap to get to the part where they play “Don’t Stop Believing.”

I can’t believe I have to watch an entire episode of 30 Rock in order to wait through the previews on a DVD.  I hate the future.

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9 comments to “A Random Exclamation of Frustration”

  1. You hate certain parts of the future. If it’s inconvenient and you own it, pirate it. It’s not as wrong as it could be if you didn’t already own it, and the company selling it failed at providing you with what you want/need.

    It’s kind of similar to how video games with DRM attached only make it more difficult for people who actually bought the game to play it. Pirates never have to worry about DRM. They only have to wait until someone cracks it.

    If you’re unhappy with the service you’ve been provided, the internet will always provide an alternative.


  2. I would have to check, but I think that’s part of the new Netflix-variety discs some publishers are putting out. I know I can still skip things on the ones I get from work.


  3. er, shit. The unskippable ads thing, not the lack of chapter selection. That’s just a shitty, shitty DVD.


  4. Netflix is not the only offender. It seems like every DVD I’ve bought this year have the unskippable ads as well. Below is my coping mechanism:

    My TV faces my computer. While the ads play, I turn the TV off and work/surf/play poker on the computer for ~20 minutes. When I finish, I turn around, turn the TV on and watch the DVD.


  5. I could have sworn I skipped all the ads on my copy of Losers from Netflix. You can at least fastforward them at like 64x speed.


  6. Isn’t there like a trick to bypassing to the root menu on most DVD players?


  7. It seems like as more people switch to Blu-ray, less and less effort is going into DVD releases. That goes beyond just the unskippable advertisements too, since just the other day I heard someone complain that the DVD version of Iron Man 2 has virtuall none of the special features that the Blu-ray does. It doesn’t particularly bother me since I have a Blu-ray player, but it sucks that some people are essentially being forced to switch by the increasingly shoddy work being done on standard-def releases.


  8. Sounds like a “rental edition”. You’ll see these at surviving brick and mortar rental outfits, too. They tend to have all the special features stripped out and unskipable trailers. I suppose this is to encourage you to buy your own copy should you like the movie, considering the movement from x-day rentals to subscription services that let you keep a certain amount of movies as long as you want.


  9. It has been remarked a few times here in the UK, that people who buy DVDs on a fairly regular basis have to sit through the 60 second anti-piracy video again and again while the people who stream/download everything… don’t.