Plexus Media - Colins Rant

Colin's Rant

Bl**dy DVD Players!

Technology is an amazing thing, and the DVD disc and player a fine demonstration of where it can go right, and so dreadfully wrong, at the same time.

Bloody DVD Players

In principle the DVD player is a huge advance over clunky, fragile VHS systems, and beats it in every meaningful way. Or does it? As the price for getting the benefits we unfortunately have to put up with a mountain of incompatibilities and user-unfriendliness, victims of exploitative marketing and cynical design, and wracked with frustration even before we can begin enjoying our entertainment.

DVDs and their players seem to be ‘designed’, if that’s the word, to make it as difficult and frustrating as possible to enjoy a film or TV series.

Firstly, the disc box is covered with cellophane so tightly wrapped and carefully sealed that you can’t get the stuff off. We can put a man on the moon, build Guantanamo, burn holes in the ozone, or seal that plonker David Blaine in an ice block for a month, but can we yet design an easy opening system for cellophane wrapping? Not a chance (and don't even get me started on McVities Chocolate Digestive wrappers). There are probably more injuries caused in the UK by the cellophane packaging wrap-rage than by power saws, microwaves and Créme Brulée burners combined, though, oddly, you never hear about wrapping companies, saw makers, oven makers or pretentious TV cooks being sued.

Then there’s the bifurcated nipple in the middle of the DVD case which holds the disc in place. This clamps the disc so firmly that Andre the Giant, rest his mighty bones, would herniate just trying to pop the bloody thing off. The only way that seems to work is to fold the whole box across your knee until the disc snaps off, spins across the room like a shining plate of razor wire, slicing through Aunt Anna’s rubber plant and neatly shaving Geordie the collie dog’s eyebrows, before embedding itself inches deep into the hardwood panelling.

Then there’s the curséd disc itself. If you’re very unlucky, or you’ve got the extra-extended version of the guaranteed-100% editor’s cut of The Return of the King, some smart-arse at the film company has decided that they’ll squeeze even more onto the disc by making it double sided. Give the man a jammy dodger!. Great idea, except where do you put the information about what’s actually on the disc? They put it around the middle in text so small and illegible that a magnifying glass, and the sort of concentration normally reserved for the Private Eye classifieds in the cludgy, is needed to read it.

Then there’s the DVD player itself. Forty years of crappy Hi-Fis must surely have convinced designers that grey buttons on a black background are not a good idea. But, oh no. In the end, the only way to find out which is the eject button is to prod them all, as the actress said to the bishop. By this time a breather is needed, and a cup of tea and a fig roll or Tunnock’s Teacake very welcome.

Then, once you’ve actually got the disc into the machine, there’s the bloody film maker’s copyright messages and logos. There’s no way to skip this stuff, so even if you’re watching the film for the 5th time you still have to sit through it again. And again. And again. I know that the US government has, post Iraq, conveniently redefined what torture is, but isn’t there something in the Geneva Convention about repetitive brainwashing of this kind? Why do we put up with this? If this was a car, and each time you got in it played a 30 second Ford or Volvo jingle before you were allowed to drive wouldn’t you be at the door of the factory next day with a flame-thrower and a pair of brass knuckles?

Then there’s the navigation system and the tenuous connection between this tortuous facility and the micro-buttoned remote control. This appears to be suffering from button dysentery, such is the monstrous flood of ever more buttons squeezing out of these devices.

And the screen designer has so little consideration for the actual end-user, many of whom are getting older and turning grey visibly under the stress, that she makes the icons on screen tiny, fuzzy and unrecognisable, and trying to move the almost imperceptible highlight around the screen from option to option would try the patience of a saint, and the dexterity of Erno Rubik.

By the time the film is running you’re so jittery from all of the caffeine in the tea that you’ve drunk, and in such desperate need of the cludgy that you hit the pause button on your remote . . . only to eject the disc by mistake and lose your place and know you’re going to have to start aaaaaaaaaall over again.

My rose-tinted memories of VHS tapes are that you slotted the tape in, wound at double-speed through the logos and other marketing crap, and were enjoying your film in under a minute. So, yes, the quality wasn’t great, and the tapes wore out, but at least you didn’t feel as though you were being gang-banged by the film companies, their designers, and a team of marketing executives desperate to justify their exorbitant wages. And you could watch the film in peace without that horrible sensation of your life flashing by in a remote-control-buttoned blur.

Next time: Sports Exhausts - why they really blow, or Yes, I do drive a Vauxhall Corsa and I do have an enormous arsehole.

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