WB Home Video, I'm angry.

[sebasd5]

If anyone from WB Home Video is reading this, please take note. We movie watchers absolutely HATE these new rental versions of movies. I can't remember how many I've come across so far, but there have been a few, and it's extremely annoying.

I'm sure many people who rent Blu-Rays have already seen them: the discs have a lame design that only has the name of the movie, and it says "rental" on the bottom. When you put in the disc, you have to keep pressing fast forward to go through tons of movies trailers and other advertisements, and then put up with the stupid BD-J spinning disc or whatever other design the authoring house decided to put in there, and when the main menu finally loads, you get a simple "Play Movie" and "Languages". Any extras are taken away from the movie.

Examples of this that I can remember so far are Inception, Red and more recently today, Clash of the Titans. The latter was especially aggravating, because at one point I accidentally hit the stop button instead of pause, and like we all know, thanks to some idiot who convinced all the studios that BD-J is better than BDMV, if we stop playback we can't resume the movie where we stopped like we've been doing since the time of VHS tapes and DVDs. Someone should tell these idiots that people do not want to wait for the stupid Java menu to load when menus authored in BDMV load in a snap.

But besides that, since I hit stop and I had to go through all the ads again, I decided to take note of how much crap the person who rents Clash of the Titans has to go through before they actually get to see the movie.

1) The piracy warning
2) WB Home Video logo

So far no problem. But then:

3) Advertisement for the digital copy, something that most people don't use, and the ones who do are computer savvy enough to use it without having to see an ad for it.

4) Advertisement on how cool Blu-Ray is. Hey, studio suits, I'm renting a Blu-Ray, you don't need to sell Blu-Ray to me, I'm already sold on it!!

5) A trailer for the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans.

6) Advertisement for Clash of the Titans video game.

7) Trailer for "Me & Orson Welles"

8) Trailer for some Batman animated feature

9) Spinning disc to load the pointless Java made menu

10) Finally, the lame menu with only two choices: Play movie, and Languages. This one doesn't even have a standard scenes popup menu like 99% of movies.

This is extremely aggravating. During all this crap, you can't even press the skip button, or the top menu button. You have to wait for each of these things to load, and then frantically press ►►► to get to the end of the ad or trailer, then the next one loads, then press ►►► again to get to the end, then repeat the same thing 9 or 10 times until you reach the menu. Are you freaking kidding me? Are the studios looking to piss people off?? Because if that's their goal, they have achieved it greatly.

Part of me wonders if this is not done on purpose to kill the format and force people to move to a downloadable or streaming format instead of movies on a physical format. Because why on Earth, if they have two technologies to author Blu-Rays, BDMV, which loads menus in a snap, and BD-J, which takes forever to load menus and makes everything unnecessarily slow, they would use the slower one? And, are you going to tell me that there is really a technical barrier that makes it impossible for discs authored in BD-J to resume the movie at the same point it was stopped? Are you going to tell me that the blu-ray player can't save a simple timecode number such as 1:23:52;23 in its RAM and then resume play once the disc loaded the stupid BD-J menu?

And BD-J is annoying enough, but even more annoying is to have to go through endless ads and trailers just to get to the main menu, and also that we used to get the real thing when we rented movies and now we get these stripped down discs without any extras. That, to me, is pissing on the customer.