Omitting chapter stops / selection menu - what's your view?

[chip75]

Originally Posted by MichaelB

This is one of those ideas that sounds lovely in theory but usually ends up more annoying than otherwise. With a hundred skip points to get through, you might as well just opt for the fast-forward button.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day has 80 chapter marks and they're all labelled and well thought out (no surprise for Cameron), but if not done right, like you said they could become redundant (I don't think any of T2's marks are more than 4 minutes apart). My main annoyance with fewer marks is when you've missed a bit of the movie and you want to go back to the beginning of the scene, but are taken too far back, then they're not much use, you may as well rewind.

Getting the marks right is a bit of an art in itself, otherwise they're just random (which you do on occasion see).

[David M]

Originally Posted by ravenus

It would be nice if Lyris or someone else knowledgeable about disc authoring could talk about how much effort/time goes into making a chapter selection menu (especially Eureka's simple text selection menu, not some fancy menu with video clips), that it's considered a good option to omit them.

Basically none from an authoring perspective. The code actually works like:

(Grab the ID # of the current button)
(Add 1 to it)
(Jump to this chapter)

So button 0 goes to chapter 1, button 1 goes to chapter 2 etc.

What does take time is finding suitable thumbnail images (although even this can be done kinda quickly). Actually coming up with names for chapters would be more time consuming.

So it's a weird one, in terms of authoring it really doesn't take long but I guess also a lot of people never use them. Personally, I always just jump around using the << and >> buttons.

[CouncilSpectre]

I use the chapter selection menus but infrequently enough not to be overly bothered if they disappeared. Providing that the skip points were still retained 'in flight' obviously.

I would feel sorry for distributors who put out the relatively bare-bones releases though. Without Chapter Selection the only 'extra' they'll have left is 'Trailer'.....