ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

A Minor but Important Thing —

One of the advantages of going through my documentary and related DVD creation is that I get to put my personal mark or belief into the whole process. That is, at critical junctures where I saw things I didn’t like in documentaries and DVDs, I can now go “I will do this differently.” Or, maybe more interestingly, decide to do the same things because I can now understand the choices that were made.

The DVDs will not have Region Encoding. I hate Region encoding; it’s a pathetic attempt to control the market by crippling a product to only work in certain places and not work in others. If I pay the incredibly foolish amount of money to bring a DVD in from Japan, I should be worried about the cost, the quality of the production, and whether I can get all my buddies together to see it this Saturday; I shouldn’t be hoping my DVD player is going to “let” me watch it!

I will not have sequences in the DVD you can’t get out from. When you pop in a lot of DVDs, you have to sit through a logo, or some ad, or some other annoying thing between you and the film. This makes no sense to me. If people buy my DVD, they’re probably going to pop it in a few times and, at some point, having bought the thing and all, they’re probably going to watch all the stuff on the DVD. Or maybe they won’t; they’ll just watch the Fidonet episode over and over and then burn it. It’s their right! And if they see my logo and decide they want to go straight to the menu, who am I to tell the machine to stop them?

I am not going to have that dumb little sticker on the top of the DVD case. You know the one I’m talking about: the annoying little sticker that binds the case shut so you can’t open it, even if you’ve already removed the shrink wrap. You pull on the case, and half of it opens and half doesn’t, and now you’re trying desperately to remove that dumb sticker to get inside. I understand it’s an anti-shoplifting measure, but I’ve seen it inside box sets. You have the box wrapped up in shrink wrap, then you get to the DVDs inside, and then each one has the Sticker of Death on it. I have specifically asked the DVD company not to have one on my DVDs.

I will have subtitles. Can you imagine? So many productions I see, especially independent ones, don’t take the evening to add subtitles. Honestly. It takes an evening; I’ve proven this. An evening to add them, maybe a second to proofread them. I press the subtitle button my DVD, get the X, and I am automatically disappointed. I don’t want to disappoint others with my own work.

I have other beliefs I’ll be sticking to as we ram into the last few months of production; I’ll announce them as they become relevant.


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  1. A couple of minor but important things about DVD’s

    Jason Scott is keeping a wonderful blog on his great efforts to make a documentary of the history of the BBS’s – technology, culture, everything. Now that he’s close to completing it, and nearing the phase of actually producing the…