So I tried out my new bluray player with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and this may be the most evil disc I have ever encountered.
First, bluray takes fucking forever to load. Just unbelievably long. It's got a fucking progress bar that you can watch crawl across the screen. And repeat. And that's just to load the disc's customized loading progress bar! So it loads and loads and loads and then it starts playing.
A bluray promo.
Jumping to the disc menu is blocked. Jumping to the disc menu is blocked. Every DVD on the planet, you want to skip the previews, you hit "menu". Nope, not this time, prohibited.
So you hit next chapter. Thank god, that works.
Because there are eight previews and promos.
Oh, and by the way, incredibly slow reaction to button clicks is normal. That's important, because the button clicks are buffered, so if you hit pause and it keeps playing and hit pause again, it'll eventually pause, and then immediately unpause from your second pause.
Oh, and by the way, during the promos, the stop button is disabled.
So you finally get to something like a disc menu, where there's a talking skull who talks some of the least inspired pirate talk I've ever heard at you for a while before letting "Play Movie" come up.
And, just because the disc hasn't treated you badly enough yet, the skull is asymmetric, with one orbit, cheekbone, and mandible slightly deformed compared to the other. Not a lot, just enough to be noticeable. What the fuck!
Anyway, you start the movie playing, and let's say your friend Chris calls or you want to go get a bowl of ice cream or something, so you hit stop. When you get back, you can just hit play and pick up from where you left off, right, like every other DVD player in the world, right?
Wrong! This disc disables the resume function. You better block out enough time to sit through the whole fucking thing, my bucko, because you're fucked if you don't. You hit stop and hit play some time later, the disc goes all the way back and starts the loading process over again.
[Having now seen the opening thirty seconds of the movie about four times now, I can say with great authority that HD makes it really easy to see that the ship looming out of the fog and little Elizabeth at its bow are pure CGI with no trace of reality. Already, my appreciation of the film is enhanced. No, diminished. I meant diminished.]
I did finally discover that there's a thing called a pop-up menu that you can get to come up while the movie is playing, that you can use to e.g. jump forward to a scene. Hooray for technology, we've walked backward to the point that blu-ray movie cases have to list the chapter breaks again, after DVD developers discovered that people didn't really watch movies that way, but we have to now, because the fucking disc won't let the player remember where we were when we left off.
So, y'know, fuck off and die, Disney Blu-Ray.
Posted by Greg at June 27, 2008 10:25 PM