REVIEW: DVDs

Reviewer: Armored Werewolf

You have to love how far film distribution have come. Betamax, VHS, Laserdisc, DVDs, and the legendary Blu-Ray. DVDs sounded like a great idea. The absurd size of the Laserdisc made it near impossible to use without scratching it beyond belief. However, DVDs failed... badly. So here, we will look at the worst things about DVDs.

Cases
A traditional case with any disc usually just opens and snaps shut. Simple enough right? Well some DVDs have these small latches or whatever that holds the top of the case shut, unless you unsnap the two clips. Why is this even there? The case shuts just fine without it. Shoutout to Cinemassacre for pointing that out. Next up are the number of things holding the disc down. Whatever they are called, some of them are flat out strange. We have these two small buttons, then we go to one big one. For the most part, they are fine. But then we get the ones where you have to become a clone of Hercules just to take it out.

Menu
You can't skip logos or trailers. Why not? Hell some of them even put ads before the movie start, how fun is that? Just let me put in the DVD and get right into the damn menu. But wait, sometimes the menus suck. Take the 1984 Transformers TV series DVD for example. You have to go to the "Episode Index", wait for some animation to occur. Then, instead of just choosing the episode you want to watch, every episode has their own screen with all six parts on it. So keep scrolling left (or right), find the episode you want to watch, scroll up to the first part, and then hit play.

Region Coding
What the living hell is the point of this? To make sure we didn't pirate this? So what if I buy an official movie outside where I live? If you travel a lot and use DVDs, you might have encountered this.

Breaking
VHS gradually deteriorates overtime, which really sucks. But, DVDs screw up far more easily. Once they start skipping, just give up there.

Overall
It's impressive to see how far us humans have evolved in the movie industry. But aside from all these problems, DVDs seem to be rather important. Without them, Blu-Ray wouldn't have came around. Remember when I made fun of My Little Pony G3 for still using VHS tapes in 2003? Chances are, Hasbro saw the fail of DVDs and maybe wanted to play it safe, and I respect that. Buy DVDs at your own risk. If you like them, thats fine. I personally don't like using them.