High-Def Disc Interactivity Debuts on HD DVD

An anonymous reader writes "Next to picture quality, interactivity has been touted as one of the key selling points of the next-gen disc formats — unlike standard def DVD, both HD DVD and Blu-ray are capable of delivering truly interactive experiences. This past Tuesday, Universal Studios released 'Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift' on HD DVD with an interactive feature they've dubbed 'U-Control,' delivering the first true on-the-fly, user-controlled supplements to a pre-recorded video format."

interactivity...

Next to picture quality, interactivity has been touted as one of the key selling points of the next-gen disc formats -- unlike standard def DVD, both HD DVD and Blu-ray are both capable of delivering truly interactive experiences.

By "interactivity", I'm assuming they mean throwing the player out of a third-story window when it refuses to play a DRM'ed movie that you've paid for [betanews.com]?

wth

And I care about movie interactivity why? It's a friggin movie for crying out loud.

Re:wth

I would think that people who want interactivity would play the video game based on the movie. Why would they want to have influence over the movie that they only want to watch, rather than have full control of a simulation in a video game?

Nice...

I'm assuming this content is better than the movie itself. I had to turn the movie off halfway through because the quality level was almost as bad as the second TFATF.

Why is this cool?

How do these features differ from the simplest video games? So there's some more space available on an HD DVD or Blueray... they just cram the space full with this?

Unless I don't understand something... what does this add to the movie itself? If it doesn't, then it's just an added feature that has no inherent quality and doesn't aid in my decision to purchase a movie in the first place.

Re:Why is this cool?

No, no, no. Don't you get it? This is HD-DVD! It's new and exciting! We're finally able to do things we've never had the space to do before? No, this is nothing like Dragonslayer or other laser disc games, nor is it like a FMV game. It's new! Buy it! Please?

Interactivity!

Yes, that's whats going to sell it!

Movie vs. Features

<rant>
I don't know about anyone else, but when I watcha movie, I like to watch the movie. Not Flashy, buzz-wordy bull crap.

Whenever I purchase a new DVD, before I even watch it, I rip it, strip everything but the main movie, and burn it.

Whoever invented the retarted "feature" to stop you from going directly to the meny during previews is a fucktard. I've only seen it once or twice, but still a complete pain in the ass.

Then we have the people who enjoy placing a tonne of DRM/copy proctection on the discs and just like to piss people like me off who actually buy movies, and want to just have the main movie start playing when the disc in inserted. Not sit through a bunch of warnings, movie previews, and then sit at the goddamn menu until you have to press the play button. I can see sometimes this can be of use, but in more cases than not, I just want to watch TFM[ovie]!

In conclusion, I want better content, not features. Stop waisting your time and money on crap nobody cares about.
</rant>
Sorry. I just had to get that off my chest.

The interactive features of DVD mostly unused

Most of the interactive features of DVD's were never used seriously,
to create a new viewing experience.

How many DVD's really had useful multiple angles?
  - Like perhaps a Fixed camera, vs one that panned.
How many DVD's had a useful alternate audio track.
  - Like a music only (matrix came close), or without drama music.
How many DVD's had seamless alternate endings or alternate paths.
(not just an all too common alternate ending presented like a deleted scence.)

The features of DVD should be used before we think about a need to switch to the new disposable DRM formats.

Interactivity: perfect for porn

Once again, the porn industry drives technology forward. It will be very "interesting" to see what they come up with for this feature!

Why bother editing a movie?

Why not just shove a bunch of shots onto the disk and let the user play them in whatever order they like. Save money because you can fire the editors. And you can label it 'truly interactive' to sell it for more money. Guaranteed profit.

One area they'll never be interactive in

I can guarantee you DVDs and successors will never give interactivity where it's most wanted: being able to put the disc in the player and press ONE button ONCE and have it immediately start playing the ACTUAL MOVIE. No way. To get that feature, you have to break the law and copy the DVD.

Movies

I don't know about others of the Slashdot crowd but most of the time I see absolutely no need for movie extras really. I want to watch a movie, sometimes its fun to see extra scenes but really some of them were cut for a reason. I mean how much of the price of a dvd or one of these HD dvds is going to be paying someone to program these interactive features.

More things change..

Isn't this what was promised with DVDs?
Why yes, yes it was.

I have yet to see a DVD player that contains all the features of Laser Disk.

Pr0n

I have a feeling this might actually end up being a main selling point for the disk format...

After all, doesn't everyone want more intereactivity in their pornography?

Obligatory Futurama

Announcer: If you want Calculon to race to the laser gun battle in his hover-Ferarri, press 1! If you want Calculon to double-check his paperwork, press 2! Enter now!
Fry presses 1.
Chair: You have pressed 2!
Fry: No, I didn't!
Chair: I'm almost positive you did!
Time passes.
Calculon: Add in the carryover from form 16A, then deduct line 2B...

Doesn't matter how good the features are...

If the studios keep pumping out crap like Fast and the Furious, they'll continue to see box office decline, slumping interest, skyrocketing piracy, and marginal adoption of new technology. Generally bad things for the forseeable future.

Not again...

They have tried this over and over again about 10-odd years ago with "Interactive Movies", basically 'games' that you could pick cutscenes in, little more than that. They failed miserably and terribly, except for the odd corner case.

Apparently, history does repeat itself (and they still haven't learned from the previous mistake).

When people put a movie in, they want to be *passively entertained*. Having the brain in between two states (passive and active) doesn't really work.

Pr0n

It'll be huge for porn. They already do choose your own camera angle. They can now do it with higher definition. See that $5 whore and her meth teeth in 1080p with 5.1 surround to truly capture what it's like to be seedy and cheap all from the comforts of home. See every pimple, needle mark, ruise, and wrinkle.

I wonder what programmability the format has

There were some pretty interesting things that could be done with the programming language that DVDs use, but to my knowledge it wasn't to the point of being able to write meaningful games. I wonder if the "interactivity" means including things like a pseudorandom number generator so one could throw in, for example, a video poker game as an easter egg (or is there a way to do this on regular DVDs that didn't occur to me?)

Here we go again!

delivering the first true on-the-fly, user-controlled supplements to a pre-recorded video format.

Great! The people who missed 1995 in videogames have finally a chance to relive the legendary golden era of Full Motion Video Multimedia CD-ROM Games! A little bit less compression artifacts, but the same two-penny production values, the same horrible acting, the same cheesy special effects and especially the same level of interactivity!

::runs in fear as the memories of the Philips CD-i commercials flood in mind...::

Just buy a video game

It should be easy (as far as movies and games go in general) to write, say, an XBOX 360 game that is just streaming VC1/MPEG4/H.264 video most of the time and occasionally drops into mini-action sequences so that you have to kill an enemy, win a car race or otherwise influence movie's branching storyline. Interactive features on players without a decent CPU/GPU are doomed to be amatuerish in comparison, so why even bother?

The simple question is, why?

I would assume that I'm not too far off from others when I say that I don't particularly enjoy these features inserted into the movies. Also, how is the end result of this different from what DVD could do? The technology is better, and more interesting, but for which applications could they be used that truly make the users' experience better?

The PIP is neat, but I for one have never sat all the way through a movie a second time to hear the commentary. This just adds a small box with video content to that. Is there really a demand for this? How does that spell interactive? All this mixing of different streams does is stop the disc from having to seek when you activate a feature, but the net effect is still pulling the person out of the movie, and putting them somewhere else. The other issue is the 'twitch factor' involved in activating these features. If you miss the activation button when it pops up onto the screen, you have to rewind it. You'd probably have to be sitting with the remote in your hand, and have to expect the button to catch it.

Alternatly I don't see a problem with the special features menu present on DVDs. It has a description of the content, that I can choose to watch, not interrupting the movie. I'm sure that the PIP feature could be used nicely in that context, choose scene to watch, choose which part is in PIP box (Scene, or Behind the Scenes).

BluRay

Ok, in the past I've bashed BlueRay,and HD DVD. Today I went to the Sony Global Marketing Conference on Sony Pictures lot. BlueRay is damn impressive. I was more impressed with BluRay and the new Bravia line of TVs than I was with the PS3. The picture quality is unbelievable compared to DVD, and on 52 inch 1080p bravias, it was awesome. PS3 wise, they had the offical hardware. There was 4 playable PS3 machines. You could just walk up and play. They were also using PS3s to play BluRay movies on a few TVs, incluing an 82 inch LCD that was playing PS3 trailers. There was a dirt bike game which had some sweet physics, GT HD, an anime looking golf game with litte girls in short skirts, and a WWII era FPS where the nazi's look like zombies. The graphics we decent (not PC quality for sure), the sound quality was amazing.

marketing

Anyone else get offended by being marketed to this way on Slashdot?

What button do I push to make it not suck?

They might address their sagging sales to the fact that instead of releasing good movies, they release titles like "fast and the furious, tokyo drift".

let's see.. direct the platform toward the 27-55 demographic.. market movies for the platform to the 12-22 demographic.. I think i'm seeing their problem here!

Perhaps...

"Next to picture quality, interactivity has been touted as one of the key selling points of the next-gen disc formats ... This past Tuesday, Universal Studios released 'Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift' on HD DVD..."

Maybe, instead of adding fancy user controlled content, they should use that money hire more competent writers, directors and actors, so that we are being sold media based on the quality of the IP contained inside, not how many different angles you can look at Vin Diesel's Orc crushing arms [ugo.com].

Um, Dragons Lair, Dragons Lair II, etc on DVD....

I have had Dragons Lair http://www.amazon.com/Dragons-Lair-Don-Bluth/dp/B0 0000INHR [amazon.com] and a few other of the "laserdisc games" on DVD for years now. You can play if on your PC or on your DVD player using your remote control (mine uses the up/down/left/right arrows). Wouldn't this be considered interactive? I mean, if I don't push any buttons, it just sits there.
Plus, the latest Final Destination DVD http://www.amazon.com/Final-Destination-Widescreen -Two-Disc-Special/dp/B000FC2HS6/ref=imdbpov_dvd_2/ 102-6203978-4790560?ie=UTF8 [amazon.com] has the ability to let the viewer select from multiple choices throught the movie that actually change the outcome. For example, if you choose for the characters not not get on the roller coaster in the first place, the movie is less than 20 minutes long. Thats probably a good thing as the movie sucks.

So, how does it work?

Of course there are all the obligitory comments above about how commentaries are stupid, and special features are stupid, and interactivity is stupid, but must have missed the thread where people actually discussed how these new features are technically achieved, and I for one would like to know.

I know I've seen some really neat things done in the past that took advantage of the unused capabilities of DVDs, or that used them in new and interesting ways.

• Men in Black - my favourite commentary, they had something (I forget what they called it) where you could see the sillouette of Jones and Sonnenberg while they did their commentaries, as well as them drawing on the screen, ALA football postgames. The was far-and-above my favourite example of dvd commentary capabilities. After seeing that, I assumed that all movies would use that in the future, but I never saw another that did.
• X-Men 1 - They had an option where you could watch the movie with the deleted scenes thrown in where they belonged. I could never actually get it working on my DVD player, but it seemed like an excellent idea. I assumed because I could never get it working that they did it the smart way and threw in an alternate "playlist" instead of having the movie on there twice.
• Final Destination 3 - someone above mentioned that there was some kind of "Choose How They Die" alternate scene ability on that one. That's really cool... reminds me of the ending to Clue, or the "Wayland Smithers" ending to Who Shot Mr. Burns.
• Back to the Future - they had this thing where if you hit a "suddenly appearing" on-screen button during certain parts of the movie, it would play a PIP of a Michael J. Fox interview. The only unfortunate thing is that it was most definately not a real-time-PIP, and I seem to remember something distinctly "off" about it, but I don't remember what... probably similar to my X-Men problems.
• Momento - The only reason I mention this one is because they have the whole "Chronolgical Edit" version on the 2-disc set, but they really authored it poorly. I mean, it's neat how they start with the credits, played in reverse... but they left out the ability to fast forward or rewind, so you have to literally sit there for 10 minutes before you actually get to the movie... definately a "what-not-to-do" reference disc.

So getting back to my actual point, are any of these new HD-DVD (and I'm assuming BluRay as well?) features truely new to HD-DVD, or is it just because there's now more room to put them on there?

It sounds like now they can do real-time PIPs (see Back to the Future, above), so that's cool, but is it only one audio stream? Does it blend two audio streams, or is it a one or the other kinda deal?

The Insurance/Damage Calculator (see TFA) sounds like it's the same as the Men in Black visual commentary (ahah! that's what it's called!) and the button overlays. But I admit, it does sound like a really neat application... kinda like watching Burnout. I could see an onscreen bodycount in some classic action films some time in the future.

I'm also extremely curious on the technicalities behind the "There's a pretty neat (but again gimmicky) feature when you can change the paint job / tires of a car in a particular scene." quote from the article, too.

So, anybody know how they do that? Or have any other note-worthy DVDs out there, with unique special features?

How come...

Seriously this is a decent idea, I know many Slashdotters would call this censorship or something but bare with me.

Release multi-rating DVD's. Mom and the kids can watch the movie at PG-13 if they want... Pastor Bob can get it PG rated and grandpa can opt for the R or unrated version. Hey parents can set the kids TV to block R rated stuff (V-Chip) and then get little Timmy a copy of Pitch Black (To go along with his standard PG-13 Chronicles of Riddick) which he can watch at PG-13 until he's older.

Why not? Starship Troopers was PG-13 until they decided to raise the rating since people were calling it a kids flick. They'll sell twice as many DVD's to those who want to avoid certain language or graphic scenes. Sounds like great business sense to me.

Experimenting is good

I trully think its retarded to jump on the bandwagon of "new toy" fanatics. The best use the new high Def DVD's is to improve the picture and sound quality. And yet I say let the retards play with this new toy in stupid ways because something cool just might come out of that interaction. After all we wouldnt have computers the size of a credit card if sombody didnt play with there new toy.

ReadySoft CEO breathes a sigh of relief...

Now they have an excuse to resell Dragon's Lair and Space Ace again! Oh boy.

Yet another naysayer.. sorry..

Does anyone remember the promise of being able to view footage from many different angles on a DVD, back when DVD was a hot new thing? Well, that certainly never became widespread (Circuit City demos aside). I think people are simply too interested in no-frills-straight-to-the-movie entertainment. Just my two pessimistic cents.

old folks

People expect video to behave like video; that is, you stick in the media, press play button, and the damn video should just run. Tape, LD, VCD, all analog media behave like that. DVD on the other hand comes with non-standard interactivity, forcing one to use non-standard menu to navigate the media, having non-skippable advertisement that is counter intuitive to "skip" button etc.

I have come across a few old folks and kids(sometimes young adults too) who got stuck when they first encounter dvd. Those people trends to memories the machine's operation procedure instead of the understanding the ration behind the actions. Non-standard way of interaction make dvd hard to use for them or anyone trying to teach them to use one.

Looks like HD disc will be even more invasive than dvd. Hope that some manufacturer will put a DON'T-BUG-ME-JUST-PLAY-THE-VIDEO-SERIALLY button and gimme back my old time video experience.

Overlays nothing new

This isn't anything new, we've been able to do overlays on DVDs already, whether it's MST3K-like shadows providing commentary, or something like a body count (just use a subtitle track) like what was mentioned in the article. We've also been able to have storyboards accompanying the main movie. Whether it's PIP embedded in the video and you have to flip over the disc (due to storage limitation on DVD), or a simultaneous stream of audio or a seperate sub-picture, we're able to do it on DVD already. This doesn't provide a "true interactive experience" as suggested. Unless "fully interactive" and "toggle something on/off" have suddenly become fully synonymous.

F*ck Interactive

"Interactive" is probably the most overused word ever when linked to modern technology - in reality, it just means "charging the consumer more for even crappier product".

Look, if I want "interactive", I'll go stick on a PC game or write a shell script or two; if I *just* want to be "entertained", I'll go buy a beer, stick on a CD, go see a favourite band play live or, yes, play a DVD. I do *NOT* need DVD to be anything more than that - I just hand over some money to someone, get a DVD in return and all it has to do is keep me entertained for an hour or two.

Interactive DVD??? Hell, I find it difficult enough sometimes getting my ass out of the chair to stick the disc in the DVD tray...

The name..

Toyko drift? Does it play on a genuine Sorny player?

Re:DVD didn't deliver

on top of that.. I have this button called angle on my dvd remote.. I believe it was supposed to allow you to watch a scene from different angles, every dvd player I have seen has it on it.. But amazingly.. i have never seen it used.. so its great that hd-dvd can do it.. but the question is.. will it get used?

Re:DVD didn't deliver

Yes, I have seen the angle feature used twice in all of the DVDs I have:

• In a music concert - you get to choose between 4 streams (3 raw cameras and one directed stream). Quite cool.
• On the Ghostbusters DVD 'extra bits' - they had some animatics of SFX sequences, and you could flick between the animatics and the final footage

I've noticed some DVDs don't have the angle feature on the remote now (and, for example, Windows Media Center doesn't seem to support it).

Re:DVD didn't deliver

Why would you need to? This is America and Canada, everyone speaks English (or Spanish, or French) here. W-wait a minute, you wouldn't want to play your region 1 DVD in a different region, would you? Sacriledge!

I have the sinking feeling that's one of the reasons why DVDs come with so few language tracks. Another notion is that possibly the same movie in different regions might be a different cut of the film (some countries have different editing needs..) It might be possible that a different language track won't exactly match the cut of the movie on your R1 disc.

Re:DVD didn't deliver

Subtitles and language tracks are not features for users, they're features for the distributors to save production costs. All those extra tracks eat into the disk capacity at the expense of genuine features and movie quality. I don't know why any English speaker would care about alternative languages unless it's a foreign language and you want the choice of watching it dubbed or with subtitles.