I got a Blu-ray player a couple of years ago for Christmas. The picture quality of Blu-ray is clearly better than DVD, especially on my big 65″ TV, but unless I think about it I don’t really notice it. But Blu-ray has one characteristic that makes it much inferior to DVD.
When I insert a Blu-ray disk, it takes a little longer to start up. That’s OK, it’s just a few seconds. But then almost every Blu-ray disk starts playing previews, one after another, and most of the controls are locked out. You can’t cut directly to the menu, you can’t skip to the next preview, and in some cases you can’t even fast-forward through the preview. You have to just let them play, one after another, for several minutes.
I find this extremely frustrating. Previews of a movie tend to spoil that movie for me when I watch it later. I want to go in knowing as little of the plot as possible. When I go see movies in a theater I usually wait outside the theater until the previews have finished playing. I know, it’s a little bit anal, but I like it that way.
I’ll do that in a theater. But in my home with my own equipment and a disk that I have paid money to buy or rent, I feel that I should be able to watch the movie when I want. Leave the previews there on the menu as an option for those who want to watch them, but let me skip them and cut directly to the movie.
So I cancelled my Netflix Blu-ray option and am going back to plain DVD for all my movies. With a DVD I can always skip the previews, or some people even copy it and strip out the previews, FBI warning, etc.( though of course I would never do anything of such questionable legality). I’ll stick with DVDs or streaming until I can get a Blu-ray player that will let me control the disc instead of vice-versa. Maybe I’ll find one in Taiwan…
