I was a DVD programmer for just under 10 years. Some titles naturally allowed for more creativity in the menus. For one easter egg, I programmed a feature accessible after an up-up-down-down-left-right-enter navigation from a specific button. Pretty sure the marketing team "leaked" it on some forum for it to be discovered.
Fascinating, how does (did) one become a DVD programmer? I wondered as a child. What’s the tech stack like there? And were there DVD programming studios/companies, or was it more of a freelance model, or employed by the big studios in-house?
I fell into it. The company started as an MPEG-1 encoding shop making interactive CDs with Macromedia Director and Video CDs. That then naturally evolved into MPEG-2 encoding and DVDs. There were a couple of DVD programming apps, but the standard was Scenarist. I started using it on the first version released on Windows NT. We used the original 3.95GB DVD-R drive that cost $15k as test discs which made it interesting when building a full 4.7GB disc. We'd write the images to LTO4 tapes when sending to replication. This was pre-SSD, so we had interesting drive configuration. Writing disc images is full of I/O. We had a raid-5 volume where the original assets lived. When muxing, it would read from the raid-5 and write to a raid-0 volume. It would then read from the raid-0 mux data and write to another raid-0 image volume. There were plenty of places programming shiny round discs that the studios would hire out. Some were the bigger post houses, but others were boutique like the one I worked. Getting studio work was a pain as you had to get certified to hold unreleased content with a security audit. This was all Web1.0 days, so not much learning resources other than an email mailing list that wasn't so much tech support rather people talking about DVD "tech" with occasional interesting questions raised here and there. Scenarist was a drag-n-drop node based UI. It was pretty useful on learning what could connect where because it would change the cursor accordingly. The best learning resource was the DVD bible from Jim Taylor "DVD Demystified"[0]. After that, it was just watching as many DVDs as possible to see what other people were doing and taking inspiration from there. Lots of cool stuff done with the subtitle track like the robot animation over the video for MST3K.
Wow, fascinating stuff. A whole lot more than I realized but all of it makes sense. Really takes me back to the disc days. MPEG-2: haha! Thanks so much for sharing your story
Pretty sure it was Lupin, but couldn't tell you which of the plethora of them. I'd guess it was an Extras menu, but it went to a bit of the actor doing a goofy bit as the character not at all part of the actual content. Just the cast/crew having fun.
By nature of DVD menus and a remote with number keys, you can just add 6 to the number of buttons on the menu to type in the specific button on screen. Then again, not many consumer remotes had those.
I was downplaying things when I said "pretty sure" as I know for a fact they did. Some people could have found the content while ripping, and some people could have found the extra buttons in a software player too.
