An Apple Original on DVD: The Definitive Unboxing and UX Review
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DVD subtitles are encoded as images, not text, so in fact you can have any typography and style of typeface that you like, if you're willing to put some effort into it.
The first release of Ghostbusters on DVD abused a subtitle track to store a Mystery Science Theater style silhouette of the people doing the commentary track. It was very funny, but sadly only worked on the 4:3 version of the DVD.
It was removed from all later releases, but they never re-recorded the commentary track, which still contains references to things they are supposedly pointing at, even on the blu-ray releases.
[1]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53636
Edit: To the dead comment about JVM shipping with DVD. No, you are confusing DVD with Blu-ray. You may use the terms interchangably conversationaly, but they are 2 totally different things. DVDs were quite simple, but that's what made them so effective. While Blu-ray used Java, HD-DVD used ECMA script. They were both overcomplications to a situation nobody really cared about, a solution looking for a problem if you will.
I've programmed many interactive games, but the DVD spec is a very poor choice for any requirements for random. It all comes down to the DVD player manufactures and the cheap commodity players that became available. These low end players didn't really have a random function. Instead, they had a preset randomized list. We built a test disc for this to see which players offered true random. Some players would choose the exact same random order every time you restarted.
If you think something was fairly sophisticated then that was a well done disc, because there was very little sophistication under the hood. The space was very confined, and became even more narrow if you used an abstraction layer system like DVD-Studio Pro.
So the DVD UI phrase is a confusing term to me as there really isn't one.
Once inside, the production is not dissimilar to normal short run DVD production. Standard DVD authoring software. Standard DVD burners. There are a few additional steps during video encoding that includes forensic watermarking and the pain in the arse that entails to ensure each disc is uniquely identifiable. Once the disc is burned, qc'd, and packaged, the physical media is then handled in also ridiculously security theater fashion. Lots of signatures and timestamps.
To leave, you must once again pass through security to make sure you haven't succumbed to the temptation of walking out of the facility with more than you entered. You can return to your locker to retrieve your personal devices before finally being able to leave.
[0] There are more than one company that does this work, but this is the description of where I worked many many moons ago.
There were of course a few things we could do to make the ID unreadable, however it resulted in an unwatchable bit of video that would no longer be meaningful.
The system does work. Every screener season I was involved, people were caught. They didn't always make the news because not everyone released to torrent sites. There are other screener "crimes" that don't involve the police but perhaps loose future screener privilages.
There are other forensic techniques for feature films screened in theaters to catch camcorders. Modified versions of the content could be sent to different regions of the globe. When a pirated copy was found, they could look for these modified portions of content to narrow down what region was copied. These are innocuous things like changing the color of something in the background that oridinary people wouldn't even notice if it was changed from shot to shot. You'd also have to see the content from multiple regions to even possibly know that it was done. This is just one example.
AMPAS has almost 10,000 members, presumably at that scale it makes sense to have pressed DVDs made.
For screeners just sent out to certain branches though, maybe burned DVDs make sense?
It could very well be possible that nobody working for this company even knows it's possible to do this. It could be possible they know and decided it's not worth their money for it. I cannot provide the definitive answer.
If it is a pressed DVD release, then there is no way for each disc to be unique without each disc having a glass master created which is just beyond the realm of sanity. Even with Apple having more money that God, this particular silo of the Apple universe cannot tap into it willy-nilly for something like this.
High quality copies were in thousands of cinemas all over the world for months and not a single copy leaked. How can that be possible?
For the people that used to camcorder a theatrical showing, the studios cracked down on theaters to police themselves. Getting caught as your theater being the one allowing for this to happen would get your theater banned from receiving new content. Also, nobody wants these copies. They suck plain and simple. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
For the digital copies, other than the hacking examples like the Sony situation, most were rogue employees. Companies providing pre-release services have taken much more interest in their security both physical and network. Production companies have also become much more concious about who they work with and the threat of pre-release leaks is a big concern. If you're a service company chasing production company work, you're going to do what you need to make yourself a viable option.
I'm still surprised it hasn't been broken though.
The SD resolution of the DVD screener is part of the security. It's not dissimilar to changing the port of SSH. It's just one more thing to make the time less desirable to copy. After all, who wants to pirate/share/download/watch a crappy SD video?
Who cares enough about movies that they want a physical copy, but not enough that watching standard def video blown up to 1080 or 4K is fine? That Venn diagram must overlap far more than I think it does.
To expand, there is also tons more content only available on VHS than other formats. Straight-to-video was all the rage in the 80s/90s. Mind, that it's not necessarily good content.
Also, upscalers matter. To my nearly half-century eyes Sony upscalers aren't too bad. No one is claiming they're in any respect hi-def, but they're also hardly a miserable experience. Craptastic upscalers, on the other hand, are craptastic, sometimes from major brands who cheaped out.
Like what ? I don’t think I own a single device capable of playing back plastic discs in any format.
This was maybe true 15 years ago, but not today.
I think game consoles are the last holdout, and even there we’re finally seeing versions free from this antiquated technology.
And blu-ray players are under $100 now.
Physical media still has a lot going for it. High bitrate video which cannot be taken away from you, and doesn't require you to be online.
So we went from "anything will play DVD" to "you have to buy a specific piece of outdated technology"
Also, OP article pointed out how most people screening these things "haven't touched their AV setups since 1999." Blu-Ray might be a nonstarter if you want to win the popularity contest. Lowest common denominator and all that.
Keep in mind this thing is USB-A, meaning you need an adaptor for any laptop sold in the last couple of years.
on my MacBook Pro 16" M1 Pro
What's 'super' about is is the non-removable USB type-A cable, at a time when all their new machine are type-C only...
The SuperDrive happily works with the M1, as long as it's connected via the little Apple adapter. When I try to use one from Anker or Amazon, the drive won't spin up, and macOS complains the device is drawing too much power.
I've ripped about 100 home movies for friends in the last couple of years. What I love about the SuperDrive is that even though it's old and slow, it is the most reliable piece of gear for this task.
Generally speaking, I start with a Pioneer Blu-Ray drive because it's fast fast fast. If that can't read the disc (because people are simply awful with the way they treat their most precious memories), then I try a Sony DVD drive. And if that fails, I go to the SuperDrive. So far, I've only had two discs that the SuperDrive couldn't read.
The reason why ripping an audio CD is such an "art" is that without a filesystem there's no easy way to tell where the laser actually is on the disc. If it jumps or skips you might not realise.
A couple years ago they rewrote the dvd app and dropped a ton of handy features. It’s very barebones now.
Apple has style-guides for every product and everything Apple, which whatever external contracted agency is provided and will meticulously follow. Unless novel design is involved, review is expedient. Any that have had previous contracts will become efficient and accurate. I've seen it with my own eyes happening so fast and quietly, and periodically, it's like they didn't want anyone to know they were making money between periods of inactivity, or that Apple had been their only client for many Moons (unclear).
Like you mean the subcontractor does his part quietly to not call corp attention to themselves, right?
My second job was working for a small marketing firm in the post-dawn hours of desktop publishing. There was the owner, who would scare up business, the artist, and myself, the graphic designer. We had one huge client, Siemens, which accounted for 90% of the firm's revenue, but this left us with plenty of time available to work for other clients. Most of the work we did was for other tiny clients until we exhausted ourselves and realized the only work we did that mattered to the business was for Siemans. Eventually we dropped all other clients but in theory remained open to working for a client as large as Siemans, which never presented itself. We had no NDA, but I can't imagine any of us told anyone we were working for Siemans. Maybe having Apple as a client is more bragworthy.
My first-hand experience regarding Apple subcontracting was as a resident IT specialist at offices and facilities of two businesses recently purchased by a large international corporation (my employer) that was in a period of acquiring other companies (as a business strategy, which works, but it kind of also proves executive incompetence). The two businesses were related, one was an engraver, printer and proofer (insanely professional and expensive color proofs, and the equipment was drool-worthy). The other was a design firm and, as far as I could tell, for years at least, subcontracted for Apple to design all their packaging for everything they sold. This was not International Paper or some huge packaging company, but a small firm, less than 10 employees, surprisingly enough. The nature of Apple being secretive about releases and the nature of the product this firm provided meant that many individuals not employed directly by Apple would be privy to information about upcoming products for which certain media outlets would pay. I can only assume they were under NDAs, but I was not. This design firm was moderately successful at maintaining secrecy from the vantage point of a local IT department of one that was not all that curious or suspicious of what anyone was working on, in fact, I am biased against wasting any time doing anything that was not work. I always felt that the best attitude to have in IT was having absolutely no interest whatsoever in what anyone was doing, but I still noticed and became aware without anyone actually saying so nor by way of being nosey. I accidentally saw the work (artwork and patterned die files for cutting boxes for iMacs) and immediately recognized what it was and its significance, and that they had not been doing much of anything at all for the previous 5 months informed me Apple was their only client.
Is this the modern-day equivalent of a handwritten letter?