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DVD Bouncing Logo

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335 pointsmariojv99 comments

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If you're wondering why it's just a link to a search, let it wait a bit.

I didn't know about this until they started doing it at Flyers games, and everyone cheered when it hit the corner.

Bonus hint: if you are on mobile set the browser to "show desktopsite"

Here I am waiting way too long for it to move, thanks for the tip!

Worked fine on mobile for me without showing the desktop site.

Interesting. I tried both Firefox and Chrome on Android, neither worked without the desktop mode enabled. In that case my guess is that the screen size or the resolution of our mobile devices plays a role.

I did notice more Google widgets not working on mobile, such as the current "ethereum merge" search, wich is supposed to show a countdown timer (which can not be fixed with the desktop mode btw).

I had success with Kiwi Browser, Chrome, Edge and Firefox for Android on a Pixel 4 running Android 13.

I just see a "Before you continue to Google" popover. :-(

Thanks for this! Still, it feels so right but yet so wrong.

Out of curiosity, I tried searching with <different-words>+bouncing+log, but bouncing works only for DVD :)

I love the DVD bouncing logo. I like videos where people get really excited about it hitting one of the corners, prompting cheers. There's a bunch from bus trips but here's a bigger one in a stadium [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytKVGtJ5yng

My favorite is still The Office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOtuX0jL85Y

That was funny, but then I was disappointed they needed an aside to explain it. Seemed unnecessary IMHO.

I think it was a good aside.

1. It makes it more evergreen.

2. The excited/super invested explanations are funny.

3. It leads into the joke that Jim doesn't believe that Pam ever saw it hit the corner.

Ah, good point. I didn't know the joke kept running. I've never seen the US version. I'll give it a go.

It’s very good. Bar the first season and last … 3?

Different take entirely. For those unaware the UK version is so cynical and on occasion even dark (and i love it for that) and in contrast the US version is more light hearted and succeeds completely on those terms.

Both are landmarks in tv comedy.

It's a very different show. The pilot is note-for-note the UK show, but they quickly realized that Steve Carell can't play Ricky Gervais; he's just not enough of an asshole. So they recalibrated. I think the US version in its heyday is the better of the two shows.

Greg Daniels was the showrunner for the first 4 seasons; he's Peak Simpsons, and also King Of The Hill.

I watched that office episode came out and I didn't realize this was a thing (watching the logo and cheering when it hits the corner) outside of The Office, so it seems like the aside was necessary.

It’s the difference between US and UK comedy.

That watches like live-action reenactment of an OG Invader Zim scene.

Man Invader Zim, haven’t seen that referenced in a long time, that little cartoon was the perfect kind of weird for its time.

If you haven’t already checked out other work by Zim creator Jhonen Vasquez, his comics Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and Squee, are excellent and full of very similar weird humor.

Very familiar, I’ve got hard copies of both plus Filler Bunny! Huge fan.

FWIW, Netflix released a special episode in 2019 reuniting a lot of the key people back with the show. It brought back some great memories and hasn't lost its touch. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_Zim:_Enter_the_Florp...

That's strangely accurate. I didn't like that "edgy dark" humor for the most part (every Squee and Zim fan I ever knew was a total dickhead), but Zim in particular was kind of a weird and endearing look at humanity.

You put your finger on something that's bothered me for a while but was never able to articulate. I loved some episodes and some moments were pure gold, but much of the show was nonsensical and revolting. Dipped a toe into his other work and discovered that the latter was much more his style.

It's a bit like how I really enjoy Tarantino movies, except for the violence.

For anyone who wants to try digging through Google's mangled mess of JS embeds: I'm curious, does Google embed the logic for these easter eggs in the common JS that comes along with every SERP, or only on the page that has the easter-egg itself?

Search lazy loads the easter eggs, there's way too many to load them all on every search request.

In general Google product's JS is built around a lot of lazy loading bundles.

Is there a way to disable them? I hate to be distracted, especially at work.

Lazy means you only get them when you search for them.

Do you find yourself searching "dvd bouncing logo" for work quite often?

No, but sometimes the Google logo itself is a distracting animation (I believe they call them "Doodle" or "Knoodle" or something).

You can use an adblocker to remove whatever you like from a webpage you regularly visit, not just ads

Exactly once, in order to make it look like one of the TVs on our display wall, that was very much connected to a computer, was in fact connected to an old DVD player.

It appears that nobody has shared the rather long list of Google easter eggs, so here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_Easter_eggs

Personally, I'm a fan of "recursion", as well as "emacs" or "vi"

Outstandingly catchy (and funny imo) song based on this concept of the bouncing DVD logo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ws0QtAiiXQ

I was fully expecting to be disappointed and turn it off after a few seconds, but I can tell you, I was transfixed.

YouTube's 'most replayed' feature is useful here. Huge spike when it happens.

Ok, that was very surprisingly catchy.

Pam claims that she saw it one day when she was alone in the conference room... okay. I believe she thinks she saw it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOtuX0jL85Y

It's interesting how memes like this propagated without really ever propagating "on the Web" or really any centralized communication channel. See also: blow on the game cartridge if it doesn't work, in case there's dust on it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22886401

If anyone is interested in more of these kinds of easter eggs, I run a subreddit for them at https://reddit.com/r/eastereggs

Doesn't work for me.

If I leave it a while, I eventually get a notification pop-down saying "This page is slowing down Firefox. To speed up your browser, stop this page."

Is it Chrome only?

Whatever it is, it sounds like someone's implemented a very simple feature very badly - a bouncing logo is the type of thing people made in basic "DHTML" on the old web, not something that should be slowing down a browser in 2022...

Worked on Firefox for me -- maybe you need an update, or maybe you have an extension that is fighting it?

No weird extensions and same in safe mode. I suspect it's hw accel issues of some kind.

Wouldn't've expected as it's just a PNG (they're dynamically generating a PNG data uri and inserting it into an IMG SRC), but I don't know how they're generating it (hidden canvas?) and the update frequency is high. Doesn't seem very optimised.

It is probably down to ensuring hardware acceleration is turned on as I am certain that I have done that for a different web issue.

Tried it in Chrome. It works but oh my is the frame rate awful.

All it's doing is setting the logo to absolute and adjusting its position values each step. Outside of CSS redraws, it shouldn't be causing any slowdowns.

That and updating the SRC on every iteration with a generated base64 PNG data URI.

I saw that but I figured it was just generating on "wall" collisions.

I'm running Safari and it's working. Not Chrome only.

Works fine for me in FF

love it. I remember seeing this pulled off with 2 scrolling <marquee> HTML tags https://dvdmarquee.neocities.org/

Shameless self promotion:

https://github.com/pryelluw/mac-dvd-screensaver

A Mac screen saver that does that but with a twist.

Useless App Idea #8237: Record a 10 second video of the DVD bouncing logo and get a future alert when its about to hit a corner. It can also notify your friends so they know what they are missing

I seriously considered making a mobile game about this

Sometimes the bouncing DVD logo is better than the movie on the DVD. The Amazon firestick screen saver is also my favorite thing on TV.

Amazon Fire Stick with the Aerial Views[0] (Apple TV Screen Saver) app probably the best thing on TV since GoT.

[0] https://github.com/theothernt/AerialViews

I quite enjoy the background pictures my chromecast serves up.

Even the Win10/11 login screen pictures are quite nice, most times.

Really, anything is better than the 20 second eternally looping attract reel of a dvd's main menu. Friends once fell asleep to one of the redneck comedy tour dvds and it reverted to the main menu once playback completed. It was the worst until I turned it off.

Switching to another tab and switching back hits a corner for me every time

Just a heads up. If you want it to work on your phone you have to check the "Desktop Site" option.

Didn't have to do this on my phone.

https://dvd-player-screensaver.glitch.me/

6 months ago, I decided to build the DVD screensaver using just SVG+CSS. Enjoy.

Bouncing DVD Logo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22882260 - April 2020 (270 comments)

My nostalgia kicked in and so I opened the link and began searching for videos of it hitting the corner perfectly.. And then it started. I love google for these hidden gems.

How did this work on actual DVD players? Was it programmed to never hit a corner or was that a side effect of how it was implemented?

> Was it programmed to never hit a corner or was that a side effect of how it was implemented?

None of that because it was hitting corners.

Can confirm it would hit the corner if you waited long enough. I saw it happen twice, and a third time where it was like two or three pixels off from hitting right in the corner.

I'm fairly sure (based on observation/recollection) the logo was placed randomly with a random vector, and when it contacted the wall it's vector was reflected across the normal at that point (eg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reflection_angles.sv...). I'm not sure that every configuration would reach the corner, but many would.

It hits the corner, it's just really rare. If there are 500 possible pixel positions when it hits the edge, then it's only going to hit the corner exactly on 0.2% of bounces.

https://dvd.js.org

Add a query flag to turn it into a selection game of sorts. I used it to pick standup order :)

https://dvd.js.org/?names=han,leia,chewbacca

https://www.screensaversplanet.com/screensavers/zz-dvd-1164/

I have the DVD logo as a Zoom video background. Always get chuckles.

Also, do a barrel roll

https://www.google.com/search?q=do+a+barrel+roll

Seems like it's hitting the corner quit often - is it on a predetermined path, or perhaps it's manipulating the bounces to achieve this?

Try resizing your browser window.

By default, my 16:9 screen with tabs and address bar leave a nearly 16:8 (2:1) rectangle such that (with the 45° trajectory) the logo bounces to the bottom middle, then to a corner, then repeats that loop, mostly.

You can resize the window to prevent it from hitting a corner if you'd like. Turn it into opposite-of-pong game.

Never hit once on a good portion of my ultra wide screen. I watched for longer than I care to admit.

What do you mean? Barely hits any corners for me... https://imgur.com/a/uFB6ck6

I just imagine, 'We payed hella bucks to put the logo on the unit & box, damn straight it'll bounce across thr screen.'

It's addictive because you can try resizing the browser window to try and make the logo hit the corner, it's kind of fun.

First thing I did when I got my new tv was to install this as screen saver (for oled tvs this is recommended).

I thought Googlers were supposed to work with greater focus in mind. Someone is playing around.

Self-promotion: I made an Android live wallpaper of this.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stephanwoz...

It hit the corner like 3 times in a minute?

wish it only changed color when reached at the corner

This is how you know Google has far too many people than they actually need.

Letting people occasionally work on something fun can be good for morale.

It's also a sign that your culture is able to deliver a fun feature, just for the sake of it. I've worked several places where things are so fragile nobody would dare make any change that wasn't strictly necessary. That's not a good sign.

While it can definitely be good for morale, it's worth remembering that all changes bear the possibility of unintended consequences.

This amusing anecdote comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fsUAdlzwAs

Bearing risk in mind, there's probably a reason that it's acceptable to implement the DVD logo on the front-end client but poor taste to humorously update HTTP headers, for instance.

(That said, I tend to stay in the camp of "any path that can be hit, I'll eventually have to support.")

All business, all the time! No fun allowed!

Getting paid to code a bouncing Google logo is cool but fun things are what I do outside of work.

Why not both?

I think those little things are a part of Google DNA from the early days and actually have a huge impact on the brand perception.

I am pretty sure easter eggs were a significant part of what made Google a cool company 10-15 years ago to my young eyes. The answer to life, the hidden games in Android, the raptor game in Chrome. At the time, it was rare for public company to do those silly things.

It was NOT rare. Microsoft used to do a huge multitude of easter eggs. Most big companies stopped because there was fear that easter eggs would increase the attack surface for hacking. For one concrete example, the PHP easter egg was useful to tell which (usually vulnerable) version of PHP a site runs so that you can run exactly the script you need to attack it.

French military victories

When that went, it was a sign google was different to the early days.

That seems like a ridiculous thing to say. That said, I actually came to the comments to wonder just how much total effort would have gone into this from proposal, through approval and sign-offs by multiple technical and non-technical teams, before finally getting through to production. Anyone have an educated guess? I’m really curious even though I don’t believe it should sway opinion on whether to do it or not. The value is spread across employee morale and however many millions of users have their day brightened a little.

That said, I actually came to the comments to wonder just how much total effort would have gone into this from proposal, through approval and sign-offs by multiple technical and non-technical teams, before finally getting through to production.

Who's to say it's not an internal training exercise? Someone(s) is learning to heard the kittens on a low-stakes project, someone else is learning to get the right sign-offs from the right teams/people, and the new test manager can spin her team up on this little project while they try the new workflow. And the intern gets to see their CSS tricks go into production to amuse millions.

We do our best to spy on every detail of your life we possibly can, but look at how whimsical we are about it! :D

Here's another Google search link https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pernicious

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