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Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

I remember watching the DVD of Memento, and using the secret DVD menu button combination to enable watching the film backwards scene by scene. I remember thinking that was amazing and we were entering a new era of creative movie distribution. Shame that sort of thing didnt really catch on.

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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.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/DVD-Demystified-Jim-Taylor/dp/0071350...

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

Any chance you remember what the title was?

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.

It might have been discovered by people ripping the dvd. iirc the rip software detected the chapters

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.

This reminds me of an Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVD my friend had. There was an option to Play All on the main menu and it would simultaneously play all the episodes at once on the screen, each in their own box.

Whoa, TIL! I love Christopher Nolan films. I'm guessing there might be an OSS toolkit or multimodal LLM able to do this kind of de/reconstruction with an avi or whatever file format.

Related tangent (creativity assoc w a Nolan film), one of my all-time favorite web pages is this interactive visualization of Inception^1 which makes the levels of dreaming and the related slowing of time intuitive. Sadly it's desktop-only, but well worth it.

1. http://www.inception-explained.com

If you have the DVD, or have ripped it with chapter markings it would be super easy: you just need to change the chapters order, like in a playlist (that's basically what the original DVD did, IIRC)

Something like this for Tenet would be great. There are plenty of explainers, but not as well designed & interactive.

Agreed! FWIW, here's an analysis of the techniques it uses: https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/how-they-did-it-inception-exp...

Loved the fact that DVDs had the ability to create those kinds of features. New and clever.

Sadly, I thought Memento in chronological order was completely boring.

Fight Club had a couple of features/easter eggs in their DVDs as well.

We watched and all wrote about Momento in our language arts program in high school.

The character Fuchs in Barry reminds of Sammy Jankiss.

I don't think anyone in our class had found that feature of the Memento DVD menu?

Bank then before YouTube, there were properly-tracked copies of Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz on the internet.

Another weird thing about Memento,

If you train a neural network on videos of fluids in reverse, can it recover or reconstruct the parameters of the fluid?

> Shame that sort of thing didnt really catch on.

Not exactly the same, but some creative things similar to this are happening in the video game space. There have been a number of recent video games that primarily consist of watching a movie and discovering little hints here and there that let you unlock more of the movie through the user-interface. Sam Barlow has been a pioneer here, "Immortality" from 2022 is probably the most innovative example of this approach to interactive movie-watching.

It's a very fuzzy genre, but you can find some more examples with varying levels of interactivity by heading to the most recent titles here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interactive_films

Memento is one of the few movies in history where out-of-order watching would even make sense, possibly the only one. Much like 3D TVs, it didn't catch on because people don't actually want to consume media that way.

there are near infinite movies, seems kind of bold to claim these things

With near infinite movies to choose from, one would think you'd name one already.

i mean, i don't waste my life cataloging these things. i was just making an observation that it is impossible to be aware of the corpus of movie plots, as you'd need to live thousands of lifetimes to consume and be aware of the current available media. so, stating that a single movie is one of a few or possibly the only one that would make sense in this manner, seems like a epistemological mistake. like, how many languages do you speak? do you often watch media in languages you do not speak? do you pay for media that doesn't make it to the mainstream releases? do you travel to see media that is only premiered once before it fails and doesn't make it to a theatrical release? there are so many paths that are never witnessed, it just seems like an idiotic thing to say.

Pulp Fiction?

It does some anachronistic stuff, but I don't think it'd work well cut up and reassembled.

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