Growing up DVD

There's an excellent blog post on Kotaku called "Growing up Sixty-Four" that I reread every once in a while. It's a beautiful piece of storytelling about how the Nintendo 64 shaped the author's youth, and it has inspired me since I first stumbled upon it. I've wanted to write something in a similar spirit for a long time, but about a different medium that has very much shaped who I am today: the humble DVD.

First Contact

I was born at the end of the 80s and for the first years of my life, I had very limited exposure to movies and TV shows. We only had five TV channels at home until I was about 10 years old, and my parents were not big on VHS, cinema, or TV in general. We did of course watch cartoons as kids. We also watched some movies and did have a VCR and a small collection of recorded movies from TV, but it was pretty small. Still, I think I've always loved movies, the experience and the memories. The movies that I did watch during this time have left a big imprint on my mind. I've mentioned Home Alone in one of my previous articles, and I think this is one of the movies that has really stuck with me. Same goes for the Back to the Future movies. We actually had a recording of the first movie that was missing the first 15 minutes, something that's probably hard to imagine nowadays, watching a movie without the beginning. But this was basically what we had, and if we wanted to have a complete version, we would have to wait for it to be rerun on television.

A glimpse into the future

In the mid 90s, DVDs began to emerge. My first DVD, which I bought before I even owned a DVD player, was the movie "The Matrix". I was 11 years old by then, in the 6th grade. I had already started having English classes at school, which in Germany back then began in grade 5. But with the advent of DVDs and the ability to switch languages with the push of a button, I started watching movies increasingly in their original language, which for most movies was English. And this has had such a profound effect on my life that I can't even begin to explain what I would be missing if this technology had not existed back in the day.

At first my level of English was not good enough to understand everything, but bit by bit, I exposed myself to the language more and more, and at a certain point, there was no question. I would just default to watching movies in their original language. If I did not understand the language, I would use subtitles. I think this was and still is one of the best ways to learn the language, and it helped me pick up a level of English early on that school itself would not have given me.

Beyond the movies

But multiple audio tracks and languages were just one of many things that made DVDs feel special. DVDs introduced something that, in the age of VHS, was not really common: bonus material. Behind the scenes footage, audio commentaries, trailers for the movie itself and for other movies. Back in the day, watching trailers on DVDs was actually one of the main ways of discovering new movies. And it really was becoming a big hobby for me to collect DVDs, to collect movies.

There were some movies that had such a large amount of bonus material you could spend weeks watching it. The best example is the special extended edition of Lord of the Rings, which I think to this day holds the top spot regarding bonus material. I recently watched a video on YouTube about forced perspective, a technique they used heavily in Lord of the Rings, and the creator mentioned that this bonus material is basically like a mini film school. And I agree. You learn so much. About acting, casting, set pieces, wardrobe, special effects (digital and practical). I loved watching all of it.

Another thing I loved doing was listening to audio commentaries. There was actually a period in my life where I would rewatch American Pie 2 every night with a different audio commentary track. I think there were three different tracks on that DVD. A very weird habit, I know, but for me it was something very magical to listen to the actors talk about the movies and discuss how they felt while filming them. And I think this is something that has been lost to a certain extent with the advent of streaming.

Down the technical rabbit hole

Alongside the bonus material, I also got into the technical side of things. Learning about resolutions, frame rates, and the different broadcasting standards. The two big ones were the PAL standard, which is prevalent in Europe, Australia, and some other countries, and the NTSC standard. There are others, but those are the two that really mattered. And there are so many peculiarities that result from these that are, in hindsight, rather fascinating, like these little tidbits: NTSC has a resolution of 720x480, while PAL actually has a higher resolution of 720x576. This means that correctly mastered movies in PAL regions could have slightly better image quality. And even though the difference in resolution suggests that the aspect ratio would also be different, this is not the case: PAL and NTSC have different pixel aspect ratios that result in the image having the same overall aspect ratio of 4:3 or 1.33:1. And then there is the matter of frames per second.

Movies are traditionally shot at 24 frames per second (or more specifically, 23.97 frames per second). For NTSC, which runs at roughly 30 frames per second (or 29.97 to be exact), a technique called 3:2 pulldown is used to duplicate certain frames. This results in microstuttering every once in a while, but depending on your sensitivity, you might not actually notice this. Since the PAL standard comes from a region with a 50 Hz power grid, it uses 50 interpolated half-fields, resulting in 25 full frames per second. The solution for fitting 24 movie frames into 25 PAL frames is even simpler: just speed everything up a bit. Instead of 24 frames per second, movies would run at 25 frames per second, meaning they actually played about 4% faster. It's called PAL speedup. And when you speed something up, the audio pitch also changes, by roughly a semitone. There are techniques for correcting this, but back in the day they could result in artifacts like the so-called wobble effect. So for many TV shows and movies, this correction was just not done. So imagine this: I was watching movies in Germany, 4% faster than people in the US. The most obvious way to notice this is by watching the intro for a TV show you know well and comparing it to the European one. Everything is tuned up about half a step, which is mind boggling if you think about it. For a large percentage of the world, you just sped everything up, and movies ran shorter because of it. If you compare the runtimes of PAL region DVDs to their NTSC counterparts, the PAL versions are shorter because they simply run faster.

I was also really interested in sound quality, although my room back then didn't really allow for great sound. I did get hand-me-down tower speakers that I own to this day: a pair of Heco Superior 850 Forte from the early 90s. I had to replace the tweeters at some point, but I still use them. They originally cost around 1300 Deutschmark per speaker, and they're still pretty good in my opinion. It's a fascinating thing that even though we have had so many innovations in home cinema since then, well-engineered speakers from back in the day can hold up just fine. You can't really cheat physics.

Shopping elsewhere

Once I knew about all the differences between PAL and NTSC, I was chasing originality as much as possible and increasingly started importing NTSC movies. The problem was that, unlike VHS, where the "lockout" was mostly technological because not all TVs and VCRs supported playing NTSC VHS on PAL hardware, DVDs had region locks from the get go. Region 1 for North America, Region 2 for PAL regions, and many others across the globe that allowed manufacturers to only support certain regions. This was done to prevent cross market import and export, because in Europe, different production companies sometimes distributed the movies, so it was a whole licensing issue. From a technical level this was an interesting concept, but from a consumer level it was basically early DRM.

The good thing was that many DVD players could actually be unlocked. There were service codes you could enter to make them region free. My first DVD player from Toshiba, and my second one also from Toshiba after the first one broke, both supported this. So I unlocked them and was able to import movies without a problem and play them back on my little TV. When I finally got internet access at home, I also got access to a whole new way of acquiring movies. You could now order online. My very first order on Amazon was for Scrubs, season two. I remember coming home from school, seeing the package half sticking out of our mailbox, and I still remember the feeling. It was something very special to me: I could go online, enter my payment details, click a button, and a day or two later the product would be in my mailbox. And the even better thing was that I didn't even have to order in Germany. I could just shop wherever.

There were stores that specialized in specific regions, and there was one called CD Wow that was like heaven for me. Movies were relatively cheap, mostly Asian region NTSC versions, but since I watched everything in its original language anyway, this wasn't an issue for me. On the contrary, I could get better versions there, like the Criterion Collection of Snatch, where they really made sure to have the best possible image quality. Back in the day, I sometimes bought movies in multiple versions to get one with better image quality or because it came with additional bonus material.

And of course I also had my pirate phase. I remember AnyDVD, Nero Burning ROM, and all the other tools I used a lot. I learned about the different storage formats, DVD-5 and DVD-9. And interestingly, DVD-9, since it has two layers, could introduce a small stutter on older players whenever the data switched from one layer to the other. This is the kind of arcane knowledge that might get lost in time for most people, but it's something I definitely noticed back in the day and could nerd out on all day long.

The cutting floor

Another peculiarity of growing up collecting movies in Germany, and another reason to import: movies were often edited for the German market. If the unedited version would not have received a rating or would have ended up on the so-called index, an edited version would be sold in stores. This even went so far as to create versions of movies rated 18+ that were cut down to a 16+ version. Even if the regular version was legal to sell, an edited version was often created anyway with a lower rating to reach more people. This madness led to the fact that you had to do your research before buying a movie in Germany. If you didn't want to risk ending up with an edited version, you had to look online, and there were websites like Schnittberichte.com dedicated to describing exactly which edits had been made for a given movie. Imagine this: entire websites dedicated to cataloguing the censorship in movies. In the last decade or so, I have the feeling this is not done as much anymore, especially with the advent of streaming, where releasing different edits for different age ratings would actually be much easier. But for some reason, they just don't bother.

Hello, enshittification

Thinking about all of this, DVDs and movies have had a profound impact on my life. And I am a bit sad to see the current state of entertainment. One thing that is very prevalent is the feeling of enshittification, and I have experienced it way before people were really talking about it. I remember the transition from DVDs to the high definition formats, especially Blu-ray, where on paper you suddenly had a format that was much better. Higher resolution. Better audio. More storage. But there were so many little paper cuts that made the actual experience often feel worse than watching a DVD.

One brilliant feature of DVDs was that when you stopped watching a movie, depending on the player, you could just hit play and it would instantly resume where you had left off. On some players this even worked across disc changes, storing the last position based on some kind of fingerprint (at least that's how I remember it). If you turned off your DVD player at night and turned it back on in the morning, it would just resume exactly where you had left off. VHS had this feature too, by the very nature of the tape, but without all the quality of life features that DVDs brought. There were some inconveniences around DVDs, like the unskippable trailers and announcements that you had to sit through if you didn't have a modified player, especially during the rise of piracy. Those obnoxious "you wouldn't steal a car" spots were often unskippable, and that was pretty annoying.

But when Blu-ray came around, so many things were worse. The instant resume feature, at least on my brand name Panasonic player, did not support resuming for most movies. Some had a software-based resume in the menu, but it took forever just to get to the menu because they introduced Java-based menu systems that looked fancy but were obnoxiously slow to load. Everything felt really sloppy. Sometimes it took minutes to reach the menu of a Blu-ray. The technology might be better on paper, but the experience was often so much worse.

The early magic of streaming services

I also remember the first time I really started using streaming services. For the longest time, I was strongly opposed to paying money for digital copies of something. I had to do it for things like Half-Life 2, which came on a disc but still required you to log into Steam. Bit by bit, you realized that more and more companies were moving towards the digital age. When iTunes came out, I swore to myself to never pay for a digital download, and I still continued buying CDs and collecting vinyl. It's funny, looking back, that there was actually just a short window in our lives where we paid money for owning digital copies of something. Owning, of course, in quotation marks, because how can you own something that has DRM protection and where companies can decide to take it away from you at will?

I was never someone who rented DVDs by mail, even though there were probably a few services in Germany that offered this. I did rent movies in video stores from time to time, but it was not my preferred way of consuming movies. I was much more of a collector. I first started using Netflix when I was studying in Canada for a semester in Waterloo. Netflix hadn't come to Europe yet, but in Canada I could register and I started paying something like five Canadian dollars a month. The first movie I watched on Netflix was, I think, the first Thor movie. And it too was a bit of a magical experience, because at the push of a button you could watch a movie, knowing this was not a one time purchase, and then go watch the next one, and the next one. When my now wife, then girlfriend, visited me in Canada, we binged Breaking Bad on Netflix. I had already watched it, but rewatching it with her was very convenient. But convenience is a double-edged sword, and I think there are certain situations where it's actually better to not pick the most convenient option.

The successor of the bonus disc

Around the same time that streaming was starting to take over, YouTube was quietly replacing something else: bonus material. I still remember the first time I really got hooked on YouTube. I discovered the Angry Video Game Nerd around 2006, when I was 19, and I started binge-watching his videos from my bed on my old CRT monitor, which was attached to my computer. This felt magical to me, because all of a sudden I realized you were not at the mercy of TV stations and you didn't need to spend actual money to watch interesting content (back then, when it wasn't overflowing with advertisements, that is).

Today, YouTube has all but replaced any kind of bonus material I would ever watch attached to a movie, I guess. Which on one hand is awesome, because you have practically unlimited interesting content and there is so much high quality stuff on YouTube. The amount of work that people put into some of the videos is just astonishing. Of course there's still also a lot of crap out there, but nobody's forcing you to watch it. On the other hand, the idea of having to sit through a thousand different ads to watch an internet video still feels wrong to me. Same goes for all the short form content the platforms are trying to shove down our throats. We had to endure crappy ads in linear TV programs for long enough, and now it's slowly creeping back into every corner of media consumption. Unless you fight it with adblockers and other solutions, that is.

Looking for the soul

Today I'm very torn. Having a large library of movies available at the click of a button can be very convenient, but it also has downsides. There's the selection anxiety, where you don't really know what to watch, where you find it hard to pick something and stick with it, because we have deteriorated into a state where everything needs to catch our attention in the first couple of minutes or we can't commit to it. This is also why things like bonus material don't really stand a chance in today's day and age for most people, I guess.

Back in the day, you paid hard earned money for a movie, and it became an experience. It was something you would want to rewatch, and if the movie was good, you were usually also curious about how it was made. Just like many people still collect vinyl today and say it has a very special feel to it, I think the DVD represents something along those lines, with the downside, of course, that video quality is not up to par anymore. It's hard to go back to DVDs today because of the substantially worse image quality. But the idea of turning it into an experience, of learning about how movies are made, how actors prepare, and so on, is something I really miss.

I still think about the Lord of the Rings bonus material on a regular basis. I have fond memories of watching it over Christmas and it has a very cozy feel to it. A lot of that might be due to nostalgia, of course. But I think it's important to acknowledge the things that have improved technologically while also being honest about the degradation of certain aspects of our consumption habits. The attention economy has definitely done a massive disservice to a lot of things.

I don't know what the future will bring, especially for movies, or what role AI is going to play. I expect it to play a pretty big role, if only due to the cost savings attached to it. But I still hope that even in the future, we will see at least some form of artisanal movies, where you can watch the behind the scenes footage and see how real people were involved in creating them. I think there is something to it. It's like a fine piece of furniture that is handmade, where someone put in a lot of time. It might not technically be better than a mass manufactured piece of furniture, but it does have soul. And this is something I've learned over the years: no matter how good the technology is, you can't really emulate the feeling of something having a soul. This is definitely something I hope we will keep, even with all of the technological advancements to come.