DVD THROUGH THE DECADES

Although I've once again lost my supply from the local op-shop, I 
have managed to keep picking up  second-hand movies from various 
other places. Before the op-shop closed due to the pandemic (then 
burnt down, then flooded) the ready supply of unwanted VHS tapes 
was already starting to dry up. Interestingly this seems to have 
coincided with the appearance of Blu-Ray discs among the stocks of 
the sorts of places where I buy these, but they're still so rare as 
to be irrelevent and I don't even have a player for them set up (I 
was given a semi-broken one recently though). Therefore what I have 
ended up with are a lot more DVDs.

I've never really liked buying second-hand DVDs. The trouble is 
always scratches. Generally my rule is to always check the disc 
before purchase, but some second-hand stores annoyingly put tape 
over the cases to stop you doing this, and then it ends up a game 
of chance. Worst is when I take that chance and then forget to 
check when I go to watch the disc, so I get half way through a 
movie before it gets choppy and then ends up at a "cannot read 
disc". Then there's also the occasional solitary deep scratch that 
I miss, yet ends up causing huge jumps during playback. 
Occasionally you get a worn-out VHS tape which is barely watchable 
(still better than "Luke, I am your fa-fa... CANNOT READ DISC" 
though) or infected with mould (since recently ending up with a 
whole bag-full of the latter, I'm now looking into building a DIY 
tape cleaning machine), but it's much rarer than with second-hand 
DVDs. This also means that I almost never buy second-hand DVDs from 
the internet because then there's no way to check until you've got 
the thing. Even with one new DVD that I bought from Ebay the seller 
sent a region 2 (UK etc.) disc instead of Region 4 (Australia etc.) 
in contradiction of the description in their listing.

But in spite of all that, now I'm mostly stuck with DVDs as my only 
option for movies in the $2 or less price-range (higher also than 
the previously usual $0.20 - $1 VHS price range, though now those 
are often priced the same as the DVDs). So I've been accumulating 
more of them and, as is my way, starting to obsess over the minor 
differences in packaging and presentation that have evolved over 
the course of the format. So, at the risk of being exceedingly 
uninteresting, here are some anecdotal notes on minor changes to 
DVD movies over the last two and a half decades.

EARLY DAYS

I don't think DVDs really went mainstream in Australia until the 
early 2000s. I'm sure the official introduction was earlier, but in 
practice I think they were rare enough in the late 90s that the 
average VHS user wouldn't have even heard of them. Certainly discs 
from the 90s are very rarely encountered in my second-hand 
selections, and actually I couldn't find any Australian DVDs from 
that time frame with a brief scan through my (uncatlogued) 
collection. I did recently pick up a Region 2 copy of The Green 
Berets (1968) published in 1999. This is notable for using a 
combined plastic/cardboard case which I'm guessing never really 
took off even within the UK. The plastic section holds the DVD and 
also has a lip that clips in place to secure the cover which is 
entirely printed cardboard and wraps around from the back. It's 
clearly an attempt at a minimum-cost packaging design, which 
presumably turned out a little too minimal for public acceptance. 
The disc itself is also my only DVD flippy-disc made by a major 
distributor (Warner Bros.) rather than in a discount bulk movie 
publisher who wanted to fit multiple movies on one disc. Although 
the movie only runs for 136min, they chose the rare 2-sided DVD 
format instead of the now commonplace multilayer format. I'm not 
sure what limitations would have caused them to do this back in the 
90s, but it does mean that mid-way through the movie a dignified 
hand animation breaks the news that you've got to get up off your 
backside and turn the disc over to watch the rest of the film.

I did get to experience that for myself as well, because it turns 
out that the habit of cost-cutting DVD publishers to label discs 
region 2 but actually make them region 2+4 so they don't have to do 
a separate run of discs just for the Australian/NZ market, was 
established even back then. Shame that wasn't the case for that 
disc I bought off Ebay (the BBC always seem to ensure that their 
DVDs are truely region-specific).

21ST CENTURY DISCS

Going into the early 2000s, it's not surprising that the industry 
moved away from the 'flippy-disc' 2-sided format pretty fast, but 
the cardboard cases also gave way to much sturdier whole-plastic 
cases. As with VHS tapes before (where regional differences in 
cases and general presentation were also much more significant), 
the cases, although varying widely, don't exactly match those 
common in the USA. Many were porobably made in Australia, as was 
also the case with VHS tapes. First releases tended to come in the 
most secure cases, usually clear and with a reliable, secure, 
disc-holding mechanism. Re-releases on the other hand tended to be 
in black plastic cases, much thinner and more easily bent about 
while opening or pressing on the front cover. These usually has 
less tactile and often less reliable disc holding mechanisms.

Special features evolved during the 2000s. One thing lost after the 
rise of the internet was the once-traditional filmography and 
production notes features. These little slideshows of text on 
graphical backgrounds were little summaries of information that 
anyone today, and no doubt many of the more technological people 
back then, could find on websites like the Internet Movie DataBase. 
Single-paragraph biographies of each key actor, followed by 
multiple screen-fulls listing movies that they'd been in before, 
were the typical thing.

Rarer, but equally antiquated within just a few years, were 
catalogues. These were more common with VHS tapes, but one recently 
jumped out at me from the DVD case for the movie Traffic, published 
by Roadshow Entertainment in 2001. They're little booklets of all 
the new and upcoming DVD releases that you were expected to hunt 
down at your local store. New movies are accompanied by many 
releases "New to DVD".

THE INTERNET AGE

The inclusion of those little bits of information soon to be widely 
available online look rather quaint today, but of course now the 
internet is now replacing the DVDs themselves. You can see an 
interesting cross-over point with one disc published by Roadshow 
Entertainment in 2013, The Wolf of Wall Street. Actually it claims 
to come from the future, because in two places the copyright is 
marked as "MMXXIII", which of course is next year, but I think a 
first-release from 2013 is more likely. This is, I think, the only 
disc I've picked up caiming to be a "DVD + DIGITAL ULTRAVIOLET", 
which sounds at first potentially damaging to eyesight, but turns 
out to be Roadshow Entertainment's attmpt at a DVD-linked streaming 
platform. Inside, clipped in where the DVD catalogue could be found 
with their discs sold twelve years earlier, is a bit of paper with 
a website URL (roadshow.com.au/wolfofwallstreet), an alphanumeric 
code, and a whole lot of fine print. Interestingly the link does 
still seem to work, though I don't pay for enough internet data (or 
get enough internet speed, my modem's back to 3G again most of the 
time lately) for wasting on downloading stuff that I've already 
got, so I didn't enable the Javascript.

Wikipedia doesn't seem to know about "Digital Ultraviolet", so it 
was probably just an Australian thing. The information link to 
roadshow.com.au/ultraviolet on the paper slip now just redirects to 
Roadshow's main page, and somehow the Wayback Machine never grabbed 
it, but DuckDuckGo pulled up this webpage which announces that the 
service closed in 2019:
https://page.my.roadshow.com.au/uv

What also happened in the 2010s was that the quality of the cases 
for first-releases dropped down to the level of cheap re-release 
publications from the 2000s. They're now all thin black plastic, 
and different distributors seem to be more commonly sharing the 
same cheap case design. The discs themselves have also lost the 
multi-colour printing that was standard in the 2000s. Good designs 
using the reflective aspect of the disc could be very effective 
too, but the single-colour designs that are used now, even for 
sci-fi movies, are far more basic and functional than the sort of 
thing seen ten years earlier.

Generally publishers don't seem to be putting much effort into DVDs 
anymore. I realised this particularly last night when I watched 
Ready Player One (2018) for the first time on a first-release 
Roadshow Entertainment DVD that I picked up from the op-shop before 
it flooded (the movie was better than I expected actually). For the 
first time on a DVD that wasn't from some dodgy budget distributor 
of very old and low-budget movies, they actually had USA copyright 
notices at the start and end instead of Australian ones! The disc 
is marked region 4, PAL (so unlikely to be the same as the US disc 
even if it's actually region-free), and has Australian ratings 
labels. They simply didn't bother to insert an Australian version 
of the copyright notices! That's a level of disinterest that never 
happened at the end of the VHS era so far as I've seen.

On another note. I use a DVD player made in around the mid-2000s 
and I've noticed that with some recently made discs like Ready 
Player One, it tends to stall briefly during playback. Not enough 
to count as a skip, but noticable, and more frequent than a layer 
change. I thought this was just from very small scratches in discs, 
but it also happened with a sealed copy of a recently-made DVD of 
the 1962 film Hud (great film - doesn't deserve any glitches) that 
I bought second-hand. Is there something about the way they're 
making DVDs now that's actually slightly incompatible with 15-20 
year old players? It seems doubtful that there would be cause to 
introduce an incompatible feature at this point, but the evidence 
is mounting.

THE END?

Those late 2010s DVDs are about the peak of my exposure to new 
discs (and to a large extent, movies), so the current state of DVDs 
in the industry isn't clear to me. Even Ready Player One was 
apparantly released online weeks before the DVD according to the 
Wikipedia page, and then DVD was accompanied by various types of 
Blu-Ray. Although I've bought a couple of new DVDs online over the 
last couple of years and not seen much presence of Blu-Ray stuff 
(for old TV shows though, so it probably wouldn't be expected), I 
haven't actually been into a shop selling new DVDs in the 2020s at 
all. At least one department store that I've been to used to sell 
them but now doesn't stock entertainment stuff at all (at that 
particular country branch). Have Blu-Ray discs started to replace 
DVDs as expected, or are they both going down together in the face 
of competition from streaming services? I really don't know. But in 
5-10 years time, when the stuff is all trickling down to op-shops 
and similar retailers of near-worthless used goods, I guess I'll 
find out.

 - The Free Thinker