the trouble with dvd players

March 16, 2005 1:19 PM

Why don't most DVD players have arrow keys on the face of the unit?

Sometimes, I misplace my DVD player remotes, and without the remote, it's almost impossible to access some menus on my DVD players. Why?

posted by drezdn to media & arts (12 comments total)

There are many modern devices that can't really be operated without their remote controls. There are just too many functions (especially on A/V equipment) to bother designing and building an entire separate interface for the front panel that almost no one will ever use.
posted by jjg at 1:31 PM on March 16, 2005

Money. It's cheaper not to, and the demand isn't there. Margins are getting razor-thin on that stuff.
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 2:12 PM on March 16, 2005

My PDA has software that allows one to use the IR port on it as a remote control for many devices. And I always know where it is: In the nerd pouch on my belt.
posted by Doohickie at 2:26 PM on March 16, 2005

Ditto RikiTikiTavi. I had a friend who was an industrial designer, and he told me of some company that included remote controls with their product rather than engineering buttons onto the main device because it was cheaper--even though you'd almost never be operating the controls from farther than arm-reach.
posted by adamrice at 2:41 PM on March 16, 2005

What I'd like to see is a DVD player that will bypass all the flashy crap, warnings, etc, and bring me right to the main menu.
posted by rolypolyman at 3:04 PM on March 16, 2005

rolypolyman:
That's illegal in the USA, under the idiocy known as the DMCA, but you can import players that allow you do that (or buy from companies that do so). That's also technically illegal of course, but chances are so excellant that justice will never be served, that I think there are even American companies selling them these days, not just foreign ones. The cripple you want disabled is UOP (user operation prohibitions), but you might as well get a player that is also region-code free while you're at it. (Not difficult - most players with UOP disabled are also region-free)
posted by -harlequin- at 4:38 PM on March 16, 2005

Simple cost-reduction. If you look inside a DVD player or VCR with a full-function front panel, you'll find there's almost an entirely separate device in there, often with its own microcontroller. The parts aren't necessarily expensive, but the additional labour required to put it together and hook it up to the main board makes it prohibitively expensive.

Whereas if you only have a handful of buttons you can just whack a simple PCB in there that clips in and can be wired without encoder/decoder chips. If you keep the switches in one row you can mount the switches along the front of the mainboard, which I guess would be hard to do with keys in an arrow formation.
posted by cillit bang at 4:40 PM on March 16, 2005

-harlequin-, thanks for putting a name to what's annoyed me for so long! With it I was able to find this patch for the DVD Player in Mac OS X, and I'm now looking for a physical DVD player that also ignores UOPs. If you have any advice in this regard, I'd love to hear it. E-mail is in my profile if you'd rather not respond in-thread, but thanks for the tips!
posted by odinsdream at 5:46 PM on March 16, 2005

This reminds me of Tivo, which has no buttons or display (other than two LEDs). That always struck me as rather daring and/or boring. Don't lose that remote!
posted by smackfu at 5:50 PM on March 16, 2005

Similarly: form-factor reduction. You can make the DVD player look really thin and sleek if you take the buttons off. Most people look at the result and say "ooo! cool!" right away, not "hey! where's the directional keypad!"
posted by scarabic at 6:28 PM on March 16, 2005

odinsdream:
I think the original thread question has been answered, so I'll allow myself to drift further offtopic. I was last in the market a few years back, but err... ended up buying a tabletPC with DVD-rom instead. (I wanted to watch DVDs on my commute :)
So I don't have any particular model to recommend, and my advice is years out of date, but here goes anyway:

I'm aware of three main cripples imposed on DVD players, in order of how annoying they are: 1) Region code locking, 2) UOP, 3) Absense of digital video outputs (such as SVGA).
When I was looking, it seemed like you could pick any two of those three and find an off-the-shelf model unshackled of those, but I didn't see a model with all three cripples removed (though various places would have been able to modify one to pass all three). Times may have changed on that one, I don't know, but the digital output doesn't seem very important to me, since I have a 27" television, so the difference wouldn't be perceptible even if my TV had digital inputs, which it doesn't :-). I plan to get a projector, so that might change the equation. Even a pirate has no need of a digital output, since CSS was cracked years ago and they can access the raw data.

So, forgetting #3 and going for a player that passes #1 & #2, it's worth ensuring that the player has really good PAL< ->NTSC conversion, (or that your TV/projector does) since it's no good being able to play foreign DVDs if they play poorly.

I can't find it, but there was a website for an asian company that catered to film buffs looking to get players to watch arty films that never get released in the USA (or anime perhaps :) They were more in the $100-200 range than the $30-$99, but they had all the mod-con features for persnickety film enthusiests, so I'd suggest searching for a place that is oriented at that market - if it's good enough for people far more demanding than me, it's good enough for me :)
posted by -harlequin- at 1:12 AM on March 17, 2005

Harlequin, add Macrovision and DRM to that list. A big "fuck you" to fair use rights such as time-shifting, excerpting for commentary or research, making a personal backup, etc.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 12:45 PM on March 17, 2005