DVD Player Displays - Not the info we need...

Most DVD players (and even the combatants in the current format war, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players) still have a little bitty display on the front of the console. The console front unfortunately isn't sufficient to navigate the DVD, as I've posted about before, but maybe we can get some use out of the face with that display. What's to be found, though, is that what's shown owes more to legacy than to actual usefulness.

Check out the photo, and this is what you're most likely to see on any DVD player display: Title, Chapter, and Hours:Minutes:Seconds of elapsed time. So, for a quick sanity check, who ever needs to know the title? And in fact, it's rare that the title's meaning is even clear, since there's no standard that "the main feature is title 1," and so on. It's the same with chapters, where a numerical indicator means little, if anything, to a normal casual user. Ultimately, these delimiters are a throwback to the tracks of CDs - which, in turn, mimic the tracks of vinyl records. Meanwhile, media on iPods, DVRs, and computer media players have moved away from numeric labels to full track/episode titles, much to users' delight. Time for disc players to catch up!

Finally, the elapsed time. Why elapsed time? It was certainly the only option, technologically, back in the age of tape players. But few people need to know how long they've been watching a movie; most only need that info to calculate how much longer it'll run. So I make a plea for "time remaining" as a default setting, or at least an available option. Even better, though, may be the ubiquitous "slider" found in media players and DVRs everywhere. Give us the whole story: time elapsed and time remaining, quantitatively and visually.

And somewhere in there, we might get around to watching a movie...