Why do so many people care about menu support?

No, It is so that my wife can get to special features. (It's a WAF thing).

A few weeks back I watched the HBO mini-series "The Pacific."

The "default" stream played (largest) was an empty framework with nothing going on. You have to go into the (lite) menus and search among about a hundred different files to find the 2 episodes on the disc. Further, you don't know which one is the first or second episode without watching the 4 minute intro.

Finally, the "extras" (which most people usually deride as pointless for most discs) provide a lot of compelling backstory of the various battles as well as interviews of former Marines that is quite interesting.

With "lite" menus you'll not be able to see any of this extra content. You'll just see that blank framework that greeted you when you first started the playback.

The story is similar with other TV series disc sets. Menus can take the guesswork out of which episode is next.

-Suntan

I agree with doom. Most of the time a bunch of fluff I am not interested in. I can think of ten items on my boxee that are more important to me. Another is the nfo support. I have a very minor interest in cover art or movie info. I want the movie to stream flawlessly. I think as often in life people want what they don't have or used to have with something else.

I don't understand the "having to search for the episodes" dilemma. I rip to mkv and only the main episodes are ripped. Give me the stuff, if I want to save any extras...those can be saved to mkv as well.

I normally want the main movie file but I like chapters and subtitles. Only on some Blu-ray movies do I want to see the full menu to check out th extras.

I guess everyone is different... some people want HD Audio downmix/bitstream, some people want Blu-Ray ISO with Full Menu... Some people want Cover Art, Some people want Gigabit Ethernet, some want internal HDD support... some want VOD/Netflix. some people want Sigma Chipset and some Want RealTek...etc...

Different people want different things and not everyone wants the same things- whatever floats their boat... because at the end of the day... we work hard for our money and if we want something we pay for it and it better do what it says it does...

Thats the same exact reason why the "perfect" media player has not been produced yet , and never will be :-)

Personally, I rip to ISO because I never want to access the physical disc again, and I want to be sure that I can access all content at all times, if I want to.

Besides, some of the extra material cannot be ripped by any of the rippers I've seen. Picture slideshows, for example. The "Follow the rabbit" feature on the Matrix DVDs and picture in picture features on Blu-ray are other examples. (although, it should be possible to create an mkv with both tha main and pip video-track, but I don't know of any players that supports pip). I have also been unsuccessful in my attempts to rip the MST3000-style video commentary subtitles from the Ghostbusters DVD, but maybe other rippers will be able to do it.

Many DVDs and blu-rays also use seamless branching to include multiple versions of a movie on one disc. This can be recreated with ordered chapters in mkv, but I don't know of any HW-players that supports the branching. Some windows software players support it, but it isn't always that seamless. The easy solution to this is to just rip the movie multiple times, and waste a little bit of disc space. Disc is cheap anyway, so this will usually be a "good enough" solution.

I also think the menus themselves are worth keeping in many instances. Properly designed menus set the mood for the movie, and they organize the extra material in a logical order. The appendices from the LOTR Extended Editions are examples of well designed DVD menus that's definately worth keeping.

I rip different discs in different ways depending on what I want. I'd say that for most of my movie DVDs (probably 90%+) I rip in ISO but without menus - just the main movie with only the one sound track that I want.

But for certain DVDs I rip the full disc into an ISO with menus and all. I do this for all my wife's workout DVD's because she uses the menu structure to pick what she wants and that's just the way that it's gonna be (definitely a WAF factor) regardless of whether I could give her the same options in a different way. So for this, I just chose the path of least resistance!

I have several music documentary type DVDs and several concert DVDs as well. I find that ripping the full disc with menu support is the easiest choice for me on these as well.

But again - for normal movies I generally just want the main feature and the one audio track so for 90+% of my movies I don't bother with menus.

As has been mentioned, people want what they want and often it doesn't matter whether they really need it or not. For me, menu support is only needed for series disks with multiple episodes. For single title disks, a.k.a. movies, I'll rip the main title to a single file for instant movie playback. But for series disks, I don't want to be bothered with having to rip individual episodes and identifying which is which. This is all too time-consuming, especially for BD (I can rip multiple episodes from DVD with Shrink, but I have to rip one at a time from BD with DVD Fab). My players have DVD menu support which allows me to just rip the whole series disk to an .iso and play it back, selecting an episode from the menu. They even remember where I left off and highlight the next episode. Because my players do DVD menus but not BD menus, I don't even bother getting series disks in BluRay.

I had an interest in the Neo NTV550 when it came out because of it's BD menu capability, but there are too many clouds over that box to make a purchase in the near future.

+1

I rip all my BDs to the ISO format . Plus using the My Movies Add In, all I need to do is put the disc in the BD rom drive and my WHS does the rest. I don't want to mess with having to select the movie and content I want. Which, unfortunately, is what I will have to do with my HD DVDs since no media player will play HD DVD ISOs.

I'm in to untouched 3D Blu-rays, thats why I get the ISO's and keep the menus. If I need a 2D only version, then I use tsMuxer. With tsMuxer I can rip out and make my own Main movie blu-ray ISO. I tried MakeMKV on Mac OS X. I dont like it.

As of now, Anydvd HD nor DVDFab Bluray will not take a 3D Blu-ray and remux it for you into a main3D movie Blu-ray ISO. I soo am waiting for that feature.

I moved on from DVDs years ago.

The DVD folder structure is pretty simple compared to BR.

Maybe when/if you graduate to BRs you will feel differently.

-Suntan

For me.. I very very rarely care about extras, and do think starting the feature right off is better.

Their is an occasion I do want to see extras, I rip the ISO. Otherwise MKV or AVI is perfectly fine for me.

weird i just found this topic, but i would like to chime in. I originally was going to buy the netgear ntv550 but wound up going out and buying a wdtv live hub. when i was looking at streams I was excited to see blu-ray menu support. It's weird I thought about it and it came down to on my media server I really going to use that much space for a movie, close 50gb for a blu-ray. Most of my blu-ray movies when ripped are anywhere between 10-25gb. And if you want the extras you do have the disk.

I feel like its amount of movies or features. Also how often you you really watch the extras?

may people have different preferences.... I initially didn't care either.... but as storage gets cheaper per GB... I'm starting to consider it...

I have too, but I would most likely wait till full menu support. Though I think I might be a few years off from full rips on there.

Storage -- as in the HDD drives themselves -- may be getting cheaper, but the NAS units you put them in are not. At $80 for a 2TB Seagate HDD, a 4-bay NAS unit can cost more than the 4 drives needed to fill it. So I share the sentiments of conserving space and only save the main_title.m2ts with a single HD-audio track and a single subtitle track.

As you say, each to his own. The flexibility to do as one wants makes this all worth it to so many.

Many of the enclosures are only a few dollars more than a 2TB drive. The last few 4 bay enclosures I purchased were only around $75 which I have attached to my unRAID setup. The seven attached to my WHS were around a hundred. But they are still much cheaper than the eighty terabytes I have setup for storage in my WHS and unRAID systems.

I do rip an ISO of the entire BD. But there are two reasons for it. One I want to have the option of accessing the the titles as if it were a disc to see special features etc. and also some titles have problems in simple BD mode, so you need to watch them with full BD menu navigation.

And I don't want to spend the time deciding what I want to rip from each title. Since the proces is automatic with my WHS I like just sticking the disc in and having to do nothing else. When the WHS is finished the Disc is ejected and the BD ISO is ready for viewing. And the folder is automatically populated with cover art, fan art, etc.

It is possible to build the server yourself and might be cheaper for the server it's self.

I currently have linux server with about 3tb of storage space now, and i just bought another 2tb hdd to add into it.

The build itself cost about 200.00 then plus hdds as time goes on. The key is to remember that you are only building a server not a gaming computer. so you don't need a quadcore processor or 8gb of ram. If you have an older computer in the house you can turn it into a server.

I know it's about menu accessibility on the streamers, but the server factors into it at least for the space/content ratio.

If i find the link i used to help set up my server i will post it.