Damages episode listings on Blu-ray - HOW ANNOYING!
 

I just got the first disc of Damages from Netflix the other day and was shocked at how many episodes seemed to be on it from the main menu. Turns out only four of them are on there. You can highlight the remaining episodes, it tells you the title, and lets you "start" the episode then tells you "Please insert disc X." What is the point of that?!?! Why not just include only the episodes that are on the disc on the main menu? There was also a special features section which did the same thing. I mean once you put in that disc, you will still have another main menu through which to navigate to get to any of these additional items. What was Sony's philosophy here? :hscratch:

Do other shows do this as well? Just looked at my LOST S3 set, and it doesn't seem to have that issue...

Lost doesn't have this issue because it's from a different studio.

I complained about this in the review I wrote for DVD Talk, by the way. The idea is that Sony wants the menus to be consistent across all of the discs, but my personal preference is to only see what I can access right then and there.

That sounds incredibly annoying. I hope studios don't adopt that policy.

IIRC, either Rome or Big Love did this same thing. Lame.

My Sopranos HD DVD sets have the same "feature."

I remember seeing that on some DVD sets as well, but I can't remember which ones. Another annoying thing I've seen in the past is a list of ALL of the special features (documentaries, featurettes, interviews, etc) appearing on every disc in a set, but when you select one that isn't on the current disc, it just tells you "sorry, insert disc X to watch that feature".

Damages does that as well. It also hides the commentaries and deleted scenes under the episode selection menus, so if you use "Play All", you'll never know they exist.

Weeds Season Two also did this.

Ugh. I guess that didn't happen with season one because the entire season fit on one disc. Good to know as that is on my Netflix queue.

HBO loves to do that.

I haven't seen any HBO shows do that. (Entourage, Deadwood, Rome, Extras)

wow, this does sound pretty shitty.

Okay - more to this story now. So I stopped disc 1 after trying to access the trailers. The message said "Please insert disc 3 (or continue with current disc)" so I ejected it and returned it to Netflix. When I inserted disc 2 yesterday, the SAME message came up! So the "place holder" Sony installed on the disc assumed it was the same disc. When I hit continue, the menu came up with the disc 2 content. So I GUESS that if you have a player that remembers stopping points (like my PS3), you could essentially insert the disc for which it is asking and it would start that episode or feature.

Still this just doesn't make sense to me. I wouldn't even try to navigate to Special Features if I didn't see it on the menu, and from what I've read, most BR players don't "remember" stopping points like this. Crazy. -ohbfrank-

I think the Lord of the Rings Extended editions are like that, IIRC.

Rome had a list of all the episodes and summaries on a sub-menu (somewhat useful), but it didn't have all the episodes on the main menu.

Only 4 episodes on a disc? What the hell was it, a BD-25? We get 4 per disc on SD. We should be getting more for our money with HD.

The split is 4-5-4, and all of the discs are BD-50s.

You're not getting short-changed, so I don't really get the indignation. I'd imagine that Sony couldn't fit 13 episodes on two discs while maintaining the quality they had in mind, and they thought 4-5-4 was a better split than, say, 6-6-1. I don't think 3 hours of HD material (closer to 4 on disc two) with lossless audio is anything to gripe about.

3 hours!? I've got SD movies longer than 3 hours (Storm of the Century is actually over 4), and I'm damn tired of movies that span more than 1 disc. I better not have to merge the SD-DVDs and burn them to BD myself later just to see the whole movie without swapping.

The first time I saw this was on the Sex and the City DVD sets.