Fun thing I discovered: A lot of DVDs check which region the player is from and play a different warning at the beginning. VHS is analog and linear so that FBI warning is just baked into the video but DVDs can shuffle video on the fly. Fun fact: That’s how they got the theatrical edition and the extended edition on one side of one DVD, if you play the standard edition it just skips the added scenes on the fly.
Way back when I still lived at home, my family had a little game, someone would put in a movie and the first one to guess which movie it was “won.” I could often do it from the previews. DVDs spoiled this with their menus. Well, most of them did. Some of them do just start playing the film (or start at the previews).
I recently ripped my whole DVD collection to my NAS because, well, optical drives are going extinct. And I noticed some patterns. DVDs of contemporary movies from early in the format’s history were often special events. They had specially designed one-off packaging, lots of extra features, extravagant menus, etc. As you went later in the format’s run, packaging became standardized, and especially older pre-DVD movies that were being re-issued on DVD would often just auto-play the movie when inserted. They often had menus that had no animation or music so you could chapter select or toggle the subtitles on but you’d have to stop the movie to see them. Also, TV shows on disc suffered way more from disc rot than movies, I’m guessing the discs themselves were cheaper/worse.
Minor suggestion: Do it in winter. Transcoding video like that is a CPU intensive workload, if you’re going to pump that much heat out of your PC case you might as well want it.
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