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My Troubles with the Double-Sided DVD

Regular readers will disagree, but I’d like to think that I’m not entirely without technical acumen. I’ve been known on occasion to correctly use the term ‘stateless session bean’, and recently reformatted my hard drive without losing any of ABBA’s greatest hits on MP3.

However, I recently purchased seasons 1 and 2 of The West Wing on DVD. They’re the first double-sided DVDs I’ve ever own. Episodes 1 through 4 are on one side, episodes 5 through 8 on the other and so on. The label for the disk is printed in tiny writing around the inner circle.

When I pulled out the first DVD and squinted at the label, I was confronted with a conundrum:

  • Do I play this like a record or CD, with the side I want to play facing the ‘needle’?
  • Do I play this like a record, with the side I want to play facing up?
  • Do I play this like a CD, with the side I want to play facing down?

Two of those are the same result, but all three are possible criteria. As it turns out, you play the side with the applicable label. If you want to play episodes 1-4, you should be able to read episodes 1-4 on the top of the disc as it sits in the DVD tray. Of course, my DVD player sits on top of my TV, so it’s above my head, complicating the problem.

This is a new problem–one we haven’t really had to face since the record album. Maybe it’s only a problem to people old enough to have played records regularly (hipsters and DJs aside, I suppose). Maybe I’ve got no technical acumen after all. Regardless, it’s the little things like this that irk the average citizen. Technology so often kills us with a thousand cuts.

This entry was posted in:Technology
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Published by dbarefoot

Darren Barefoot is an author, speaker and digital strategist. He’s the co-founder of Capulet Communications, and co-author of “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”.

8 comments

  1. I have numerous DVDs that are double-sided, mostly with “widescreen” on one side and “fullscreen” (talk about a misnomer there) on the other. I like that the full capacity of the discs are used this way rather than sold as separate versions.

    I dunno, I just always put the disc in with the description I want facing up. I don’t think it’s ever been much of a conundrum.

  2. Don’t you find the same problem with one sided DVDs too – which side goes up with them? 🙂

    I do get what you’re talking about. The bizarreness of having shiny medium showing on both sides struck me as odd the first time I saw it too.

  3. What Rog said. I despise having to check a DVD’s box to make sure it’s widescreen and has English subtitles (or captions, or whatever – I know there’s a difference, but I don’t care, all I want to know is that I can expect what the actors are saying to appear in a little text box at the bottom). I’ve not bought movies before because all that was available was the fullscreen version. I’m not even entirely sure why Hollywood does this. The majority of the cost of a DVD at retail has to be the money involved in shipping the box around, and it’s just as easy to make two DVDs fit into that box as one, so if there’s too much “stuff” to make everything fit onto one DVD and you don’t want to offend Darren 🙂 and go double-sided, just make it two discs.

    Oh well.

  4. Am I to understand that Darren, a Canadian, doesn’t own the Anne of Green Gables dvd? Perhaps the Canadian edition is single-sided?

  5. Everyone I know is Canadian, and I’m from the East Coast myself, and I don’t know anyone who has the Anne of Green Gables DVD 🙂

  6. I always get confused by that too.
    The disc says something like, well – my copy of Napolean Dynamite says:
    Side A: Full Screen
    Side B: (Flipside) WideScreen

    So, do I put the side I’m not looking at down in the disc player for Widescreen, or do I flip it over for Widescreen? Am I looking at Side A, so I should flip it over, since the content is on the top? Or is the text a label (like on a cd) so i put it in face up, with the content on the back?

    Way to simple for me. I can never remember – it’s always trial and error. Also ,why is “WideScreen” one word, and “Full Screen” two words? Hmmm…

  7. they’re releasing some CDs with DVDs on the other side now too…imagine being in the car and putting the wrong side in while driving around, then you gotta flip the thing over, and the discs get really scratched up…nightmare. And of course, similar to Copy Control, some CDs won’t work in some players and it’ll apply to DVDs too…putting the media on both sides is not giving you product on as much of a quality disc.

    It baffles me how the media industry shoots themselves in their own feet constantly…aren’t they out of room for bullets yet?

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