I would really like a better DVD player for Christmas. Something with these features:
- Skip all the cruft and just play the movie.
- Remember your place in the last 20 DVDs you have watched.
- Automatically enable subtitles on every movie
I'm really surprised that no DVD manufacturer has incorporated any of these features as far as I can tell.
Just play it!
The ability to skip all the junk and just play the movie seems stupidly obvious to me. I get really sick of having to fast forward through everything at the start of the disc. I've seen a lot of people post about tricks that work with their DVD player (notably stop-stop-play), but nothing like that seems to work with mine.
It seems like the kind of feature that shouldn't need obscure button presses to get to work. It should just be a setting that can be enabled.
Remember my place!
We often get half way through a movie and decide to finish it the next night. If the DVD player is undisturbed, this usually goes quite well. However, if the kids put something in the next day, the DVD player forgets our place in the movie we were watching. I'd like it to remember the place in more than just the current disc.
My TiVo has been doing this for TV shows for years. I can start tons of them at once and come back and continue watching any of them from where I left off. It seems like a feature that would be trivial to add to DVD players as well.
Turn on the subtitles!
Because of my wife's hearing loss, we typically watch everything with subtitles on. With TV, it is a setting that can be set once. With DVDs, it has to be set for each disc. Luckily our remote has a button that makes it easy.
Even better would be a player that automatically knows to turn the subtitles on for us for each and every movie without any intervention.
