I bought Ken Burns’ The Civil War on DVD recently (found it cheaper than on Amazon). Tonight I decided I’d listen to that instead of music while working. Then I was reminded why I hate DVDs so much. I don’t even know how much crap there is we’re supposed to be forced to sit through at the beginning of those disks. After having a small fit of button pushing to no avail, I quit Apple’s DVD player and opened VLC and the movie popped right to the beginning, no crap, no waiting.

I haven’t seen the film in years, it really is a masterpiece.

Update: VLC is good, but it’s a little buggy and a huge processor hog. It was using more than 65% of the processor by itself, making the laptop very hot, other applications sluggish, causing all the fans to turn on and making my hands sweaty. A quick Google search turned up this patch for Apple’s DVD player which overrides all those asinine ‘action prohibited’ messages on DVDs. I installed it and it seems to work perfectly. Now I just need something like that for the DVD player connected to the TV.