Easter Eggs for Halloween
Although we’re still in theaters, we’re busy at work on the DVD for The Nines, which should hit store shelves sometime after the New Year.1 There are going to be quite a few special features on the disc, but it’s the Easter Eggs that have me blogging today.
My question for the DVD gurus out there: How hard is it to find an Easter Egg? Searching online, I can find scores of sites that list eggs, but none that talk through how to find them in the first place.
Can a clever geek simply run a program revealing the hidden files on the disc, or does one have to click buttons endlessly? I ask because I’d love to have some sort of competition for finding them — but not if someone can simply hack the disc. Your answers will change how we do it.
- Before you ask, it’s a traditional DVD, rather than a Blu-Ray. And it would be Blu-Ray, as opposed to HD-DVD, because Sony is the home video company. ↩
Articles
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:01 am
We usually run the dvd trough a computer dvd player. some software can highlight all the clickable areas, or we just run the mouse through the screen until it shows up. that’s for dvd menus.
now one could hide the egg with a “hit enter” while some extra is running and give no visual hint. Make it an unwritten rule like maybe “hit enter when you hear someone say the word nine.”
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:07 am
You can just hack the disk.
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:17 am
Yes, with a DVD ripping program like MacTheRipper you can easily rip all clips, even those without a clear access link in the DVD menu.
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:51 am
I’ve found a few before by, on a computer, right-clicking to give the option to show what destinations are available. If there are more in the list than there are obvious links to click on, then you know there’s something hidden. Then it’s just a matter of going to each menu item and trying each of the arrow keys. Usually one pops out that wasn’t where you expected it.
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:36 am
In my opinion, Easter Eggs are a waste of time, and you’ll find that consumers are generally apathetic about hidden surprises. The Memento DVD annoyed me, I want to watch the film and the extras without having to play games.
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:59 am
There are several ways to find an Easter Egg. It’s dependent on the programmer. You may have to click play, pause and fast forward at a given time during playback. For a DVD though it’s better to put the Easter eggs in the menu code.
That way you don’t distract from the film. Since Nines is the movie it is, I can see people searching for them. You can have numbers from the movie entered in the menu, or have people click pause and FF.
As far as how hard it is for someone to get to them, if they have a PC and programming SW they can disassemble the code stream and get anything. That’s how the HDCP encryption was broken. Basically, hackers won’t buy the movie just to find your Easter eggs, especially since it won’t gain them notoriety or compensation.
I’d say just go crazy and don’t worry. If you are, have your encoders set a folder that needs a key press sequence to access and decrypt. But remember, hackers can get to nearly anything. Do a search for DVD Jon. He broke nearly every form of encryption for video streams.
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:08 am
There’s a program called dvdshrink which lets you rip and copy dvd’s, once you rip a dvd, it shows every video file and special feature available on the disc, in case you want to remove any so that the picture quality is better (in most cases movies are recorded on double layer dvd’s, but people burn them on single layer dvd’s because they are cheaper, since single layer dvd’s have less space on them, you have to compress the video to fit everything). So, this program would let you see all the easter eggs I think, but it wouldn’t tell you how to find them.
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:26 am
Considering how apparently easy it is to find the files by hacking, you could still run a contest with the rule that you have to include the way to find the easter egg. That would mean that simply hacking the DVD wouldn’t work, because that would tell you how to find the easter egg.
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:37 am
One can “break” the easter eggs and find them very easily if they’re in any menu - you don’t even need to hack anything. Anyone can do it.
If you’d really like to hide it, I’d recommend putting it somewhere in another video stream (e.g. what #6 mentioned). And if you’d really like to make a contest out of it, make it a requirement to identify the moment you had to do that (people who just ripped the streams wouldn’t know where the easter egg was hidden in the first place).
I’m sure there’s a way to break even that - everything can be broken - but at that level, it should be such a small population of people savvy enough to do it that it would be fair to risk.
At least, as I understand it. I’ll leave it to the hive mind to correct me.
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:23 am
Hey, I produced a lot of DVD Xtra content for the Ghost Whisperer Season 2 DVD Box set. One of the things I pitched was throwing an easter egg on DVD one, then doing a game that involved finding a hidden code on some printed tarot cards included in the packaging that leads you to a hidden website, then back again to the DVD with how to find the easter egg.
So - DVD packaging to Web back to DVD. That was the loop and the pitch.
In terms of how much you should hide the Egg. My suggestion is not too much. If someone REALLY wants to find something and they are really good at it, than they will. But the average DVD buyer wont even look for them in the first place… and I think you want to encourage the possibility that people can accidentally stumble on them, that opens up doors.
In terms of embracing your web demos, who are more savvy. I think its more about the Journey than the technology. It’s about being creating and giving people a clever hunt and clever codes to figure out. Those guys that can hack the DVD to find the Egg in a second will still go on the hunt, because they are into that kind of thing.
There are a lot of fun things you can do with Flash these days on the web, so I recommend pointing people to those areas to find out where the Egg is on your DVD, but keeping the Egg itself simple to find. For example, I put together the site andshamethedevil.net for Ghost Whisperer… its on the show itself, I wanted a fun place where I could drop messages for people who watch the show and give them hints to the future, but I didn’t want to spell it out for them. So if you go there, and click on the star, the site breaks open and you move the pieces to see a hidden message underneath. 42 entertainment did similar things for Dark Knight and Nine Inch Nail’s Year Zero… with pixels that erase to reveal the new joker… sites that are underneath real sites, etc. Its a lot of fun.
Remember the old game Myst? The best thing about that game was, the end was staring you right in the face from the beginning… all you had to do was pick the right book on a shelf and the game was over… but you had to go on this huge puzzle filled journey to find out which book was the right one.
So what if you had a page that was a grid of numbers on your DVD? Make that page easy to find. But the key is, people have to punch in the right numbers in the right order? Then you can send them all over the place searching for the numbers! This is just one random freeflowing idea… but that’s the direction I would go.
Now for the big kicker. I would recommend, fairly soon after the DVD release, that you actually expose all the needed info on wikipedia. The real truth is about 2% of the people are purists that want to go on the hunt for themselves… about 80% don’t care, and the other 18% want to go through it and find the egg, but they want a cheat sheet… so give it to them.
Anyway, I am rambling, but I do this stuff for a living… I’m always looking for the latest way to connect the internet with TV and Film. I’m producing something in Nov, but if you have any more questions, contact me before then. I also do occasional lectures and panels on said topics at USC if you are floating around there ever these days.
stephan
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Despite being pretty tech savvy, i have a devil of a time unlocking easter eggs. Damndest thing. Breadcrumbs are always nice though.
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:34 pm
No one has mentioned it, so I thought I would. There is a site, gamewinners.com (click on DVD on the left channel box) & you can search for just about any movie that has hidden features & it will give detailed instructions on how to access all the easter eggs on the disc. Hope this helps.
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Very hackable.
The existence of software DVD players that support DVD menu navigation on a PC (e.g. WinDVD, PowerDVD, Media Player Classic, VLC, Mplayer and countless others) should be enough to understand that the code running on the DVD can be easily interpreted on a PC. In fact, standalone hardware DVD players interpret the code in a “Virtual Machine”, and the DVD programming interface (byte-)code language is very simple to reverse-engineer. There are many software utilities that do it automatically and even in visual form. Here are a few references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video – the section about the programming interface and external links http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/index.html http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/vmi.html – the command instruction set (a bit technical) http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/vmi-sum.html – quick summary of the instruction set http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/vmi-jmp.html – illustrations of simple commands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bytecode – general concept of bytecode
So yeah, a less-than-clever geek could easily map everything out. Ripping all the video content, of course, is also possible, rendering an easter-egg scouring competition ridiculous.
Easter-eggs, however, are pretty suitable for this type of film, so yeah, go with them, just dump the competition idea.
Another approach, like Stephan suggested, would be to take advantage of other technologies, like interactive “puzzle-websites”, perhaps combined with info you would learn from going through DVD easter-eggs or some hidden code/image/whatever-else-you-wanna-mess-our-heads-with in a TV commercial or, obviously, in the film itself. Stuff like this has previously been done with http://donniedarkofilm.com/ , http://requiemforadream.com/ , and a few other films/video-games.
BTW, I love how this is one of the most tech-rich non-tech-centered blogs out there.
October 4th, 2007 at 11:19 am
I authored this dvd a while back for the band The Decemberists. We put all sorts of DVD easter eggs on it, including one that has been yet to be found, and to the best of my knowledge has not posted on any messageboards as of yet.
In my case, what I did was hide a series of invisible buttons way way way outside the title safe area, and the navigation of those buttons is such in that unless you type in the correct code with your arrow keys (in my case, I used the Konami code of up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right), could you get to it. If you pressed a wrong arrow key, it would just bring you back down to the buttons that you could actually see.
On another similar dvd for a different band, we made a virtual maze of menus. You had to navigate through it just the right way in order to unlock the special content. On each of the menus, we incorporated conceptual artwork from discarded ideas for album covers, as well as unreleased/demo tracks as menu music. Every once in a while there’d be a special button that would lead to some behind-the-scenes video.
Personally, I love this type of stuff, especially since it takes hardly any time to do. The fact that people can cheat, and look up the answers on messageboards… I think that’s okay. It certainly takes the fun out of it for those people, but at least they get to enjoy all the content on there (which most people will only watch once anyways, maybe twice).
October 4th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I like that you keep updating us on The Nines, but the big issue is the strike vote. At least to working workers. How ’bout an indepth post on that issue with your thoughts? If not here, than on Craig’s blog or on the WA boards. Thanks in advance.
October 5th, 2007 at 7:44 am
Thanks for all your suggestions. I suspect we will end up doing some sort of competition, but you’ll have to tell us not only what the hidden content is, but how you access it.
October 5th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Hi again.
Previously you mentioned finding no sites that talk about HOW to locate DVD easter-eggs, and in my previous post I explained the general idea, giving the argument that it is all quite possible by analyzing the virtual code on the DVD (no “endless button pressing” required). Now, I’m by no means a “DVD guru”, but I know a thing or two about this, and it appears as though my previous post wasn’t too clear on the subject. Hence, please allow me to further elucidate.
In order to “hack the disc” and find out “how you access” all the content (i.e. cheating), software tools like the visuals editors PgcEdit(free and open-source, cross-platform: http://download.videohelp.com/r0lZ/pgcedit/ ), DvdReMake Pro (commercial program: http://www.dimadsoft.com/dvdremakepro ), or the old, discontinued, free IfoEdit ( http://www.videohelp.com/tools/IfoEdit ) can be used. The free PgcEdit, for example, can preview all menus and video content, while allowing you to debug (a simulated navigation session), forward-trace, and even backward-trace all the functions available on a DVD disc. It can also display all visual buttons; give text information on where the invisible buttons are, how to get to them, and what they all do; display in human readable form all the commands associated with the presently viewed title; tell you which remote control commands are required to get to what content (backward-trace); scan all controls that only appear after some point in the title(s); etc… Basically, this allows you to quickly understand how to access (normally, e.g. on a standalone) any and all content on the disc -> how to find easter-eggs.
Even if measures are to be taken by the DVD author in order to befuddle such fancy editors (and that has happened before), anyone familiar with the internal DVD structure (which is all well known and covered online by many sources) can derive that info manually with only a text editor at hand. So again, it is all crackable, not just the hidden content — also deriving how to access it. That is, unless you come up with a new content protection system, which ought to take some time to be broken.
For the interested, http://www.dvd-replica.com/DVD/vmcommands.php includes a guide with full coverage on the individual commands in the DVD (virtual) instruction set.
A couple of notes, to wrap things up: - There have been commercial DVDs with easter-eggs not viewable by any usual method on a standalone machine, and even some with completely unrelated, inaccessible extra video content (bad authors). Those can be ripped to a PC…
Hope this clarifies some things.
October 5th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
I am a uni student and so only have a laptop and no DVD player which makes it really annoying when easter eggs have the ‘certain remote buttons in order’ way of accessing. (My player doesn’t have arrow keys, or an enter button).
But I definitely think movies like Memento, Donnie Darko and (I imagine from the previews) The Nines warrant egg-hunting missions. It sort of comes with the genre.
October 7th, 2007 at 1:03 am
i would definitely second the idea that most of us don’t like/care/search for easter eggs. and i would be pissed if i found out there was content i’d be interested in behind an easter egg - meaning that i’d feel like i’d paid money to see the extra content, not have to go hunt for it. to me hunting for eggs is annoying as it’s basically random and utilizes what is already a pretty poor tool (menu navigation via a remote) to begin with.
October 7th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
What is it with those Easter Eggs anyway? I mean, you pay a lot of money for a DVD, but they try to hide something from you which you actually “paid for”! E.G. there’s a great Easter Egg on Depeche Mode’s One Night In Paris Live DVD… but would I know, if I didn’t look up their website? Of course not! But I paid 50 bucks for it and don’t even get to see “everything” I paid for. Okay, this is a bad example as the Easter Egg on this DVD was figured out quickly. But who knows how many DVDs I still got on my shelves with those tiny, little Easter Eggs (and these are probably a lot!).
January 10th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
John, How involved were you in the design of the DVD artwork? and for that matter, the poster.