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.

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…

• About not yet found DVD easter eggs, I guess it pretty much depends on the target audience, whether there’ll be enough interested, knowledgeable people to follow through with such a method, or a bunch of dedicated button-pressers… and, as previously noted, usually, only very few people are interested in easter-eggs in the first place, even fewer bother to quest for them.

Hope this clarifies some things.

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).

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.