DVD players can already play various types of video and audio file and JPEGs, and display disc directories. It would be trivial to extend this to the display of ASCII text files, since it would surely only involve a combination of the facility to display the text in the directories and read the files themselves. This would be a useful facility for including prodigious amounts of text on a DVD, including copious notes on the music, film or TV programme on the media, scripts, lyrics, or eve plain text books. In fact, it might even be feasible to provide HTML and hence illustrations, or allow the display of images as a menu-driven option if that was excessively complicated.
I can't imagine how it could possibly be difficult to do, and there must be space for the text of thousands of books on a DVD.
-- nineteenthly, May 18 2005

DVD Subtitles http://www.joeclark...d/finer-points.html
Scroll down to Captions, subtitles, and subpictures [Worldgineer, May 19 2005]

I've got lot's of dvds that have film maker's notes on them.
-- MikeOliver, May 18 2005


Great idea... It would be even better if it had some sort of text-to-speech software that read the content in the voice of William Shatner or James Earl Jones.
-- justaguy, May 18 2005


(-) can't stand reading large amounts of text off a screen.
-- moomintroll, May 18 2005


Perhaps an illustrated audio book?
-- Worldgineer, May 18 2005


I thought about text-to-speech, but it's a little sophisticated. I wouldn't want creeping featurism. Thanks for the link though: i found that a while ago and lost it again. I'm very "glad" you've reminded me of it [ack].
It's perfectly feasible to store images of text, certainly, which i've seen on DVDs. [moomintroll], isn't that what you're doing now? This place is very texty indeed.
-- nineteenthly, May 18 2005


You could probably manage easily enough to create these text-display DVD's to be effectively navigable by the run-of-the-mill DVD player. You could also have a selectable font size probably just by having several versions on one DVD. Thinking more in terms of a single book, a whole bunch of different versions of a pure text book would fit on a DVD, maybe even if they're graphic representations of text. You could even throw in some low-res illustrations.

Now, keeping those thoughts in mind, consider the market among the visually impaired who like to read.

There are a lot of DVD players out there. They're a dime a dozen nowadays. No special expensive equipment required. Could be a big untapped market you've tapped into here.

Caveat: I seldom know what I'm talking about.
-- half, May 18 2005


Great idea, [half]. DVD subtitles are actually fullscreen bitmap images that are then heavily compressed (see link). It should be easy to make huge fonts for the visually impaired.
-- Worldgineer, May 19 2005



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