A few years ago, I inherited a DVD player from departing drinking buddy Crazy Chris. I'd never had cause to try and use it, since I had a number of other DVD-capable devices (most of those also legacies from friends who'd quit Beijing). But, over the last few months, all of those other options have started biting the dust - either dying completely, becoming maddeningly glitchy and imperiously selective over which DVDs they will deign to play, or having their remote control units expire (which usually leaves you with no commands other than 'pause' and 'play' on the machine itself). So, I have finally been forced to give Crazy Chris's machine a whirl.
I might have known what to expect. Crazy Chris would buy the cheapest piece of locally manufactured crap he could find (and then wouldn't use it much anyway, since he liked to go out pretty much every night).
So, even by the standards of cheap, useless, nonsensically designed Chinese electronic products... this machine was conspicuously BAD. Somewhere beyond bad. Quite gobsmackingly awful.
The main problem was the remote, which was much the most unnecessarily complicated device of its kind I have ever seen. It had nearly 60 buttons on it! None of them bore the internationally recognised symbols for basic functions like 'pause', 'play', 'fast forward', or 'skip to next chapter'. Many of them were not labelled at all. And even where there were labels, they were in such tiny script that Chinese friends struggled to decipher them (or failed altogether: some of the Chinese words chosen were, apparently, not at all self-explanatory of the supposed function).
I managed to figure out 'play' and 'pause' and one or two other basic functions (but not 'fast forward' or 'skip to next chapter'). But the buttons which Chinese friends had assured me ought to be soundtrack and subtitle selection proved gallingly dysfunctional.
Even worse, several of the buttons led to a scrolling sequence of menu screens - from which one could not escape!! Whenever you have a function button like this that leads into a set of menus, repeated pressing of the same button ought eventually to take you back to the screen you were on previously - or to the movie you were in the middle of watching. But not with this little bastard! There was not even (as far as I was able to discover) a 'master button' that would take you back to the movie from any menu screen (with most machines of this kind, the 'play' button will do this - but not with this little bastard!). Thus, inadvertently pressing any one of about 40 of the remote's 56 buttons would leave me mired in limbo, and having to restart the movie from the beginning (because I was not able to access any 'skip chapter' or 'select scene' functions).
Even worse (how could it be worse?).... many of these booby-trap buttons returned you to the default screen. With most devices of this kind I've used here, the default screen has been blank - a restful light blue or violet, perhaps - with just the manufacturer's name or logo on it. But this infuriating little bastard device had a default screen with a tubby middle-aged Chinese guy in a traditional tunic staring out at me with a stiffly simpering smile. I soon grew to HATE that constipated grin - as it confronted me mockingly time after time when I found myself trapped on the default screen with no apparent way of getting back to my movie.
I've been staying in for most of the last week because of ill health, trying every evening to watch a DVD or two.... and having a very hard time of it.
Last night, my patience cracked. I threw the dratted remote control unit at the floor... so hard that it bounced up almost to the ceiling. Remarkably, it didn't break; not completely, anyway. So, I threw it at the floor again, even harder. This time, it broke into assorted shards.
And that felt so satisfying that I repeated the process with the DVD player itself. God, that felt good. I just wish I had a baseball bat, so I could have finished the job properly.
Of course, now I need to get myself a new DVD player.... I must take care to avoid the... er... [takes a moment to sort through the trash] it appears to be a brand called KD DASL (????).
4 comments:
How much I would have loved to have seen this for myself; a bit like the Chinese tat reviews on YouTube. And not forgetting the destroying malevolent hardware videos on YouTube too!
It should be absolutely standard for any UI that if you're cycling through a succession of screens or options, you should eventually loop back to your entry point. But it's amazingly common with Chinese consumer electronics to ignore this principle. I had quite a few moments of remote rage myself.
I feel your pain, man. Hope the catharsis was worth a couple hundred kuai.
They really have a 'destroying malevolent hardware' genre on YouTube, John?? How have I missed that for so long?! (Must resist the temptation to check now. Will get sucked in for... HOURS... )
Is this another quirk of Chinese 'anti-logic', Gary? Now I come to think of it, I grown to accept the necessity of switching off my air-conditioner by ripping the plug out of the wall because the main function button on the remote control unit cycles Off - Full Power - Half Power - Full Power - Half Power. There appears to be no switch for moving from 'On' to 'Off'!!! It certainly isn't the same one that moves it from 'Off' to 'On'. Why, oh why???
I do remember that little fat man with the "F$%^ you Round eye" smirk. But funny enough, I at first had the same problem til one of my students came by. She was kind enough to decifer exactly one button for me.
While it didn't really say what the button was for, this button opened a menu, which after a few minutes of her figuring out what the hell the menu and sub menus were for, she said "Oh, here." and voila, all the on screen menus became at least Chinglish. One more little f&^% from the fat man.
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