Above is a picture of a DVD player I saw on sale in Dick Smith Electronics [1] (a chain store that used to sell mostly electronics hobbyist gear but now mostly sells consumer electronics gear). I asked one of the staff why it said “root”, tests revealed that the DVD caused any player to display “root” once it was inserted. The DVD in question was from the $2 box (the DVDs that didn’t sell well at other stores) and for some reason had the string “root” in it’s title (or some other field that gets picked up by the player).
I wonder if an ex-employee of a movie company is laughing about millions of DVD players all around the world saying “root”.
Update: I’ve been told by private mail that “It means it’s displaying the “root” menu. (As opposed to the title menu or any submenu’s)” and “most just display ‘menu’ or similar“. So apparently every time my DVD player says “menu” the new ones from Dick Smith will say “root” (I have yet to test this theory).
The DVD format has a feature called the root menu. It’s the menu that shows up after you’ve been forced to watch all the FBI warning bollocks. You can get to it by pressing the “menu” button on the remote.
Nothing sinister.
Also, if you mean they are laughing because “root” means copulate, I think that is Australian slang. Certainly almost no Americans are aware of the non-plant-ish meaning.
This is quite common for a lot of DVD players. I have a Sansui and Panasonic DVD players that does the same.
Timon: No, I mean laughing because of the “super-user” meaning of “root”, which may be used to indicate 0wning a machine.
Also, it says “r00t” because it is cheap: saying “menu” would require more than this simple 8888 Display is capable of.
I don’t see any strange stuff here: almost all of the DVD players I’ve ever seen uses this notion, including my DVD player. Also my native language is Hungarian, and using English for me means somewhat ‘technical’ side of the world for me. The world “root” always reminds me “root directory”, “root filesystem”, “root menu”, etc first. Maybe many non-English/non-US DVD player vendor uses English as non-native language as well. Also as far as I know “root menu” is a standard notion from DVD specification … Well, sorry for my poor English here :)