February 09, 2006
You Wouldn't Steal a Movie
So I sit down to watch a DVD. A DVD that I purchased legally from a completely legal DVD store in the middle of town. Regardless of this fact, I’m still forced to sit through the “anti-piracy” promo at the beginning of the disc.
And by forced, I mean I’m quite literally not permitted to skip it if I want to watch the movie. Thanks to the User Operation Prohibition requirements of the DVD Digital Rights Management system, the DVD consortium prohibits my DVD player from skipping this patronising advertisement no matter how many times I’ve seen it before.
At this point in my train of thought, the following appears on the screen:
And I’m thinking: “Yes, I would. I’d steal it in a second if the stolen version allowed me to fast-forward past the fucking adverts.”
Posted to personal at February 9, 2006 11:43 AMYou need to get your Mac chipped.
Some DVDs have forced me to watch trailers for other movies. Idiot distributers.
Posted by: Alan Green at February 9, 2006 12:20 PM (#link)Apparently VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) doesn't bother to support UOP, or regions. Unfortunately, it can be a bit slow because it does all the decryption itself.
Posted by: Carey Evans at February 9, 2006 01:44 PM (#link)VLC: enthusiastically seconded. The increased CPU usage due to decryption overhead is way, way more than compensated for by the fact that VLC actually does what you tell it to rather than what the twerpy standard requires.
Posted by: Ben Zanin at February 9, 2006 05:31 PM (#link)Luckily the skip protection for the anti-piracy and ad crap in some DVD's still allows fast-forwarding. I'm lucky to have 127xFF in my player and skipping the unwanted content doesn't usually take more than a couple seconds. :)
Posted by: Sulka Haro at February 10, 2006 02:32 AM (#link)Hoo-motherfucking-ray to that. The Disney DVDs are terrible for putting ten trailers before the film on each DVD, which are only skippable on a one-at-a-time basis. What a waste of time.
Posted by: Phil Wilson at February 10, 2006 08:41 AM (#link)The fact that the trailers before the film are getting ridiculous is enough reason to complain, but adding these stupid anti-piracy commercials before the movies is insulting. Imagine if Web sites put a anti-piracy trailer before you could visit the site. No one would stick around. It's almost getting to that point with movies. I say spend some of the money they used to create and distribute this stupid warning and actually create a movie worth watching.
Posted by: Josh at February 13, 2006 04:42 AM (#link)You need to get your Mac doorstopped. Or, just wait until it turns itself into a doorstop, after around 3 years.
Apple makes great little music boxes and that's it. If you need to work with media, better get a PC.