Media Companies Want to Control Us
321 Studios, the company that sold DVD-X Copy and DVD Copy Plus, was sued out of business. The judge ruled that it violates copyright law to make a copy of a DVD. Apparently, I don’t own the DVDs in my collection, I merely purchased a license to view them. And now that we know CDs and DVDs can rot more quickly than advertised, it’s only a matter of time before I own a collection of shiny drink coasters. And my 2-year-old son is determined to scratch and otherwise abuse “Daddy’s frisbees,” so having a backup would be nice.
Why do I have to watch commercials and introductory messages before I can watch the movie on a DVD? They’ve instructed my DVD player to block the fast-forward function so I have to watch. Ridiculous. It would be nice to rip the movie to a new disc where it can play immediately.
It would also be nice to consolidate all my music and video on one server and access them from anywhere, including a Home Theatre PC hooked up to the family TV. Once everything is encoded in OGG and DIVX, I can get rid of those awkward discs that I have to keep switching.
Neilsen just reported that the most sought-after demographic, young males ages 18-34, are watching less network television. Instead, they use cable channels, the Internet, video games, and home videos. Guess where more advertising is going to show up?
And big media companies are pretty amped about DRM. If Disney gets their way, all distribution channels will have DRM mandated by the FCC. So we can look forward to a future where little discs litter our entertainment center and force us to watch advertisements until the content that we thought we actually paid for rots away.
August 9th, 2004 at 1:53 pm
I figure it’s only a matter of time until this website takes off and you will commercialize just like everyone else. After that you will talk about how irrational and annoying all of those open source developers are…
August 11th, 2004 at 12:01 pm
I’ve been using KMediaGrab on linux to rip DVD’s to mpeg files. Seems to work pretty well, you might give it a try…
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kmediagrab/
August 14th, 2004 at 12:25 am
I agree with Joel that Media Companies are putting ridiculous restraints on us in order to milk as much money as possible. I think it’s possible to have a company that treats people fairly and conducts business honestly, and still make money doing it. Someday I hope to prove that by writing commercial software that is also open source.
August 14th, 2004 at 12:35 am
Dean, thanks for pointing me at KMediaGrab. It looks pretty cool as a frontend to mplayer/mencoder. I love mplayer. It seems to handle every file format I throw at it.
I setup a WinXP system for my Dad (hey, you do what you gotta do), and the DVD player did not come with a codec, so I tried installing VideoLAN Client (VLC). I am really impressed with VLC. It runs on all kinds of OSes. Not only does it play all the video formats, but it can be used as a server to stream video.
August 14th, 2004 at 11:34 pm
Argh! Nothing irritates me more than having to sit through previews or commercials when I pop in a DVD and see that red circle with a slash that says “You are OWNED!” I can’t imagine customers allowing the DVD hardware manufacturers and/or media companies to put more controls on your home theatre system.
Thanks for the tip on VLC! I ran into issues running a Xvid encoded AVI file on Mac OSX and had to download DivX with an Xvid decoder. It looks like VLC just might be the answer for all my codec problems!
P.S. I definitely reflect the growing trend of people watching less and less TV. Heck, I don’t even have cable! (But I do have RoadRunner!!) I just don’t watch all that much TV to justify spending $30+ a month on cable. If there is a show that I want to see (ex: Amazing Race), I’ll just download it from the BitTorrent network a day or two after the show airs. It’s almost like a public TiVo service, really. Now, what I’d LOVE to do is to get a group of people together, have one person get cable and a TiVo and then share that TiVo with a bunch of other people who can initiate certain shows to be recorded and then shared over the ‘net (VPN, etc.). I’d gladly pay someone $5-$10/month to get AVI files of a half-dozen shows or so that I can watch on my laptop. Think about it.