Is Warner they just offering a “legal” alternative that of course nobody will want?  Just to be on record as having one, so consciences will be assuaged as they try to crackdown on all the people who do the sensible thing at home?

If I want to take my VHS cassettes and encode them to DVDs or BluRays, that should be my right. If I have a delicate, brittle, old copy of a book and am worried about it eventually falling apart, I should be allowed to scan the pages into an OCR program and make my own e-book.

The DVD standard is especially stupid because the region coding. If you purchase a legitimate copy of a DVD from another region (often at inflated prices) how does the movie studio miss out on the royalties from your purchase? What if you would like a disc with a non-French or non-Spanish language subtitle track for your grandmother or friend? Oh wait!  This disc is from another region. I guess I will do without… or I will rip the disc I paid for. That certainly sounds like a hassle and isn’t ripping a DVD technically illegal? Screw it. I’ll just download it illegally.

The iTunes TOS in the US explicitly states that Apple can deactivate your libraries if you attempt to use them outside of North America. From my experience, they have never deactivated my legally purchased albums and videos, BUT the threat really irritates me. 

If I want to watch a variety show that airs in Japan that will likely NEVER be released on DVD and is currently unavailable for legal international viewing, where do I go? Wouldn’t it just be smarter if the company licensed the show to a website that detects your IP Address and after determining your geographical location shows you advertising from your region? No, lets just insist the potential audience member does without.

If I want to see a movie I vaguely remember watching on TV when I was 5 years-old (Let’s say, for example, the animated version of Brian Froud’s Faeries that aired on CBS in the early 80s) but have never seen available on VHS, DVD, or BluRay. I would gladly watch it with commercials on Hulu or Netflix. For some reason, the rights-holders refuse to make it available.

What if I am a person who purchased an imitation version of Showbiz Pizza’s “Rock-afire Explosion” from a closing Pizza/Arcade and had no way of getting show performance cassettes from the maker because the company closed in the mid-to-late 80s and because internet searches for the animatronics show tapes brought up nothing? If someone offers me access to the tapes through shady means and a buddy wants to replace the original Apple II computer with a Linux machine with Ardunio crossovers it should be my right to do this.

Why is new merchandise and new formats exempt from these rules? If I want to convert my HD-DVDs to BluRay (perhaps at a loss in visual quality) why should it matter to the studios? The studios won’t refund my money for content such as games, music CD-ROMS, and proprietary movie formats that no longer support modern PCs. If I rip the content or emulate the hardware, I should be permitted.

It is the content industry’s obligation to find a way to offer their content to anybody willing to consume at a fair price. If I already bought your content, I shouldn’t be obliged to pay extra for a copy of it.

Should we laugh our heads off now?

Most of these get played back on a TV via HDMI from a laptop, so the resolution and clarity are never really an issue.  I could just keep the DVD iso, but that’s usually around 5 gigs.  Doing this usually places it around 1.

Converting a DVD to H.264/MKV with MeGUI and a custom Avisynth script goes at about a 1:4 rate for me on a 3.3Ghz Core 2 Duo machine.

But I also am applying a deinterlace, decimate, and temporal smoother filter in the avisynth script.  Of course if I took all those out it’d be much faster, and my files would be 20% larger as well.  So tradeoffs I guess.

A tiered range of release products, ranging from a low-resolution 360px MP4 (to watch on a phone or iPod), to a full boxed DVD set with accompanying blooper reels, booklet and commemorative gewgaws, would be absolutely marvelous. Actually, given Big Media’s fixation on mass production, it’d be more than marvelous. It’d be a goddamn miracle.

Also, given how obsessed the companies are with attempting to lock you in to their individual systems, being able to purchase what you wanted through an impartial single-point-of-purchase would raise such a situation to the status of Proof Of A Loving God.

I once bought a DVD that had a song on it I liked. But I didn’t want to play the DVD every time I wanted to hear that song, so I bought the CD which also happened to contain a dozen more songs I didn’t like, which cost me as much as the DVD. Then I wanted to play the song on my MP3 player, but it wasn’t available anywhere as an MP3, so I had to purchase an iPod and a copy of the song as an MP4. Then I wanted to put a few seconds of the song on my phone as a ring tone, and they were kind enough to sell me that few seconds for about half the price of the CD. Now I’m thinking about wanting a copy of the movie on my iPhone, and they want me to go to a special store, wait in line, and charge me for that.

The story as it is always going to be:

I borrowed the DVD from the public library, ripped a copy, watched it with the record executive’s daughter and then we did the horizontal hula.

Bumkis really given if they ran a steam-like service with as few hurdles as possible once your account is set up and verified we’d be lined up out around the block.

Anything else is illogical from their perspective.

What I don’t understand is this great reluctance to offering the most convenience to their customers.  iTunes did it and we all know how that turned out.

People only copy, rip, steal when the alternative is too expensive or too much effort.

The only public DIY machine I think that doesn’t have a failure rate of 70% is the slurpee machines.