Collateral damage in video war

[admin]

DEAR Warner Bros. Remember me? You bought the film rights to my novel Jennifer Government, for Steve Soderbergh and George Clooney. Didn't work out, but that's OK. These things happen.

-- snip --

A few nights ago, I rented The Dark Knight on DVD. I popped the disc into my home theatre PC and snuggled up on the couch with my wife to watch it.

Only it didn't work.

-- snip --

There is new anti-piracy protection on The Dark Knight DVDs, which prevents it from playing in my PC.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/collateral-damage-in--video-war-20090110-7e0x.html?page=-1

[UncasMS]

nice article by max barry

[blutach]

Maybe nice, but it's BS. The DVD plays. The bad IFOs are never touched. He simply has a bad pressing (or 2).

But the disc was engineered so that it would purposely not work in my DVD player

That's crap. It was engineered to make copying it harder.

My copy (also region 4), plays in everything.

There's something wrong, in my opinion, when a machine I purchased, playing a DVD I purchased, tells me I'm not allowed to use the fast-forward button.

Blame the DVD Forum - they invented PUOps and regions etc etc.

Regards

[drfsupercenter]

Well, that copy protection IS a bit insane.

Though I didn't notice it when trying to watch the movie...

One complaint I have about it though, is that I think Warner Bros. purposefully made the DVD transfer look bad to promote Blu-Ray sales. Batman Begins looked amazing on DVD, and then I noticed that The Dark Knight is often fuzzy and not very good quality. Shame on them!

--EDIT--

And as for skipping the copyright warnings... it seems like some of my older DVD players can use the "next chapter" button even if there's no real chapter. So PUOs don't mean anything.
But on the computer, one nice thing about VLC and mplayer is the ability to just open a certain title. I've often put them in and run mplayer to play title 1, so the movie starts and nothing else. However, I believe mplayer can't work with an encrypted DVD, so it has to remove CSS or whatever's on it first. Which could be what they're complaining about. I'll try it and see what happens.

--EDIT 2--

Yep, as I thought.

I tried it in VLC, just opening "DVD (no menus)" in title 1... it got to 1 second and stopped. That guy isn't making it up. I'm trying it in mplayer, and it appears to just be stalling... likely the same problem as VLC, where it can't ignore the encryption.
Possibly the only programs that CAN play it are something like PowerDVD, which has its share of DRM problems itself.

[dr_ml422]

This guy Max Berry on something or what? I got a copy and it plays fine on everything I have and everyone else's hardware also. Maybe the copy he got from the video store was actually a copy if you know what I mean. They do that also you know. Maybe not the big boys but mom n pops and even some larger video stores I've had copies from. I could tell right away.

So where are you suppose to play it if not on your pc if wanting too? Just your standalone and a sony at that? I'm off here w/this. They actually so paranoid about even letting you watch a flic on a computer? So what will work? Billy Boys wmp? Gotta google this whole drm nonsense and see what it's all about. I thought it was for anti-piracy or w/e.

[drfsupercenter]

It was created for anti-piracy, but I think it directly fuels piracy (That guy did a good job summing it up!)

I tried it myself, it doesn't work in two of the programs I tried. And VLC is a great program for playing DVDs. Media Player Classic could play it, but that's only because it loaded the main IFO like a DVD player, not the title itself. (That means you have to suffer through the anti-piracy warnings!)... I suppose PowerDVD would work too since it works in a similar way.

But look at all the pirated copies of The Dark Knight out there. Do you think all this DRM is helping anyone?