We start with copyright news as we usually do, and we start with a quite unusual story, one that I still don’t really know what to make of.

PC gaming piracy is a big problem, I think everyone can at least acknowledge this fact (whether ever more intrusive DRM is the solution to the problem, I think, is where the debate is at the moment), but if the goal of anti-piracy is to increase revenue, and intrusive DRM doesn’t seem to be producing, why not try something else?

A sample result from the Vigilant Defender questionnaire, which shows that DRM not only does not really help encourage pirates to buy games, it may even drive them to pirate in the first place

Except, I probably wouldn’t try what startup anti-piracy firm, Vigilant Defender, has tried – to actually help the spread of pirated content. Yes, you heard right, the first step in Vigilant Defender’s experiment is to actually help seed a leaked beta version of the hit game, Deus Ex Human Revolution. The second step is slightly tricky, as the version of the beta they seeded was slightly modified to drop out of the game after the first few levels, and direct users to an online questionnaire, in which they were asked questions about why they decided to pirate the game. While data collection is essential to solving the piracy problem, especially given the industry’s often biased “research” on the matter, the key question asked of gamers was “what would you be willing to pay for this game”. Not only will the answer to this particular question prove useful in finding out just why people pirate, and what price point can influence the same people to go legit, Vigilant took this one step further and proceeded to offer downloaders the opportunity to buy the full game at a price determined by average answer to this particular question. And amazingly, 8% of all those who downloaded the modified leaked beta actually went on to buy the game, at the user voted average price of $24.99 (half of the retail price) and that’s actually quite a high rate of return for games, especially when the target demographic is often described by the industry as “criminals” and “freeloaders”.

In my opinion, what Vigilant Defender tried to do was very clever, even if they went about it perhaps in too much of a roundabout way. What they’re actually advocating is a system where users vote for the price they want to play, and where pirated versions of games actually become demos of sorts. The gaming industry may not want to believe it, but a lot of gamers do use pirated games as an extended demo, and many, I’m not saying all (or even anything close to a majority), to end up buying the full version if they like the game. Game publishers, on the other than, would rather prefer people buy games they don’t like by making sure they can’t test it fully before they buy it, and perhaps that’s how it used to work before Internet piracy became ubiquitous, this kind of business model no longer works. But on the other hand, by offering downloaders cheaper version of games, it’s perhaps encouraging downloads, and this kind of distribution model would be a hard sell for game publishers. But there’s definitely something here, and perhaps a little bit of tweaking could bring us a new distribution model that takes advantage of P2P networks such as BitTorrent to not only distribute the games, but to promote them. Imagine if games came with a thin layer of unobtrusive DRM that simply nagged users to buy the game from time to time, a DRM so not annoying that release groups don’t even bother to have it (so it remains in the pirated versions floating around the net). Users would then be given an offer to “upgrade” their pirated version to the full legit version for a discounted price, but the caveat is that their save games/profiles would no longer be compatible with the full version unless they pay the full price, or some kind of incentive that still makes buying games at full price an attractive proposition. And if you want pirates to help you sell games, then let them join some kind of commission based affiliate program, where for each downloader that “upgrades”, the seeder would get a small commission for their “help”.

The even easier alternative is to lower game prices and improve services for legitimate customers, so that piracy becomes more trouble than its worth.

For Vigilant Defender though, they have a slight problem on their hands at the moment since this Deux Ex experiment was not actually approved by the publishers of the game, Square Enix, which could land the anti-piracy company in a bit of bother with anti-piracy laws.

Bad news for Australians lately on the copyright front. Only a couple of weeks ago, we got our first taste of mass copyright lawsuits, and this week, our government signalled changes to our existing copyright law which would make it even easier for mass copyright lawsuits to happen. Namely, the Attorney-General wants to make it easier for rights holders (or agents of them) to match IP addresses to real identifies, by “streamlining” the legal process. In other words, due process has to go out the window to make Hollywood and the RIAA happy. Even the idea of a ‘graduated response’ system was mentioned, at a conference sponsored by the copyright lobby, of course. Still, there were some other proposed changes that were positive, such as extending “safe harbour” to protect more types of Internet businesses, rather than just ISPs – search engines like Google and Bing will benefit the most with this proposed change. But as long as politicians still continue to believe that a single IP address is evidence enough of a “crime”, and that the “crime” itself is costing the creative industries insane amounts of money and jobs, then politicians will always be on the side of the copyright lobby, made more likely by the uneven spreading around of lobbying cash from both sides of the issue.

In HD/3D news, this week could prove an important one for advocates of managed copy, who want legal alternatives to “ripping”. UltraViolet has been talked about quite a lot, and this week, we finally get our first taste of this “in the cloud” based managed copy system. Unfortunately, the taste is not quite palatable.

UltraViolet from Warner Bros. is being distributed via Flixster, and it isn't a very convenient user experience

Warner Bros. released Horrible Bosses and Green Lantern with UltraViolet digital copy included, but the way Warner has decided to deploy UltraViolet is the biggest problem at the moment. The current WB process requires users to enter in a 12-digit redemption code online, which in itself is annoying, and then users will have to sign up to Flixster, and then install the Flixster app on the device they wish to view the UltraViolet copy. And it’s all wrapped up in various layers of DRM, as you would expect.

And as WB owns Flixster, and to add to the problem, when other studios release their version of UltraViolet, they will use their own distribution network. So right now, if you asked me on which devices an UltraViolet digital copy works on, I can’t tell you, because it will depend on each studio, and this is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. For UltraViolet to be viable, I think it really has to either tie in with iTunes, NetFlix, Amazon or one of the existing players in video distribution, or all the studios have to come together and come up with a single distribution method, with all of the major devices supported (the iDevices, Android system, game consoles and Blu-ray players, at least). And then, streamline the process so it’s as simple as scanning a QR code, or just a matter of inserting the UltraViolet Blu-ray or DVD into a UV compatible player – none of this 12 digit code nonsense, or having to figure out each studio’s UltraViolet system and having to have an account for each.

A two parter Sony related story, the first part goes here in the HD section I suppose. Sony has had to issue a massive recall/repair for 1.6 million LCD TVs they produced since 2008, apparently due to a fire risk in a faulty component. It’s not exactly what the company needs at the moment, but the “good” news so far is that there haven’t been any reports of actual injuries, and that the damage so far has been restricted to the TV set itself.

Less costly for Sony, financial wise, but perhaps more costly in terms of image is the news that a further 93,000 Sony online network accounts have been “hacked”, in the latest security breach.

Fortunately for Sony, the breach which led to hackers gaining access to 93,000 accounts on the Sony Entertainment Network (SEN), PlayStation Network (PSN) and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) networks appears to have originated elsewhere. According to Sony, hackers managed to source the email/password combinations for an unspecified (non Sony) online service, and proceeded to use the same login combination to try their luck on the PSN, and managed to get access to the 93,000 accounts. Sony have disabled 33,000 SOE accounts, while have forced password changes for the rest. Sony says that credit card info was not accessed during this attack, but personal information may have been.

While Sony is right that the data breach occurred elsewhere, the security issue here still lies with Sony, because allowing hackers to launch this type of massive attack can easily be prevented. Simply limiting failed login attempts from any individual IP address or range, which is standard practice, could have prevented the 93,000 accounts from being accessed. And some kind of “CAPTCHA” system, or human verification, would have prevented the hacker’s bot based login attempts. Both of these are common techniques used to prevent dictionary based attacks. And once again, it took Sony days to spot the unusual activity on their networks, when it really should be a matter of hours if not minutes.

Life to date Xbox 360 sales in the US (in green) is catching up to Wii sales (in blue), but the PS3 (red) languishes in third place

But while Sony’s security problems have been highlighted recently, it doesn’t seem to have seriously affected the fortunes of the PS3, as price, as always, seems to be the main driving factor behind sales. So Sony’s $50 price cut to the PS3 in the middle of August has seen PS3 sales rise, although as the September 2011 NPD US video games sales analysis shows, the rise was not big enough to really endanger the Xbox 360’s position as the best selling console in the US. The gap has closed, however, between the PS3 and the Xbox 360, while the gap between the Wii and every other console seems to be widening. If the gap remains as big as it was during September, the Xbox 360 is set to overtake the Wii as the best selling home based console of this generation (in the US) within 39 month – but it will be well after the Wii U is introduced, so that’s what Nintendo are holding on to at the moment.

Alright, that’s enough for this week I think. Hopefully more of a newsworthy week this next one, and I have a feeling it will. Have a good one.

Starting as usual with the copyright news, we start with the MPAA’s win against Zediva, as the judge in the case handed down a preliminary injunction against the “innovative” video rental service.

Zediva is a great deal for consumers, but it can only do it by using loop holes that Hollywood is trying to close

A little background info. Zediva’s service works by allowing you to rent physical discs, but instead of sending the disc to you like what Netflix would do, they do what Netflix’s other service does, by offering you a streaming version of the same movie. Zediva then reserves the disc you “rented”, and removes it from circulation. Or basically as Zediva puts it, you rent the disc, and they play it for you over the Internet (imagine a DVD player with a really really long cable). Why did Zediva do this? They did this – and this is where I think Zediva’s downfall will be – to avoid having to pay licensing fees for streaming content.

You see, the problem is that Zediva’s motivations, it seems to me, are born out of trying to avoid paying these licensing fees and release restrictions, and make more money than they would otherwise. If this is Zediva’s real motivation, then good luck to them, but I don’t think they have a snowball’s chance in hell with their case. And in the judge’s summary of the ruling, it’s made quite clear that the judge sees real problems with Zediva’s argument, and that if Zediva was allowed to continue operating, it could harm the existing video-on-demand industry, Netflix included.

Now, it could be debated that what Zediva is doing actually does not hurt Hollywood if you compare it to traditional disc rental, but that it does hurt Hollywood studios when compared to what they can make from streaming deals, and even Zediva won’t deny this, as after all, their business model is to save on licencing costs. This then leads to the debate as to why streaming should cost more than traditional rentals, why Hollywood should choose to not only “tax” new innovative distribution methods, but to place artificial limits (like a 30-day embargo to help increase disc rental income), when these help to fight piracy. But that’s their business decision, and they may be right or wrong, but that’s not for Zediva to decide. So people get pissed off with Redbox waiting times for new releases, or the somewhat hysterical reaction to the Netflix price increases (best encapsulated in this video), and it might hurt Hollywood more to be too greedy when it comes to streaming licensing fees and release schedules, if people do decide to “screw it” and use BitTorrent.

Pron magazine/website Perfect 10 is making legal headlines again this week, twice actually, as they launch yet another lawsuit against yet another online company, this time Megaupload. As you may or may not know, Perfect 10 has in the past sued Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the middle of these three recorded a win against Perfect 10 this week in which the Ninth Circuit court rejected Perfect 10’s appeal over an earlier decision favouring the search giant. But while courts are reluctant to rule about top tech companies that have been Perfect 10’s target before, they may be more favourable to ruling in Perfect 10’s favour against Megaupload, especially since the MPAA’s case against similar file hosting provider, Hotfile, seems to be going okay. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be Perfect 10’s first victory, but it all depends on how frequently their content has been uploaded by users of Megaupload, and if it’s not frequent at all, why Perfect 10 didn’t file DMCA notices to get those content removed, instead of launching a lawsuit (“to make more money” is not an excuse the court would accept, I think).

Diablo III will use 'always-on' DRM, but not for anti-piracy, says Blizzard

Good will amongst gamers is something every game developer needs, and up until this week, Blizzard, the makers of the addictive World of Warcraft and Starcraft series,  probably thought that the had enough good will stored in the bank to pull a nasty surprise. But, as Blizzard will admit, they might have miscalculated. What happened was that Blizzard announced the next episode in another one of their addictive franchises, Diablo III, would have “always-on” DRM, meaning gamers won’t be able to play the game offline, even for a couple of seconds. So Blizzard decided to do a Ubi, and as I talked about last week, nobody likes Ubi DRM. The funny thing was that Blizzard probably never intended to do this as a form of anti-piracy, but only as an anti-cheating feature. This may very well be true, but Blizzard could have avoided this whole controversy (and still used “always-on” DRM) by including an offline mode, much like how Test Drive Unlimited 2 does it (offline and online progress are recoded separately). The statements made by Blizzard immediately after the backlash began didn’t help either – executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo’s statement about there being other games to play when people are offline, for example on long plane trips, was the most ill-conceived of them all (yes, “other games” that people will buy instead of your games).

So it’s a lesson for Blizzard and any other company that chooses to use draconian DRM, for whatever reason – beware of the backlash, which might ultimately hurt revenue more than a couple of extra pirated copies would have (or the cost of adding an offline play mode).

In Blu-ray/3D news, exciting news, sort of, although it’s technically neither HD nor 3D (not yet anyway).

I’ve been talking up UltraViolet for a while now, and it’s not like me really to voice my support for anything Hollywood comes up with, especially if it’s wrapped up in all sorts of DRM, which UltraViolet will no doubt be. But for me, UV is a huge shift in the way we “buy” movies, and it comes just at the right time when cloud storage is all the rage.

UV, simply puts, turns buying a movie into really buying a movie. The idea is that, instead of buying a movie on each platform, on disc, then on iTunes,  then another version for your Android device … instead of doing this, you buy the license to watch the movie, and then you get access to all the versions via the cloud, for all of your popular devices. It’s like Digital Copy, except it’s all done in the cloud. So when you buy a Blu-ray movie at Walmart, you can instantly get the movie to play on your Android phone, as long as you have a good Internet connection. And at home, instead of finding and popping the disc in or pre-ripping it to your media player, you can just fire up your TV’s UV app, and watch all your purchased movies from the cloud.

Flixster is already available on a variety of mobile devices, and so, it's the natural fit for delivering and managing UltraViolet

The big news this week in regards to UV is the first announcement of UV compatible movies, as Warner Bros. announced both Bad Bosses and Green Lantern will feature UV support. I’m not surprised at all WB is one of the first companies to announced UV support, as they’ve always been quite open to new formats, having supported VCD in Asia, and HD DVD before they decided not to. And WB’s recent acquisition of Flixster is starting to make sense as well, as it seems Flixster is the app that WB plans to use to allow users to manage and watch UV content. As Flixster is already available on a wide variety of mobile devices, it’s an easy decision for WB to use it for UV.

What was more interesting was that WB also announced that it would even be possible for users to bring in their old DVDs to retailers, and have them “enable” access to the UV version of the movie. I don’t know how this will work, or whether there might be a way to do it without having to go to the store, but it does sound interesting. And as mentioned earlier, I really hope TV and console manufacturers embrace UV as well, as this would allow me to digitally stream my movie collection without ripping (also need studios and ISPs to work out some kind of deal to offer free bandwidth for watching UV movies).

In related news, Time Warner owned HBO plans to make available console versions of the HBO Go app, which is great news for those that are actually in the regions that can access HBO Go, which sadly does not seem to include Australia (we miss out on Hulu as well … boo!). The announcement also mentioned other “connected devices”, which sounds a bit vague, but hopefully will include things like Blu-ray players and TVs, for easy peasy catch-up viewing.

And finally in gaming, Sony has, as expected really, announced a strong degree of integration between their upcoming portable console, the PlayStation Vita, and the PS3.

This will include the ability to use the Vita as a controller for the PS3 (so allowing the touch surface, gyroscope, microphone, camera … all to be used to control PS3 games), plus the PS3 can also send graphics data to the Vita to display. Sounds familiar? It should, because this is exactly how the Wii U controller would work.

PS Vita will offer Wii U like features, much earlier than Nintendo's console

With the Vita coming to the US probably early next year, and the Wii U much later than that, it’s a shot across the bow for Nintendo, if not directly at them. The only issue is the price. At the expected price of $249, and add the $299 cost of the PS3, yes, you might have a system that rivals some of the innovative parts of the Wii U, but might be more expensive, and not have as good  graphics as the Wii U (which must surely be an ironic situation for both Sony and Nintendo). But then again, the Vita can be used as a standalone gaming console far far away from the Wii U (the Wii U controller also allows independent play, but only within close proximity to the main Wii U console). So a Vita + PS3 combination could in fact replace the Wii U + DS combination, and if that’s true (and if graphics quality is discounted as a factor), then Sony becomes the better value proposition. And a PS3 price drop, or a PS3 + Vita bundle, may help.  Of course, Nintendo knows how to make fun games, and Sony struggles at times, and this could be the deciding factor.

For the Xbox 360, they’re going in a totally different direction, which could work for and against them. But Microsoft has demonstrated Windows Phone integration with Kinect and the Xbox 360, so they’re planning something similar too – and it will be even better value for those already with Windows Phones.

So we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you enjoyed this issue, and see you next week.

The very first version of Digital Digest, note the Asus V3400 reference

It is worth noting again that Digital Digest is really a collection of many different websites that I have developed over the last 10 years. The very first of these websites was a Geocities (and Tripod) hosted website called DVDigest. It was still relatively early days for the Internet, and the boom was underway. Free web hosting was all the rage, and Geocities and Tripod were amongst the leaders. You get something like 15 MB of space and some unspecified bandwidth limit, for hosting static HTML pages and images, which was plentiful back then. And when you do go over the bandwidth limit, you can always open another free account – to solve the problem of ever changing URLs, you used redirect services like cjb.net (so you would have something like dvdigest.cjb.net, which would direct to whichever free account that was still active back then). Now, this was a time of venture capitalists going crazy and IPOs popping up all over the place, so in comparison, DVDigest was pretty amateur. Even for the amateurs.

But it was noob time for most people back then, before the word “noob” was even invented. My interests back then, being the nerd that I am, was to go to newsgroups and help people with their DVD playback problems. I was one of the few that jumped on to the doomed VCD bandwagon (having purchased a hardware MPEG-1 decoder card at great cost), and my interests naturally flowed onto this new format called DVD. Playing DVDs on your PC back then is  like trying to play games at 2560×1600 resolution today. With 8xAA and 16x AF. In other words, stutter city was the name of the game. That is unless you had some sort of graphics card that could accelerate DVD playback (or a dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder card). The graphics card I had back then was the  Asus V3400, part of Nvidia’s Riva TNT family. Despite the marketing, it did not have DVD acceleration and playback was, well, awful. Software based DVD decoders were still in their early days back then, and it took a great deal of tweaking before you could get acceptable framerates on an Intel Celeron 333a. The experience I gained from helping people play DVDs is what led me to write up a few webpages and open a site called DVDigest, which quickly became DVD Digest because people were a bit confused at the name (and they still are – “Digest” reads as in Reader’s Digest, and not as in “digest food”, BTW).

This went on, and more content was added. There were a few new things coming out back then that were quite exciting (for a nerd like me). Talks of doing the impossible and somehow copying the copy protected DVD to your hard-drive, that is if you had a hard-drive big enough. The very first “ripper”, if I can remember, was all about using PowerDVD’s screen capture facility and capturing everything frame by frame. People might as well have pointed a video camera at their TV for all the good that it did (no sound until further processing!) , but at least the process path was all digital. There as also this thing called DivX ; -) – which allowed you to make high quality videos (even better than VCD!) at maybe only a tenth of the space. It was an exciting time.

DeCSS: Who knew such a small program could cause so much trouble ...

It was still late 1999 when I was approached by a company, which shall remain nameless (and actually I can’t remember their name anyway), that offered to help me host my fledgling website, which had already grown too p0pular to be hosted on a 15 MB free webspace deal (shocking, I know). I was to get a part of the advertising money, and they would do all the hosting. They even kindly purchased the domain name dvd-digest.com (don’t bother hurrying over to whois the name, it’s owned by different people now, I think), which was perhaps not as kind as I had believed, naive as I was. All went pretty smoothly until the said company received legal documents which suggested that the rippers I was hosting was not entirely legal. The infamous DVD CCA vs DeCSS case had started. It doesn’t really matter now that the court eventually ruled in favour of the defendants, but I’m sure it was scary for the company that hosted DVD Digest (and owned the domain name to boot). And they took what was in their eyes not only the right action, but the only action, which was to “Shut It Down!”. I was on vacation and away from the Internet at that time (hard to believe that being away from the Internet is actually possible these days, I know) and I did not find out until a week or two after the fact. It wasn’t good news for DVD Digest.

So I had to start from scratch again in the fake new millennium (2000), this time with the domain name digital-digest.com, even though the site was still called DVD Digest back then. And start again I did. The year 2000 was a great one for DVD Digest, despite the soon bursting of the Internet bubble. It was then that I turned what was really a hobby into a business of sorts, and of course, the DVD industry made huge strides in those few years which was helpful for a website that relied on more and more people wondering why they’re only getting 15 FPS from the DVDs on their PCs.

The DVD Digest name continued to be used for many years, with Digital Digest eventually taking over as the official name of the website, but by then there were other sites part of the Digital Digest network called DivX Digest and DVD±R Digest, but that’s a story for part 2 and 3 of The History of Digital Digest.

To be continued in part 2 …

The new 2D, animated and 3D templates are nice, and should be enough for most common usages and can be customized effectively. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same old Nero Vision with the same old problems as before (read our DVD authoring tool roundup for the pros and cons).

Read the Nero Vision 5 DVD Authoring Guide.

It won’t create DVDs with beautiful menus and other fancy features, but things like multiple audio tracks and subtitles are not too difficult to add in. The output quality is quite good as well, although this largely depends on the quality of the source file. Give it a try and I think you’ll be impressed.

The other guide I wrote is about AVI to WMV conversion, trying to make these files playable on the Xbox 360. I used the free Windows Media Encoder 9 software, which unlike DVD Flick, is not as straight forward or well designed. It will work well when the input file is “Microsoft approved” (ie. WMV files), but for anything else (like DivX/XviD), it can cause a lot of problems. The software itself is quite powerful, with support for a lot of different types of encodings, including streaming and VC-1, but you can just feel that it wasn’t really designed for use by your average/newbie user (which is no surprise then that the URL for the software on Microsoft’s website has changed to add “forpros” in the URL), unlike DVD Flick.

I like to organise them alphabetically, which means shuffling everything around whenever I buy some new DVDs. But the biggest problem is storage, or rather, finding places to store them.

As you can see from the picture above, I’ve had to maximize all the storage spaces, stacking the DVDs in different ways whenever possible. I can probably still store about 200 DVDs in this way, but after that, who knows what I’ll do.

This is the biggest problem with having a physical medium. If everything was digital, then it would take roughly 5024 GB (each disc being 8 GB, which is quite a high estimate), or ten 500 GB hard-drives (until 1 TB drives are more available). To be safe, I should have a RAID-5 setup to ensure I don’t lose data, so I would an extra disk. These hard-drives would still occupy less space than a stack of 20 DVDs, and assuming I’ve done the hard work to categorize and tag these digital entries, searching and playback become so much easier and quicker.

Maybe one day…

English is not my first language, so while watching DVD movies, I prefer to have the English subtitles on. Obviously, subtitles are essential for people with hearing difficulties.

This week’s pet peeve is DVDs that don’t have subtitles. Back in the old days, when buying a DVD player would mean a week’s wage, many region 1 DVDs would not have subtitles, and only closed captioning support. CC support is completely useless to people outside of region 1, as we don’t have CC decoders in our TVs. But this is perhaps understandable, since these DVDs were never intended for sale outside of the US and Canada.

However, I’ve noticed that even today, several high profile releases do not have subtitles. The most recent one I’ve encountered is the region 4 copy of Unleashed (released by Universal Pictures in region 4). This DVD has a DTS track, extra features, but no subtitles. The region 2 version has English subtitles for the hearing impaired, while the region 1 version has at least closed captioning support. While I would be able to live with having no subtitles once in a while, but what about people with hearing impairment? Are they not entitled to watch this movie?

Why do studios insist on releasing NTSC content in PAL regions? Is it because they are lazy? Cost savings? Or just because they don’t give a rat’s arse about people who actually pay their salaries (us, the customers)?

A lot of people still don’t have equipment that can play or display NTSC content, and is it really that hard to produce a new transfer for the PAL regions, especially when there are so many countries that uses PAL (Europe, UK, Australia). Notable NTSC releases in Australia includes The Goonies, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory (only the full-frame version is available as well) and my recently purchased copy of Dilbert: The Complete Series. Often, the NTSC warnings are not very visible nor helpful, since most people don’t even know the NTSC/PAL difference (nor should they be expected to know).

On a related note, if you have a Pioneer Plasma that has PureCinema mode, you should have an “Advanced” option which basically does 3:3 pulldown, playing back 24 FPS content at 72 Hz. 3:3 pulldown triples every frame to get the required 72 Hz refresh rate, and what you get is a slightly smoother picture compared to standard 2:3 pulldown (the “Standard” PureCinema mode) . I use this mode to play back all my NTSC DVDs. For my (3 year old) model, 3:3 pulldown only works when the input is interlaced, so I have my upscaling DVD player set to 1080i 60Hz mode when playing back NTSC discs, and then enable 3:3 pulldown – the improved smoothness of panning is immediately noticeable. PAL discs are at 25 FPS, so I set the DVD player to 720p (native resolution of the TV) @ 50 Hz.

Yes I would, if stealing a handbag meant that I wouldn’t be forced to watch this stupid trailer again

If the Internet has taught has anything is that people like the freedom of being able to get and use information without being limited to a particular process or method. The freedom, therefore, to choose what you want to watch and what you don’t want to watch is essential. Being forced to watch some stupid studio trailer (Universal Pictures, I’m looking at you) that you’ve seen about a million times, or being told that you are a terrorist because you made a copy of a movie for your mother, is just plain annoying. Sometimes you are forced to wait up to 5 minutes before you can get to the movie, and that’s just not good enough. Ripping DVDs to get rid of these UOPs (User Operation Prohibitions) seems to be the only method, except that it’s illegal in most countries.

Many studios don’t employ these heavy handed tactics to force you to watch things, and they need to be applauded for doing so. Others should hang their heads in shame.

I think it would be great (if not somewhat ironic) that legal DVD downloads be distributed using bittorrent technology. It really is the best and fastest way to distribute large files, and it saves money for the distributors.

Digital downloads would also make distribution of hard to find/out of print titles possible. It is often not worth it commercially for studios to release old and rare movies, but if they do it online, there is no production cost involved.

And once bandwidth becomes faster and cheaper, perhaps HD titles can be distributed in the same way.

And since everything will be delivered digitally, why not allow customizations? For example, I could choose a different style of main menu, which language and subtitle tracks I want to be included in the download, and also which extra features to have (discounts available for choosing the movie only version perhaps). Exclusive material not found on the physical DVD version might also be made available, to be downloaded for an additional fee. The possibilities are endless, and I really shouldn’t be doing the studio’s work for them by coming up with these ideas (will sell ideas for money!!).