Time moves on...
Monday, August 27, 2012 at 11:11AM but it seems some industries are determined to try and ignore that fact.
Not the small bakers or butchers, they can please stay as they are, providing quality foods, but one of the biggest global industries, film.
If you have been keeping up you will know my last laptop died, and by all accounts from the techies at work was not fixable, or worth risking - so I bit the bullet and bought a new one this weekend. As I travel around a lot, and don't play on line games the tings that are important to me are hard drive for music, weight for carrying and battery life. So we picked the one I wanted, and have now spent a day trying to remember my logins and passwords for almost my entire life. Some I have just had to create new accounts as I couldn't even remember the email address I had used originally. Quite terrifyingly though, logging into Google and an amazing amount of the web all self populates - my twitter name came up even though this laptop had no idea what twitter was until about an hour ago....
I digress as usual.
So, while transferring all the music etc from my old hard-drive to this one, and sitting there looking at my Sopranos Box Set, I remembered that the new laptop doesn't have a DVD / CD drive, which is fine so I ordered an external one. I then thought that instead of taking the external drive on the train with me, I would just download the DVDs to the laptop to watch, assuming that this was the same process as adding a CD to itunes. Just plop it in, press go and away - Sopranos on the train.
Not at all it seems.
The film and DVD industry still believe that you will only want to play the DVD when it is in your physical possession at that moment in time. Unlike music where you have all you own to listen to whenever you like on multiple devices, you can only watch a DVD if you have the disc with you at the time, and have a compatible device. So although I own, and it was a full price legitimate purchase, a box set of the Sopranos I can not now watch it anywhere except my lounge unless I take a DVD player with me, defeating the object of buying small and light?
I don't want to burn them, upload them, sell copies, I just want to watch them, so I asked around as to how it was possible to do. Unsurprisingly I got loads of responses for free and paid for software that does exactly what I want, and also a stream of replies that people had the same issues and to see what I tried and see if it was any good, fast etc. So there is an industry dedicated to breaking the encryption put on DVDs, making it fairly irrelevant in the long term to bother encrypting it.
I am fully aware that many people would just illegally download and copy it if it was made even easier, but you know what, most people don't. And those that do won't stop. As I have said many times regarding music, I share a lot of music with a lot of people, I also spend a hell of a lot on stuff I find that I like, without sharing I would never find a lot of it, so I have no issues at all, like making a mix tape in the 80s, that didn't kill music did it?
So now I have to download some software that is not supposed to exist to be able to watch films that I have paid for at times I am not in my lounge... Ah well, such is the modern world.
The funny part about this whole saga is that the easiest, fastest and cheapest way for me to get the Sopranos series on to my new laptop would be to illegally download it. The industry pushing me to the one thing I don't want to do, but would make my life simpler. Idiots.
Reader Comments (1)
this is something I have a major problem with. I've had some form of media server in my house for about 5 years now, meaning I don't own a DVD player at all. Everything I watch, whether it be movies, TV shows or videos recorded on our camcorder (get your mind out of the gutter please!) is in digital format.
Not really a problem except to legally obtain many of these items I have had to download software which doesn't come from a reputable company (although I should point out it's perfectly fine) and spend a good 30mins+ converting any DVD I'm given. Downloading illegally has actually become an easier option even when I own the legal copy.
The problem however isn't really the film industry, although that has a huge way to go to become a modern industry, it's the hardware not available on the market yet that needs to drive the digital conversion just like the iPod did for the music industry. Every media server I've ever owned has been fairly high tech but nothing has been what I'd call plug'n'play. The iPod was so successful because it was easy to use. As soon as there's a well priced, simple to use iPodesque device out there I'm sure the film industry will have to soon move with the times.