News
iTunes shoppers buying into Digital Rights Management
By Dennis Lloyd
Publisher, iLounge
Published: Tuesday, December 2, 2003
News Category: Digital Media
“‘By buying into DRM they have given the seller complete control over the product after it’s been sold,” he wrote. ‘The RIAA can at any time change the DRM rules, and considering their history it’s likely that they will when the majority of consumers have embraced DRM and non-DRM products have been phased out. Some DVDs today include commercials which can’t be skipped using ‘sanctioned’ players. If the RIAA forces Apple to include commercials, what excuses will the Mac zealots come up with? ‘It’s a good compromise’?’”
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1
Very good points made; and I hope more folks start to realize just how bad things can get if we let them. Do not support DRM.
Posted by Pensive Chimp on December 2, 2003 at 8:24 AM (PDT)
2
When I buy a DVD that has previews (and now commercials) that can’t be skipped, I usually make a copy and delete playback of those pieces. Then I just watch the copy.
It will probably just be a matter of time before someone finds a way to do that with DRM protected content, without losing anything from the original piece.
Posted by Mirage on December 2, 2003 at 9:07 AM (PDT)
3
“When I buy a DVD that has previews (and now commercials) that can’t be skipped, I usually make a copy and delete playback of those pieces”
When I get DVDs from Netflix, I strip the DVD VOBs and convert them into DIVX. Many people do this so they can burn them onto CDR. A 4-6 GB DVD (MPEG2) movie becomes a 800MB-1.5GB DIVX (MPEG4).
Other people strip the DVD onto their hard drives if they are taking a flight because they know that while spinning up and down a DVD drains your laptop battery incredibly quickly, playing a DIVX from an already-spinning hard disk uses virtually no extra juice at all.
But my main reason for converting DVD->DIVX is bandwidth. DVDs average around 6Mbps of bandwidth, but I convert to DIVX at between 900 Kbps and 1.3Mbps.
This radically lower bandwidth lets me more easily stream the movies from a central file server over my WiFI network. It’s a rush to be able to tap into a movie from any room in the house, using any available laptop. DVDs can *barely* stream over 802.11b, and only a single channel. With DIVX you get a lot more headroom, and more “channels” of broadcasts, so my wife and daughters can watch their stuff as well.
I also have a couple of TV Tuner cards (MSI TV@nywhere) that record all the TV shows (ala TIVO) and transcode them into DIVX on the server for later viewing.
Best of all, once converted into DIVXs they are simple AVIs so there is none of these useless DRM headaches.
I also like to download the DIVXs to my Archos video handheld and watch some movies when I am riding public transit or waiting around.
Posted by DIVX on December 2, 2003 at 9:46 AM (PDT)
4
down with DRM!!!!!!
avoid Phoenix BIOSs
keep your copy of Win XP (longhorn will incorporate palladium).
DRM is analagous to Gestapo in Nazi Germany…i’m not kidding.
Posted by lo on December 2, 2003 at 3:18 PM (PDT)
5
In large measure, the dispute over file sharing has been a ruse by RIAA and the DRM people in their effort to keep a hammerlock on their golden goose. While stealing is stealing, I consider it stealing when the DRM people insert commercials into a DVD that I cannot skip over. They are stealing my time and diminishing the investment I made to purchase a DVD. When does this all stop? At what point is the consumer entitled to be free of unwanted and unwelcome commercial interruption? As an analogy, HBO would still charge me to purchase their programming, but now they would also insert ads ala network TV? Wrong!
Posted by Obadiah on December 3, 2003 at 7:43 AM (PDT)