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Why DVDs are starting to suck
Tim Robertson
Publisher, Owner, Podcaster, Writer - MyMac.com
Thursday, 12/29/05
On a recent purchased DVD, I found myself forced to watch four commercials for other DVDs the movie company wanted me to buy. It advertised that I could skip the ads, or push Menu to go directly to the main DVD menu. Which is nice, except every time you pushed either the Next or Menu button, a nice “Operation Not Allowed” message appeared. So in effect, I could not skip past these commercials, and every time I wanted to watch this film, I would be forced to sit and watch four minutes of advertising.
I could understand a rental DVD that forces the consumer to watch four minutes of ads on the disc if there were some benefit to me, say a reduced rental price. Rather than $3.99 to rent the movie, there would be a $2.99 version with the ads. I could accept that. But to force me to watch ads on a DVD I own is simply tacky wrong.
Bad enough that every movie now plays ten to fifteen minutes of ads before we get to see the film we paid to see. Now they are invading our home purchased movies as well.
Hey, why they are at it, why not place some audio ads on CDs that people cannot skip over. When you start up your computer, you have to sit there and watch four ads before you get to your desktop. When you get in your car in the morning, the transmission won’t shift into Drive until you have listened to three messages about the latest GM cars you could be driving. Every time you hit the snooze on your alarm clock, you have to listen to a McDonalds breakfast commercial before it turns off. Before you’re refrigerator opens, you have to listen to the latest Pepsi ad. Want to place a call on your cell? You have to hear two ads first.
If all the above sounds ridiculous, then why do we accept the same practice in the movie theatre and our DVDs? A recent DVD purchase, the Frosty the Snowman box-set for my two-year-old daughter, will not let you jump right to the show. I have to literally push the buttons at least five times before the movie can start. Disney is one of the worst offenders, so much so that I have actually returned a Disney disc after finding out that there was no way my kids could watch the movie until seven, SEVEN ads played first.
Montages on DVDs are also getting worse. You know, when the disc will finally let you get to the main menu, you have to watch twenty seconds of clips of the film you are about to watch, video feeds moving from left to right, or audio clips playing over still photos before the actual DVD menu appears.
As less and less people go to the movie theaters, the paradigm is shifting to home movie watching. As a consequence, the movie companies have much faster turn-around between theatrical release and DVD release. As such, they are stuffing as much ad content on DVDs as they can, calling these ads “Bonus Content” and expecting us dumb consumers to sheepishly continue to fork over the cash. But I, for one, am getting tired of it, and will be cutting way back on how many DVDs I purchase in the future. The content providers are simply killing this great medium.
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you are so right.
i noticed this with the "shark tales" DVD I got for my son.
the entertainment business types obviously are immune to learn about "sustainability"
BTW, if you cannot skip over ads, you still can fastforward don´t worry, once it gets to the movie or the main menu, it slows down to normal speed automatically ...
rgrds
matt
Posted by isserley
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Good point, Matt, as long as the fast FF scene does not induce an aneurism. :-)
Posted by Tim Robertson
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I agree with you on the DVDs... It would be one thing to put them on rental DVDs if doing so would enable them to offer the rental at a lower price.
As to ads in the movie theater... I suspect that the ads do enable the theaters to keep ticket prices down... Besides, I usually bring a book into the theater with me anyway to pass the time until the trailers begin :)
Posted by nightshade
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I'm waiting for the day when all the seats in the movie theaters have ads on them, and the walls become billboards like the homerun walls at the minor league baseball parks.
If ads in the theaters keep ticket prices down, I'd hate to see what they'd be without the ads!
Posted by Donny Yankellow
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While this may not be the best solution for rental DVDs only because it adds a time-factor before you watch, and isn't strictly legal, there is a solution if you BUY the DVD.
You could use an application like DVD decryptor and rip the DVD to your hard drive. In the process, you can remove any of the restrictions the publisher had put on the disc when they authored it.
Then use an app like DVD shrink, reauthor and burn it back to DVD. If your burner and player support dual-layer DVD -+R, you don't even need to do the DVD Shrink part, but it would allow you to completely re-author the disc leaving out all the additional crap.
Then you can put the 'original' dvd back in its case for archival purposes, and then just reburn the disc every time your kids think that the DVD makes a nice frisbee and it won't play anymore.
These things all fall within 'fair use', as long as you're doing it to discs you own.
Posted by Gnascher
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Thank goodness for DVDJon - thanks to him we can run our legally purchased DVDs through Mac The Ripper and remove these sort of restrictions. However, this is an extra time oberhead we could all do without.
The fact that this is our only recourse typifies
1) the contempt the entertainment industry has for the consumer and
2) the fact that all of these restrictions introsuced in the name of 'piracy prevention' get abused by the industry at their first opportunity.
Posted by David Cohen
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This is why renting movies from NetFlix is the best approach. Then if you like the movie, dub yourself a copy. =)
I do hate the fact that every movie I own now has commercials on it, but thankfully my DVD player can fast forward at 32 times the playback speed. So I only indure the commercials for 5-6 seconds and get to watch a bunch of random images flash on the screen.
Posted by rhodesman
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I think I need to look more into the copying DVD thing. Is a SuperDrive a dual-layer burning unit? (2004 G5 model)
Tim
Posted by Tim Robertson
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Tim,
To my knowlege, most newer DVD burners will burn dual layer. However, the DL discs are much more expensive. Also, not all dvd PLAYERS will play a burned DL disk. I have a 2yr old Sony player that will play DVD +/-R no problem, but it doesn't seem to handle the dual layers ...
That leaves me with the option of A) using DVD Shrink to recompress the move (usually has quite satisfactory results when using VBR and tweaking the compression rations) and burning to a single layer DVD, or B) pnly playing the dual-layer on my computer ... which kinda sux.
Hopefully my current DVD player will die soon so I can justify purchasing a new one to the accountant ... I mean ... my wife.
Posted by Gnascher
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Tim,
I agree with you regarding disney and other children's DVDs. I have a 4 and 1 year old. They don't know how to click through countless adds and confusing menu options. Isn't it obvious that kids want to watch Cindarella...wouldn't it make more sense to have a version that a kid can simply put into a DVD player and it actually plays the movie! Enough with the intricate menus!
Unfortunately, the only solution is to use DVD Shrink. You have to create a backup of your store-bought (or rented) DVD that only includes the motion picture! This way, they can scratch the hell out of it and when they want to watch it...they simply take the disk and put it into the DVD player - and bam! the movie starts to play. It's so simple, it's beautiful.
Don't get me wrong...I don't encourage copying movies that you don't own. I own all of the Disney movies that my children want to watch...but every time they want to watch the same movie 10 times, I'm required to navigate through the ads and movie menus. If you pay $20+ dollars for a movie...you have every right to erase all that crap they bundle with it, also known as "bonus content".
Just my humble opinion...
Posted by puffsajji
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For a LOT more discussion on this, check out Digg.com. This blog post was "dug" today, and there is over 100 posts thus far. Here is the LINK
Posted by Tim Robertson
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Actually fellas, copying a DVD isn't Fair Use.
DVD's, as you all know, are protected by CSS. CSS is a digital encryption system, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act expressly forbids breaking, reverse-engineering, or posting instructions on how to do any of those for a digtially-protected medium. Whether or not you own the media in question is irrelevant. For example, Mark Russinovich, who disclosed the rootkit on SonyBMG's CDs earlier this year, was in violation of the DMCA. There is currently no Fair Use provision to the DMCA.
In short, Fair Use only applies to analog content.
That being said, it hasn't stopped me, and I agree with everyone here. It stinks. I used to love going to the movies, now when I do go I try to show up about 10 minutes late to miss as much of that stuff as possible. I do find it funny, though, that the ads aren't even special movie theater ads (except the Fandango ones maybe), they're the same commercials I see on TV!
Posted by drjuicephd
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Man oh man Tim! You have addressed one of my pet peeves of the modern age.
I don't mind the montages so at all, as long as they are nicely done. (example: the opening montage on the "Millennium" TV series DVD sets)
But these ads,,,, There is just no end to them! I have curtailed my own purchases of DVD's, in part just for this reason. Well, that and I only buy the ones I know I will watch enough to justify the purchase, which isn't that many.
Yes, it is wrong to ask a consumer to pay the purchase price of the DVD, then fill it up with all those ads. Then, to top it off by making it nearly impossible to get around them via the menus,, It's enough to drive one nuts. You've paid the price for the right to watch the DVD in your home. Are they that determined to shove ads in your face? (I guess so. )
I haven't signed aboard with Netflix yet, but I have heard only good about the service.
Posted by Bruce Black
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Blockbuster online isn't bad either, plus you get two free in store rentals a month.
Maybe iTunes will partially solve the problem when/if they offer full length movies. If it is like the current video offerings it will be ad free. Then they just have to ad the ability to burn to DVD.
Posted by Donny Yankellow
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I have also found out a neat little trick you can do with most DVD Players.
Place the dvd in to your dvd player. once it starts playing press STOP on your DVD Player. Then again press STOP. Now press Play (on your dvd player) and it should jump to the main movie.
I have had this work on all of the dvd players I have have access to. So I assume it is a standard feature. However I don't have enough data to be sure. Either way its worth a try on your dvd player.
Posted by Icefreez
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You guys are right, advertisements on DVDs stink, over here in Europe they have another lovely feature - an "anti-piracy" trailer being played before the main movie. No I don't mean the standard text-page, I mean a full flung 60 second TV ad. This annoys me, I just paid about $30+ for a DVD (we've got 16.5% sales tax here) and then someone tells me that anyone buying this DVD is potentially going to rip the content and sell on reproductions...
The other thing that recently has annoyed me, when you wish to watch the movie with the original sound track (i.e. usually English) you are being forced to see a German subtitle. Not with all diks, but I bought a number and I find it infuriating and had no luck returning the disc, as I had broken the seal.
Posted by otzberg
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Hey- just rented the movie Crash...belive it or not no ads and no coming attractions! Just the standard FBI warning and straight to the main menu. Almost shocking. I think this is the 2nd movie this month I have rented like this.
Posted by Donny Yankellow
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I happen to watch all my DVDs on my PowerBook... I don't actually have a TV at home (much to my girlfriend's annoyance!) But one nice thing about the Apple DVD player is being able to insert bookmarks. Once I've played a disc, I can easily insert a bookmark at, for example, the main menu. I make this the default bookmark for the disc. The DVD player can be set to play from this default bookmark next time it is put in the computer. Result: no trailers, no adverts, no anti-piracy warning.
Cheers,
Neale
Posted by Neale Monks
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I live in the Netherlands too like otzberg,
The antipiracy message is in a lot of dvd's nowadays. It is strange to see that BREIN is advertising that buying a copy is piracy on a dvd that you have bought while it will never be advertised on a copy you buy.. The latest i bought was the Interpreter from Universal. The ad can not be fastforwarded or skipped, not even the 'stop' button works! After that the ususal copywright stuff, also unskippable.
I got really mad after that. I do download movies but that is not illegal here (despite what you think or what the moviecompanies advertise here) i still own 1200 retail dvd's. I buy them all.. When i encountered the Interpreter dvd i went looking for a dvd player upgrade to skip those ads and i found the Pioneer advanced plug mod that disables all UOP's. Cost me 150 euro, money i could have spent on dvd's, but i rather spent that money to be able to just see my bought movie without a hassle.
The only positive word i have at the moment is for Warner Bros dvd's, they also have the copywrite message on all their dvd's AFTER the movie has ended :)
Posted by BrownEyes
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