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Hollywood Says No to Filtering DVD Player
haplo21112 writes "There is a posting over at ZDNet about how Hollywood continues to trample on the American consumer's free use rights. They want to prevent the sale of a special DVD player which can be used to edit out offensive material from a DVD in realtime. While I don't agree with censorship in general, I do believe its everyone's right to do what they wish with their own media."
And that would be stealing content.Now we don't want to steal content and deny the HW of its millions (or should i say billions) do we .... ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
1) Why do you think that this will be used (soley?) to let children watch "bad" movies? Specifically, I prefer to watch PG-13 (and less) movies, but would like to see some R-rated movies, minus gratuitous sex scenes*, or gory violence (I don't enjoy gore, and if I want sex, then I romance my wife).
:-)
2) What double standards? You didn't elaborate, so I have to guess that you are critical of parents telling their children that they are unable to watch movies that the parents *do* watch. If that is your position, then it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. If I was into gore/horror films, I certainly wouldn't let my 5 year old watch them. Neither would I want him to watch a Kevin Smith film, as there is no need for him to hear the F-word 5 times a minute. How is that a double-standard? I also wouldn't let him drink, vote, or drive.
*Off-topic note about this, I was listening to an archived interview of Chris Rock and Kevin Smith on the Howard Stern show, from just before Dogma's release. One of the most interesting parts of the interview is how everyone on the show agreed that if they could eliminate one thing from their life, it would be porn. It creates such false, twisted, "high" expectations, that no real person could live up to them, and you end up spending your whole time wanking off rather than having real sex with your partner. And none of those people are exactly what you would call "right-wing"
"They want to prevent the sale of a special DVD player which can be used to edit out offensive material from a DVD in realtime."
But they want to require the sale of special DVD players which edit out foreign material from a DVD (ie. region lock-outs).
I knew the MPAA and the DVD Consortium were two-faced, but this is just ridiculous. About the only common trait between these two positions is the elimination of options from the consumer marketplace.
We need to add a simple scene scripting language to open source players.
The players would have to identify the movie inserted, and select a script based on it. The script would, at first, simply be commands like:
At frame 5,342 mute
At frame 5,370 unmute
At frame 8,330 goto frame 9,010
At frame 10,377 place a black square(x1,y1,x2,y2) with ID 1
At frame 10,402 move and resize square ID 1 to (x1, y1, x2, y2)
At frame 10,700 remove square ID 1
There could be other options such as only viewing a section of the window, zooming it, pixellizing instead of blacking out, etc.
Such a simple script language could be represented in an XML file and database. You could attach ratings to each particular script action, such that the end user could say, "I don't mind profanity or violence, but cut out the hardcore sex."
Not only would such an open system allow 'clean' editing (which could be added to a centralized database, much like FreeDB does for CD listings) but you could offer your own move edits - shift scenes around, cut out jar jar, etc.
-Adam
I actually like some tv-cleaned versions of movies better because they remove excessive use of language. I'd be mad if they only offered the edited version to me but if the DVD offered 'cleaned' English language version I'd sometimes use it. No new technology required. :)
;)
I'd like to see support for some of these features in Xine, MPlayer, etc. It'd be pretty cool to have language and video masks made for and by a community site. For language just a set of start/stop marks to skip certain channels and for video start/stop/x/y/size data so you could blur objectable spots. Maybe some way to skip scenes or portions of scenese too. MovieBlipsXML?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"Directors. If I was a director, I would be pretty upset with 3rd party disruption of my vision"
Too damn bad. When I buy something, it's mine. I interfer with the directors vision all the time when I skip over boring parts of movies I've already seen. They have NO RIGHT to tell me I can't do that. This applies to all art. YOu are perfectly free to buy a painting and then burn it or deface it. When it's yours, you are allowed to do what you wish with it. YOu can't reproduce it, that's copyright infringement, but you may modify and use the copy you own as you see fit.