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More Freedom for DVD Players?
weopenlatest writes "According to this Wired article, the House just passed a bill allowing DVD players to skip through programming. While the article stressed using this ability for parental controls, it would seem like it would also apply to annoying previews and ads that load automatically. Could this be a step in the right direction towards uncrippled DVD players?"
Well, that's a nice sentiment, but the bill (the Family Movie Act of 2005) appears to mainly be aimed at allowing your DVD to skip past nude scenes and the like. A number of family and conservative groups supported this measure. Perhaps they're also annoyed at being forced to watch the previews that some DVDs force people to play through as well.
While I think it's a step in the right direction, Congress isn't going to do away with region coding, CSS, and the like. Look at the other bill in the link, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, also noted in an earlier /. article. I suspect Orrin Hatch would support this bill, but I don't think he'll go for less copy protection. Does anyone know if he voted on this bill and how?
Although it may be legal to create a DVD player that can be programed to skip sections, that doesn't mean that the industry has to license CSS to a maker who wants to do this in the future.
Under the new proposed HD DVD standard, any player manufacturer's key can be rescinded for future HD DVD releases, so DRM may prevent the ability to enable would-be bowdlerizers from implementing their schemes.
This is the same "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005" that was just-as-in-still-on-the-front-page posted in the story about jail time for sharing pre-publication copyrighted works.
The jail time was tacked onto the bill, and of course nobody's going to vote against parental control over DVDs, right?
Won't somebody think of the children!?!
The same tactic that got the bill through Congress got the story posted under a completely different subject on the front page.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The government has to get involved in permitting stuff like this because they previously MADE IT ILLEGAL with the DMCA. The market isn't likely to help with that.
Well, FTFA:
"ClearPlay and other similar services were sued by the movie studios, the Director's Guild of America and 13 individual directors for copyright violations and for altering their work. The technology companies filed a motion for summary judgment and were awaiting a ruling in the 10th District Court in Colorado."
Apparently, the government is already involved in this. Without the laws that Congress pushed in the first place, this wouldn't be an issue.
I have a GO-VIDEO DVD-VCR combo. The main reason I bought it was because it has a feature called AUTOPLAY(R). I put the DVD in and the movie immediately starts playing. No previews. No federal warning. No Menu.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
The Directors Guild of America sued ClearPlay in federal court in Colorado alleging copyright violations. Basically the argument was that ClearPlay was creating a derivative work (actually 2^N - 1 derivative works) by placing markers throughout a movie denoting skippable scenes containing sex or violence. This provision was introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) to specifically exempt such marking from being considered a derivative work for purposes of copyright law.
I'd like to think this is an instance of enlightenment in regard to our ridiculous copyright law, but I think it's just a coincidence that this is a reasonable provision. I wouldn't hold my breath expecting something like this for commercials. The culture war- specifically hatred of Hollywood- probably had more to do with this law. Color me cynical, but I suspect it may be a gift to ClearPlay as well, who will be especially well positioned after this. Once the bill is signed into law, the suit against them will be dismissed.
I can jump straight to the menu when a DVD starts.
Combine that with automatic ad-skipping of TV programs (good but not quite perfect), and the magic fwd-30, back-5 buttons on the remote, my tv and video experience is very satisfying. Signal to noise ratio is approaching infinity :-)
Family Movie Act of 2005 - Exempts from copyright and trademark infringement, under certain circumstances: (1) making limited portions of the audio or video content of a motion picture for private home viewing imperceptible; or (2) the creation of technology that enables such editing. emphasis mine
But this technology is so dangerous that it had to be banned from public possession??!! Hoarders and speculators unite! We must not allow this! What a sick bunch.
What?
I think this whole sway toward unskippable ads/promos/trailers at the top of a DVD is the reason I just can't bring myself to replace my old Afreey (rebadged Sampo) DVD player I bought years ago.
Thanks to a firmware hacking project for old Sampo players, I've been able to re-flash it to allow me simply to press Menu or Skip-> to go right from the warning at the top of the Parade of Annoyance to the DVD's main menu.
There really shouldn't be any reason this should not be allowed in all DVD players. Back in the days of VHS, we had a wicked button called FFW to make the bad things go away; last I checked, it didn't kill the video rental business.
Nothing. It is referring to a company called ClearPlay that resold DVDs at a substancial markup after having scrubbed them of non-family-friendly content. The bill just passed makes this practice legal, which is necessary because Hollywood groups are suing ClearPlay.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
Nothing was prohibiting the players, but Clearplay the company had wrote a program to skip over non-family friendly scenes. The movie industry was aghast, saying it was against the director's wishes, the vision of the film, and a violation of copyright. This new law allows them to legally strip videos without breaking copyright.
You can circumvent the region coding on a lot of DVD players, a quick search on google should provide you with a lot of information on it. And don't bother using any of the services that require you to pay for the information, just look around, you'll find it for free.
link from the article.
-- . . ramblin' . . .
I was reading through the Senate version of this bill last week, and as I recall, there's language included that basically says the bill explicitly doesn't affect skipping of commercials, etc, one way or the other. IIRC, it says you can skip through part of a work (objectionable content), but doesn't say anything about skipping whole works (which explicitly includes commercials, warnings, etc.)
I don't have this problem because I refused to buy a DVD player until I could find one that either lacked or could easily be modified to lack the "you can only do what I tell you" (AKA UOP (user operation prohibited)) "feature". So I bought a Daewoo 5700, burned a CD, and haven't had to worry about Macrovision or UOP or regions or any of that stuff.
See, the market can handle this. You just have to decide which is more important to you, your freedom, or instantaneous gratification. (It is a sad statement about our society that I have to make such a decision wrt a stupid DVD player though...)
DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink are a fantastic combination. If you are just going to be playing the disc in your computer, you can use DVD Idle Pro to remove the Prohibited User Operations.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The ads can be FAST FORWARDED through in a few seconds if you peg the fast forward.
I had the same problem with an unskippable ad on a DVD a few years ago and tried to FFWD through the FBI warning and the ad. Voila! A few seconds to the main menu.
Annoying? Absofuckinglutely, and I wish there was a law against ads on DVDs, but when there's a buck to be made...
I am studying a foriegn language, and purchased movies from amazon.fr to help learn listening to the language. If I set my DVD drive to region 2 to watch a French movie, then later back to region 1 to watch an USA movie, one I do that 5 times my DVD locks so I can't change the region on it. WHY? The movies I am buying from France are not even available in the USA.
Not that it's a solution to the underlying problem, but you should check out amazon.ca for French movies. They have a sizeable selection of French-only stuff, and Canadian DVDs are region-1, just like the US. They're also NTSC, so your TV and DVD player should handle them too.
Seamless branching is anything but. It's essentially the same as the layer change. So if it's done well, between scenes, it's barely noticable, but you're not going to be able to use it in the middle of scenes with most players if you want to avoid a jarring pause. If the players had read ahead buffers it could be done, but AFAIK few to none do.
You'd be surprised, actually. The branching on the Alien Quadrilogy and The Incredibles was flawless. What's that, you say? No branching on The Incredbiles you say? Try watching it in another language and check out the opening sequence (or just about any scene that had text in-picture). You'll see a different title number listed, but you can bet they didn't encode the full movie twice on the same disc. Same goes for any of the Alien movies for Director vs Theatrical.
This sig intentionally left justified.
If I ever bought -- with my own money, earned by my own hard graft -- a DVD that had adverts on the beginning that refused to skip, I would take it right back to the store and demand a refund. If I press the fast-forward button, I expect my DVD recorder to honour that. I can fast-forward through the adverts on my home-made recordings {when I didn't sit through the show just pausing them out} and I expect to be able to fast-forward through adverts on other people's recordings, too. I do not see anything unreasonable about this expectation.
If the player doesn't fast-forward when you press the fast-forward button, then something is obviously broken. If changing the batteries in the remote causes it to fast-forward when you press the fast-forward button, then that to my mind proves the batteries were faulty. So if you have to change the DVD to make the player fast-forward when you press the fast-forward button, I'd say it's the disc itself that is faulty.
I think everyone should start demanding refunds on broken DVDs that don't fast-forward properly, and/or on broken DVD players with fast-forward buttons that don't work -- and threatening to sue for time wasted watching unskippable content. After all, our time is worth money, yes?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Nothing was prohibiting the players
No law was stopping players to ignore User Operation Prohibitions, but the DVDCA's licensing. You can't build a licensed DVD player that allows the user to skip over 'unskippable' content, turn off 'mandatory' subtitles or other annoyances, much in the same way region coding or macrovision copy protection on the analog signals for css encoded discs are required.
Google for "preventable user operations" or PUOP's.
You can have sections on your DVD where pressing the Title, or Menu button is ignored, likewise fast-forward or whatever.
This is usually to FORCE you to have to sit through a certain section, most usually an advert.
The reason you don't see the problem is that you haven't hired one of those DVDs yet.
IIRC, the first time this hit in anger was with the Region 1 copy of "The Sixth Sense" - well, it was the first time I heard about it and there was quite the uproar.
However, I think the article pertains to sections within content that can be skipped, and not to the removal of PUOP's - so in other words, I doubt this would have the desired effect.
Of course there is. Popcorn.
For excellent DVD ripping use MacTheRipper.
For excellent ripping to divx, HandBrake.
It's a freakin' Mac, multimedia editing is its home territory.
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