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?"

Comments

Classfication flags

[fembots]

Will we be seeing movies with built-in flags, so that parents only need to configure the player to skip [sex(base 1/2/3/4)], [violance(blood 1/2/3/4)] etc, it'll be similar to the rating/parental card on cable TVs except with better, more specific control over the content.

Parents may be more likely pay a bit more for these "pre-screened" DVDs than using ClearPlay's service - A bite-back from the movie industry?

Re:Classfication flags

[NanoGator]

"The movie industry is fighting this tooth and nail. Something about destroying the directors vision or some junk. Don't expect DVDs to come with this standard."

Why would that bother them? It would (potentially) mean they can make their vision happen the way they like, and the user can automatically water it down to their tastes. Personally, I don't have a problem with this. If I made a movie that satisfied my vision, and some people wanted to view a worse version of it, fine with me. It beats having to shoe-horn it into a lower rating.

I'm thinking about Robocop right now. The original cut of it earned an X-Rating for violence. They had to cut scenes out to get it down to R. They made the X-Rated version available on DVD. I watched it, and I couldn't believe what altering it did to some of the scenes. In one case, it actually made a scene a lot scarier. Remember when ED-209 blew away an executive? In the theatrical version, it basically opened fire on him and stopped when he died. It looked very cold-blooded. In the original version, it opened fire and blew the guy onto a table. It then kept firing over and over and over and over again. Despite all the blood spraying into the air, it was actually kind of funny. Stupid thing just kept on firing even though dude was dead. But... the blood. That scene had to go. What was once a humurous scene showing an insanely bad bug (Microsoft, anyone?) turned into a depiction of an evil robot.

I would imagine that Paul Verhoeven would have much preferred to have been able to release one DVD with user controlled settings.

Re:Classfication flags

[Anonymous Coward]

so it's capitalism. We can't force the studios to make DVD's with different version options on the disk. The bill the house passed is to stop the studios from removing your ability to do it yourself.

If I want to program my DVD to skip all the scenes I don't like in a movie (that I bought) that should be my right. The studios wanting to stop me from doing that was right up there with the idea that going to the john during TV commercials was "stealing". You made your movie. Fine I bought it. I don't like parts of it and I'm going to skip them. Deal with it.

You mean like

[qurk]

I spent a $100 premium on shipping and on the esoteric faster over what guys in Japan would have to pay, now that I have it because I bought it..... Can I actually put it in my DVD player and push play and watch it? Yes I know I am outside of that region. I payed a premium to be able to have it in hands. Can I watch it? Or do I need to buy another DVD player just to not circumvent the laws. What the hell.

Re:You mean like

[zakezuke]

I spent a $100 premium on shipping and on the esoteric faster over what guys in Japan would have to pay, now that I have it because I bought it....

1. Get a region free player. Many start under $50 in the US, other countries you can hardly buy a player that supports region restrictions.
2. Copy that disc. ANYdvd springs to mind.
3. Move to the region of your disc, or to a region that doesn't sell crippled players.

Region Codes serve no purpose but to restrict free trade. Many claim it's in violation of the WTO and I for one would love to see this verified.
It results in market for region free players and pirated discs esp in countries that made the sale of non region free players illegal like NZ.

The ethics of ads-skipping

[Lord Satri]

I was planning to try a post on this issue, but this article is perfect. These DVDs would allow to skip ads: how does this stands in terms of ethics?

Personally, I use ad-blocking in browsers, if I had a TV (I don't :-), I would not feel bad about using Tivo. I wouldn't feel bad either to use this DVD feature the article is about.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend, he was telling me that by using ad-blocking on the web, I was treatening good wepages themselves by denying them their source of revenue to pay for bandwitdh et al. Same story with the DVD and Tivo, the price would go up since the ads would have no effect. He saif ad-blocking is legal, but wrong in terms of ethics. I disagree, I believe ad-blocking websites will make things evolve and improve. Yes, maybe -some- free websites could be jeopardized, but that's how life is.

What do you think?!

Re:The ethics of ads-skipping

[Wizarth]

Assuming that HBO is some sort of cable channel or company, then a similar thing happened over here. Basically, the cable companies made a HUGE advertising campaign about how good cable (and the movie channels in particular) were because they didn't need ads, they made their money off subscription fees.

Fast forward to today. As many ads as free-to-air, although I think they still play movies in one piece... on the pay-extra movie channels.

In terms of ad-blocking, remember: They are generally paid per click, not per view, but sign-up for X views. If there was no chance you'd have clicked the ad, then they have lost nothing, and have not wasted a pre-paid impression. That said, I try and only adblock servers I don't like, and leave the ones I don't mind too much, rather then blocking them all indiscriminately. Especially if it's a good site that gives good content for free (such as many amateur web comics).

For reference: I'm Australia, referring to Optus/Austel/Foxtel, and I am not a customer (or consumer) of cable TV.

Unskippable Trailers and Ads suck...

[Anonymous Coward]

Raise your hand if you've ever bought or rented DVD with 10+ minutes of unskippable trailers and/or ads at the beginning. It's apparently something they started doing on various new releases, and it pissed me off so much that I stopped renting new releases altogether. I don't bother renting anything made after ~2002 anymore because I got one-too-many that tried to force me to watch a bunch of BS at the beginning (it didn't work -- I took the movies back and traded them in for old releases).

Imagine the pain when you have to watch a movie in two or three sittings (due to time constraints), and every time you start the movie back up you have to sit through the same goddamn 15 minutes of ads...

Anyone want to compose a list of new releases to avoid because of unskippable trailers. Here are the two that my family got burned with:

Stepford Wives (the new one)
Shrek II

Anyone have recommendations for new release rentals that *don't* have unskippable trailers? I kinda want to see Hero and House of Hidden Daggers. Anyone know if they have unskippable trailers?

Why was it needed?

[Rufus88]

aimed at allowing your DVD to skip past nude scenes and the like.

Before the bill, what exactly was prohibiting DVD players from doing this?

Re:Makes no sense

[Neil Rubin]

But can anyone tell me how this bill is related to punishing prerelease filesharers?

Strangely enough, a single bill can change the copyright law in more than one way. For what it is worth, this bill also reauthorized funding for the National Film Preservation Foundation and made it legal for libraries to copy films, music, and images during the last 20 years of copyright protection (remember that the term was extended 20 years by the Sonny Bono Act) for archival purposes.

Of course, you could have just clicked on the link to the bill in the article if you wanted to figure this out.

Re:Makes sense

[goneutt]

Thats why I've copied most of my DVD's, even the ones I own. If they expect me to wait through the five minutes of commercials they are wrong. The trick is to remove the "Prohibited user options" while making the copy.

A few weeks ago I rented a title that they must have been paranoid about getting copied: My normal DVD player couldn't read the disc. I had to make a copy (DVD-RW)to watch it.

ReplayTV's Comercial Advance...

[boopus]

No one seems to have pointed out that this seems to explicitly legalize Comercial Advance. ReplayTV gave up and stopped skipping comercials automatically as a compromise with the media industry. Hopefully they'll put it back in again.

Re:Makes sense

[cliffski]

Well said. There is probably a good need for a website that lets people rate DVDs, purely on the content that is unskippable. If I got to amazon to buy a movie on DVD, it would be excellent to see a feature list that detailed how many unskippable ad clips and logos etc there were on the movie, and how long each one was.
I could then make an informed decision not to purchase the advertising. If this was commonplace, companies would be able to do some split A/B testing and realise just how poorly this unskippable crap affects their sales.

Re:Won't work that way

[dave_mcmillen]

I HATE the previews on DVD's that can not be skipped over. I preffer previews to be on a DVD in a "bonus" section. If the preview is forced on me, I get very frustrated, I have zero interest in what I am watching.

I hear ya!

I recently had an odd experience: my wife bought a DVD for our daughter (Mulan 2) from a second-hand bookstore. It was cheap, and after viewing it, I thought it must be a copy rather than an official version. Analyzing why I thought so, I realized that it was because it didn't have much crap at the beginning, and what there was, you were allowed to skip over. Can't possibly be an official studio release, if you're that free to choose what you watch . . . Gave me a bit of chill to realize that this was the way to tell the difference -- but if starts making enough of a difference to people's purchasing decisions, it should give the studios a chill, too.

why the assumption of missing parents?

[hawk]

Assuming that the parents are missing while the children watch is entirely missing the point.

Unless you've already watched the movie a few times, you'd be hard pressed to use your controls to skip the parts that you not only don't want your kids to see, but don't want to see yourself. ALso, you'll generally be limited to fast-forward in this regard, leaving the nudity, sex, and exploding bodies there to view.

My 14 year old enjoys the same kind of SF and fantasy movies that I do. Many, though, toss in their share of gratuitious nudity and sex that make the movie inappropriate for her now (and particularly 4 years ago). She watches these with me, but currently it's a "turn your head while I fast forward" situation. (And frequently, she's faster than I am [And, yes, I *am* glad that she still finds anything more than a brief kiss to be gross!]).

hawk, who usually finds Eddie Murphy funnier after the network censors.