Fewer People Copy DVDs Than Once Thought

MasterOfMagic writes "According to a survey reported at the NY Times, very few people actually have and use DVD copying software. The survey reports that only 1.5 percent of computer users have DVD copying software, and of those 1.5%, 2/3rds of them don't even use it. The survey also revealed that users were more likely to download DVDs than copy DVDs that they borrowed or rented, and that about half of all downloaded DVDs are pornography. According to the survey's lead analyst, 'With music, part of the appeal is sharing your own playlists and compilations with your friends ... I'm not sure people share their porn the way they share their music.'"

Comments

Really not surprised

[wawannem]

To me, the appeal of a movie is seeing it, not seeing it over and over again. If a friend has a movie I'd like to watch, I'll borrow the DVD, watch the movie and give it back to him. Even the movies I like, I can't see myself copying... Now my kids on the other hand... Put it this way, if I have to watch Monsters, Inc. one more time!!!!

Re:Really not surprised

[Captain Splendid]

Well, that and DVDs, unlike CDs, are priced decently. You can do a lot of DVD buying and still not go over $10 a piece, whereas you need to shell out $20 easy for a CD. can't believe the RIAA hasn't figured this out yet.

Re:Really not surprised

[LordNimon]

The cost of a movie is frequently paid (at least, for the most part) when the movie is in the theaters. By the time the DVD is made, there's already been significant revenue to cover the costs. With a CD, however, the only revenue is generated only once the CD is sold.

Re:Really not surprised

[Fallingcow]

Uhh.....

Concerts?

Licensing for any and all commercial uses of any tracks from the disc?

CD sales are far from the only revenues generated by the music on a given CD, especially if it's at all popular.

Yeah, some artists don't do concerts and aren't popular enough to get any licensing deals, but I don't think that very many of them are with the RIAA anyway...

Re:Really not surprised

[SerpentMage]

You hit it right on the head here. It is amazing a movie that typically costs X million to produce costs about as much as a CD. Somewhere, somebody is not understanding the economics of this. I personally have a huge DVD collection and do watch films multiple times. And I even buy TV Series on DVD, especially since many series missing one or two episodes on TV means you loose a thread. And the last reason why I buy DVD's is because burning or copying a DVD takes AGES! To get a similar quality you have a huge honken file.

Re:Really not surprised

[Wavicle]

Well, kids are a great example of why I would like to START ripping DVDs.

I can tune out the 421st showing of Dumbo. But what I have trouble tuning out are the 10 minutes of advertisements that Disney tacks on IN FRONT of Dumbo. There is a 5 second window when I can press a button on the remote to skip the advertisements, if I miss it, I must either watch the advertisements, or eject/inject the disc again and sit through the FBI warning (doesn't hold on all players, one of my players can jump to the root menu after the advertisements start).

I would really like to rip a copy of Dumbo that starts playing as soon as I put the disc in, removes macrovision and encryption. I'd also like to transcode it to fit on a 4.7GB DVD. Yes, I know it sounds like I want to pirate the movie, but really I just want control over how I watch a movie I legally paid for! (okay, that's a little white lie, my mother bought the kids the Dumbo movie.)

Can anybody point me at a utility (Linux or Windows, I have both) that does this without me having to baby step it through 5 different utilities and a hundred command line options?

Re:Really not surprised

[Grym]

At the point of being redundant, this is again because the DVD is priced at the optimal point on the supply/demand curve -- and not based on the cost of the plastics or even the production costs.

Okay... so when people stop buying CDs in droves (often while citing the price of CDs relative to other goods in their lives), what does that have to say about the location of the current price of CDs on their supply-demand curve?

-Grym

That's because it is very hard to do...

[maillemaker]

I played around with at least 6 different free applications that purported to, in conjunction with DeCSS, rip and copy DVDs, so as to archive DVDs I already own in my collection, and safegaurd the originals from getting scratched.

I can't even get the damn ripping part to work. Without fail, either the video is crappy or the audio is out of sync with the video.

Then we get to the burning part. It seems a crap-shoot as to whether or not the finished burn will actually work. DVDs I've burned seem to play OK in my new $30 Walmart DVD player, but pixellate and stop playing on my 1998 vintage RCA DVD player.

So I quit trying. I mean it takes hours to rip and burn, and in the end it was a crap-shoot as to whether or not the DVD would actually play.

It's easier to download and play off of the hard drive.

Really?

[morari]

No one surveyed me... Why do you think I pay for NetFlix?

WHAT KIND of IDIOTIC headline is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fewer People Copy DVDs Than Once Thought

Is this what Slashdot has come to? PLEASE. Next topic up, "Some people think that there are more dolphins than whales in the ocean"

This site is run by morons.