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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.'"
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!!!!
mencoder dvd:// -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o thematrix.avi
Oops wrong window
find / -iname life 2>
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.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Does this mean that the guy I saw at the Best Buy buying 3 spindles of blank DVDs was, in fact, about to record 160 discs full of porn? I'd think he'd get carpal tunnel....
From changing out the discs repeatedly, of course.
...about half of all downloaded DVDs are pornography.
And the other half are liars.
What?
I'm not sure people share their porn the way they share their music.
Sounds like you need new friends.
1.5% of users said they copied DVDs.
12.5% of users said they didn't copy DVDs
86% of users shifted their eyes back and forth, coughed and changed the subject
UTF-8: There and Back Again
maybe only 1.5% realize they have DVD burning software installed for their cup holder
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Either the New York Times, who says that very few people copy and burn DVDs and the people who download DVDs are as likely to be getting porn as not, or the MPAA, who says that movie piracy is rampant and costing the movie industry billions (yes, with a B) of dollars a year.
I know which side I'm betting on.
Rob
Of course very few people copy dvds. It would be rather silly for ALL of us to rip them before putting them up on bittorrent.
From TFA, this study was released by "the NPD Group, a research group that has monitored the behavior of 12,000 Americans with software on their computers."
I'd bet the DVD copying rate is even lower among those Americans who do not have software on their computers.
I buy all my DVDs, usually either on release day when they are heavily discounted or from online sellers (like deep discount dvd) when I can get most for 6 dollars or less. Yeah I know I am indirectly supporting the evil MPAA but the fact is I want these movies and its not worth the risk to just buy them, especially when I get them for such a great price. I usually buy odd movies; like those people like us like; and series (again those people here are more likely to buy) that don't hold their price original prices very long.
I tried many of the copy programs, have downloaded torrents of current series, and all that. Now I record on the fly with the tivo-clone what series I want and keep them around till the dvd comes out and gets to a ok price. For the most part copying DVDs was more of a novelty to me and others, its the "oh, I did that when I was a kid" type stuff that just isn't worth the hassle or civil penalties to do anymore
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
...reminds me of this thing men and women used to do together, before the internet, before the dark times. Sit around and talk about how they wished there was some way they could share all their porn?Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
That's all I'm going to say.
(Yeah, it's Mac and Linux only, and I think the Linux version doesn't have a GUI yet. Thankfully, I don't care.)
Actually copying a DVD, as in making a disc from another disc, seems like a waste of time. It's like copying CDs. Who uses CDs anymore? The price of storage is low enough that I can have my entire movie and video collection on my MythTV box, ready to watch with just a few presses of the remote.
(And yeah, I know MythTV will supposedly rip DVDs itself, but I've never gotten it to work correctly. Everything that has to do with DVDs is flaky in MythTV, IMO, probably because it's hard to even discuss anything about encrypted playback without people wigging out because of the DMCA. It's easier to just encode them on a Mac and then shove them onto the Myth box over the network.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What? If you have a computer with a dvd writer, surely you also have something like nero installed. Maybe I've been away from windows for too long, but I don't remember seeing some form of protection to do a 1:1 copy of a DVD. Thinking about it, that would have made sense. Is there such a protection in commercial burning application?
Yes, there is. Although the people who put together CSS weren't incredibly bright, they weren't that stupid, either.
First, most commercial programs like Nero won't even make an image of an encrypted DVD. There's no technical limitation preventing them from doing so, but they just stop you. I think that's a lawyer-imposed limit.
Anyway, if you did make a block-by-block copy of an encrypted DVD, and burn it to a new disc, it would not play back on normal hardware. This is because the key to the content is stored on the disc in a special location, which is always made unwritable on blank DVDs. (Actually, I'm not sure if it's that the blanks don't let you write there, or if the consumer writers aren't capable of writing there, or both.) But anyway, you can copy all the encrypted data, but without the key your player will just barf on it.
However, DVD playback systems that don't rely on retrieving the key from the disc will play it just fine -- this includes every DVD player on Linux that I'm aware of, once you get the libdvdcss package installed. This is because if the drive fails to hand over the key, libdvdcss will proceed and recover the key through several other methods (one of which is just brute force, and is pretty speedy because of the braindead way CSS is implemented).
Apple's "DVD Player" application will also play an encrypted VIDEO_TS folder, even if it's not on a disc with the key on it. (Though I've never tried it off of a DVD-R disc; it will work just fine if you copy the VIDEO_TS folder from a DVD to your hard drive and play it, which is nice if you want to watch a movie on an airplane without draining your battery or something.)
But anyway, one of the only things that CSS actually does is prevent 1:1 copying onto DVD-R discs. Or at least it did until it was cracked eight ways from Sunday. (The biggest thing that stops people from copying movies, or stopped them while it was still an interesting thing to do [before you could go out and get hard drives at a lower cost-per-MB], was that most feature films won't fit on a 4.7GB DVD blank.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Overheard in a conversation between an MPAA lobbyist and a US Senator:
That 1.5% statistic is very misleading. According to my client (the MPAA), people's connections have become 12 times faster than dialup, so the real figure is 18%. And as more PC's start to have dual core processors, the MPAA forecasts this number to approach 36%.
Now when you further consider that PC screens have increased from 15" to 24" over the past few years, the figure becomes 92%.
And finally, when the 40% increase in brightness of modern displays is taken into consideration, we see that a whopping 129% of people are downloading movies illegally.
Given this vast recent upswing in piracy rates, we urge you to direct all efforts of the FBI, DHS and CIA towards stopping this national economic threat.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
In 99% of cases, this is absurdly easy. In fact, your OS already comes with all the tools you need to rip, and VLC will play the ripped image.
If you're on Windows, just right-click your DVD drive, "open", and copy all the files to a folder on your hard drive. If you're on OS X, open Disk Utility, click your DVD drive, and choose "Create Image", and choose a CD image format (not HFS or anything, and not compressed). If you're on Linux, "cp /dev/dvd foo.img" will create an image called "foo.img".
If these work at all, they will generally give you a disk image that can be used in place of the original disk. On Linux, just configure your favorite DVD player to use that file as the DVD device. For recent versions of VLC, you can simply open a dvd:// URL that points to the file (or folder, using the Windows way) -- so you do dvd:///home/somebody/movies/matrix.img or something. On Windows, probably dvd://c:/some/where... In any case, the easy way is to browse for it as if opening a file, then change file:// to dvd://
Basically, if VLC can play the DVD in the first place, than your OS (I don't care what OS it is) already comes with the tools to rip an image that will play with VLC. The downside is it does no compression and no decryption, so you can't burn this image directly, and it probably uses about 8 gigs of hard disk space.
The process of re-encoding is a bit longer, but not incredibly hard to get right. And I've discovered that ripping is really fast, encoding will take all night, but downloading in the same quality might take a few days -- and also, both ripping and encoding can be put on a low priority and run while I do other things, but downloading invariably lags me.
The hardest part is authoring an actual DVD that will play on an off-the-shelf player, but a video card with TV out is pretty cheap, and the best screen I own is my monitor anyway. So I usually just watch it once, and if I really want to keep it, I encode to h.264, sometimes turn the ac3 into Vorbis (and sometimes not, depends what the original quality is like and how much I like that movie), then combine that with the subtitles and chapters ripped straight off the DVD image. I end up with an mkv that's around 300-500 megs. If I find myself doing this enough, I'll probably write a script to automate it, but I've discovered a process that never seems to get the AV out of sync.
In any case, I don't bother unless I have the original DVD. But it's nice, I mean, downloading takes days and days, and there's the possibility of being caught and fined (or worse). Ripping means I just borrow the DVD from roommates for about 15 mins, then give it back, and the only way I get caught is if they seize my computer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In the same year, DVD sales numbered 1.3247 billion (page 28) in the U.S. alone, at an average price of $22.40 each (page 33). That works out to $29.7 billion in DVD revenue in the U.S. U.S. theatrical sales by comparison were $9.49 billion (page 4). DVD sales in the U.S. alone exceed worlwide theatrical sales.
Per film released (yeah I know they're not the same films, but we're doing an annual tally here) that works out to $48.9 million per film, for the U.S. alone. If the sale ratio of theatrical vs. DVD sales in the U.S. holds for the rest of the world (unlikely, but let's just say), then global DVD sales would be $80.8 billion, or $133 million per flim.
So to recap for 2006:
# of releases: 607
US theatrical sales: $9.49 billion
Global theatrical sales: $25.82 billion
US DVD sales: $29.7 billion
Global DVD sales (hypothetical): $80.8 billion
Average cost to make each film: $65.8 million
Average theatrical sales per film released: $42.5 million
Average DVD sales per film released (hypothetical): $133 million
I think it's safe to say that DVD sales are the lion's share of their revenue. The theater side of the industry could disappear entirely and there's probably still plenty of room for profit. Draw what conclusions you will from this about the RIAA's pricing. (Also note that the $10 DVD is a myth - yes some are sold for $10, but the average price is about the same as a music CD.)
One final footnote. The MPAA only claims $6.1 billion in losses to piracy (PDF warning) in 2005. So they're claiming piracy only accounts for 6%-11% of their total sales (depending on what figure you use for DVD sales). The RIAA claims $4.5 billion in piracy losses in 2005 versus $12.3 billion in total retail music sales. A whopping 37%