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Details of Initial "Disc to Digital" Program Emerge
MojoKid writes with an excerpt from an article at Hot Hardware: "Walmart's burgeoning partnership with the Ultraviolet DRM system backed by major Hollywood studios and their plans to 'assist' customers in registering DVDs with the Ultraviolet system, made headlines not long ago. Walmart has also since announced additional details to the program and it's a clever attempt to drive more users to Vudu, Walmart's subsidiary movie streaming service. Here's how the service works. 'Starting April 16th, 2012 in more than 3,500 stores, Walmart customers will be able to bring their DVD and Blu-ray collections to Walmart and receive digital access to their favorite titles from the partnering studios. An equal conversion for standard DVDs and Blu-ray discs will be $2. Standard DVDs can be upgraded to High-Def (HD) for $5.' Anyone who doesn't have a Vudu account will have one created for them as part of this process. That's part of the genius to the plan. If customers embrace the offer, Walmart signs up hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people for Vudu. Even better, from Walmart's perspective, is that first-time users who pony up $2 for a digital version of their DVDs are effectively paying to create Vudu accounts."
They'll let me pay them for the privilege of watching something I already own in a different format? How magnanimous of them.
... they let me trade in a DVD for a DRM-free 10-15GB h.264 MKV with the digital HD audio track. I'll happily pay money for that because it adds value for me. I could just buy the Bluray but this would save me filling up my house with those infernal things and would save me a fair chunk of transcoding time. I don't even care if you watermark the hell out of them (if the watermarks aren't visible) - just as long as they're DRM-free, so I can use them how I like.
I'm not going to spend extra money so I can trade one crappy format for another.
And just remember TPB offers this service for free. That's who you're competing against.
I'm not so sure... I got a couple big hard drives and started ripping my stuff and storing it on a NAS. It's pretty time consuming. I got about 30 or 40 movies done, but haven't done any in a while. There's a lot of messing around that I had to do to get it work right. I find that I have to use separate programs for ripping and conversion, because many discs have bad sectors (intentionally) to try to throw off less intelligent ripping programs. Not only that, but I found I got varying results. Some videos have audio out of sync even if I used the same settings that worked for all the other discs. A couple bucks a disk isn't that much when you consider how much work is involved. A technical person who also happens to make a lot of money (not uncommon) who doesn't want to waste a ton of free time converting DVDs could easily go for this. Although I'd think it would be much more palatable if you could also bring in a hard drive and get copies of the movies for your own use, and not restrict the viewing to online only.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That would be an actual content upgrade, worth a token payment.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The timing on this is WAAAY too coincidental...that's because the studios rolled this out now so that they could tell the Librarian of Congress that there exists a commercial ability to rip DVDs to digital files for use in the iOS infrastructure and therefore Exemption Class 10 and the position of Public Knowledge is unnecessary. Read the comments and replies, you'll see.
Which makes this all the more insidious. They could have rolled this AGES ago, but they're doing it now to stop American consumers from exercising their Free Use rights for another 3 years...during which, I'm sure, there will be another shift in their business strategy that they will take advantage of to bilk consumers. Ironically, the reason they gave during the arguing of the DMCA for this provision was NOT anti-consumer; instead it was compliance with licensing of hardware manufacturers. How thin that veil was! Because now they're back transparently arguing against the consumer. This needs to stop NOW! The studios stood by and watched the revolution; their loss. Consumers have hundreds/thousands of dollars of DVDs and Blu-rays and capable hardware to do the conversions at their fingertips, just as with CDs and iTunes. Exempt the DMCA and give us the ability to exercise our rights without being labeled "pirates".
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
You must be using windows to try to rip the movie.
I set up a FreeNAS server to share the drive. I then set up a second system to do the conversion.
Both my desktop and the conversion server (Linux) use dvdbackup to backup the dvd to the NAS. I can share it as is, but it takes a lot of space to store the whole backup (4 to 8 gb) So I queue the backup for conversion to xvid/avi on the conversion server. The xvid conversion is done with omgrip http://ogmrip.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
It processes about 10 dvd's a day with no cropping and no down scaling of the movie and the file size fixed at 1024m. I can fill the drive holding the dvd backups in an afternoon and have it rip the whole week with out adding to it. I have no sound sync issues and only a small number of really new DVD's will not read and backup. I have reported the errors to dvdbackup so I assume they will get it fixed.
I have 169 of my dvd's ripped and still have 580 to go.
All in all, I spend my spare time on Saturday doing dvdbackups (About 7 hours total for the day) and then spend about an hour a day moving the completed movies to the Movie directory and removing the dvd backup once it is done.
With those two pieces of software I have almost no messing around to do, simple set up a profile to set the xvid size, audio settings (Dolby 5.1), and turn off cropping.
All of my streaming is done to a Boxee Box.
Simple, easy, works almost every time (Total failure is about 10 dvd's so far.), no 2$ and no need for the internet connection to watch a movie.
All in all, I spend my spare time on Saturday doing dvdbackups (About 7 hours total for the day) and then spend about an hour a day moving the completed movies to the Movie directory and removing the dvd backup once it is done.
I think this quote reinforces GP's point - why spend free time fiddling about with all of this when you could pay somebody else a few dollars to do it for you? My Saturdays are probably my most precious resource, I am very careful about how I spend them, as I'm sure most working people are.
I mean seriously, 14 hours per week simply to amass a collection of video files you probably don't have any remaining free time to sit down and watch? You're mad...