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DVDs, Blu-Rays To Show 20-Second Unskippable Govt. Warnings
bonch writes "DVDs and Blu-Rays will begin displaying two unskippable anti-piracy screens, each 10 seconds long, shown back-to-back. Six studios have agreed to begin using the new notices. Of course, pirated versions won't contain these 20-second notices; however, an ICE spokesman says the intent isn't to deter piracy but to educate the public."
To do what? Download the pirated copies so they don't have to watch the unskippable content?
pirated copies dont have annoying 20 second warnings and dont cost any money. go pirates!
I think of this: Video Pirates
I have kids and I prefer thing that start right away then the real version I purchase. So I create a legal copy, remove eveything but the main movie and here I go!
As with DRMed music, the pirates will win because they OFFER A BETTER PRODUCT.
If the intent is not to deter piracy, what are they educating the public about? How to rip their disks to avoid the warning?
There must be an enormous cost associated with this - 20 seconds multiplied by every time a DVD is played sounds like a lot of wasted time, and according to ICE, it's not even supposed to deter piracy. So what's the point?
This handy flow chart explains why. The **AA guys are desperately trying to put themselves out of business. See also The Oatmeal about why HBO is trying to do the same thing to people wanting to buy Game of Thrones .
Dog is my co-pilot.
People who will see that screen _already_ have bought an original DVD...
drmad
Just one more reason to not buy any preview-infested Blu-Ray discs and just use my $$ to stream videos from the internet.
Wonderful. Yet ANOTHER reason to never buy another movie on DVD or Blu Ray again. Congratulations, movie studios on pissing off even more of your PAYING CUSTOMERS. I mean, really -- at this point are you intentionally trying to put yourselves out of business?
Here in the Netherlands, where it is perfectly legal to download a movie (can't upload though) we have these since VHS... First a FBI warning, an institute that as absolutely no rights or business here, then a RIAA warning (again, no business here) and then the Dutch 'Brein' Warning... And then a couple of trailers I have on interest in... All in all you're going to lose between 5 and 10 minutes of your life being told lies that piracy is stealing (which of course it isn't) Man, I the only movie I ever bought was the Godfather collection, v2000, VHS and DVD... Because those are the only 3 movies good enough to tolerate that shit! (Although in practice, I just watch the torrent....)
When I see this the message I get is
"If you avoided paying for this then you would not have to see this stupid message"
I love how the *AA are intentionally putting themselves out of business.
There can be no other reason.
Music sales are up, movies are still grossing record revenues, Netflix is successful, etc. They keep trying to tell us piracy is bad.
No, piracy offers me a better product. No revoked keys, no work involved in playing my content, I can put it where I want, use it how I want, etc.i
Fucking idiots.
If you still want to keep things above board (for the creators, not the leeching middlemen), just rip the disks before you watch them. Yeh, it's a good 5 minutes and a bit of a hassle, and totally illegal due to DMCA, but you never have to sit through any of the crap they shove on the disks these days again, like these warnings, trailers, or flashy menus. Obviously pirates don't have this problem.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Consider an open hardware project consisting of an ARM board booting from flash and running Linux which has the sole purpose of playing DVDs and Bluerays. Couple it with a power supply, BD drive, and chassis; and the genie of I-can-do-whatever-I-damn-well-please-with-my-disk is forever out of the bottle. Who here would buy such a thing?
You mean senselessly beat and pound on the people who already got the message. As futile and pointless as a preacher screaming to the congregation that they need to "accept Jesus" when they're already in the church.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Whenever I see an unskippable copyright warning on a DVD I legitimately own, the movie industry owes me another movie for free. I can't help it if the MPAA just keeps on breaching my policy.
If they really want to educate people then at least make it interesting rather than 20 seconds of dullness. Something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MgZqMx-qWw maybe? (From The IT Crowd)
---- There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.
20 seconds might be plenty of time for you to do all of that, including fuck, but the rest of us usually sit down to watch a movie after we've done all that (and I for one, last a lot longer than your few seconds... ask your Mom when you see her Sunday).
I'd prefer not to sit there for 20 seconds to be annoyed by messages that, by PAYING FOR THE MOVIE, do not actually apply to me.
Leave it to the government to advertise piracy. This is a lot like putting up a sign "Wet Paint -- Don't Touch" and we all know what people will do.
Similarly, in Utah (under President Clinton) they created the Escallante National Monument in order to "preserve" it. Of course, nobody lived out there and the only people who went out into the area that became the monument was a few ranchers and red-necks. After they announced the monument, 1,000's of people headed down there and now it is a major tourist attraction. The volunteer fire department in Boulder Utah just about went broke because drunk drivers would drive off Devils Backbone (narrow one lane road, 500 feet down on either side) and they would have to haul the cars out. Property in the area jumped from $1,000/acre to $50,000/acre. (Interestingly enough much of which was purchased by Gibb Smith who was a major figure in the Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Sierra Club not long before the national monument was announced.) All in all, declaring the national monument was perhaps the worst thing that could happen to preserve the "wildernessness" of the land itself.
Putting an ad at the beginning of every movie that says: "Don't pirate me" simply says: "Pirate Me" or: "You could have downloaded this from the Pirate Bay for Free."
put a one time use web entered data key at the end of OPTIONAL previews for a 50% discount on a future movie ticket (only valid on some movies, like the ones the expect to bomb anyways and need extra audience).
This says a) thanks for buying the disk, and b) thanks for watching the OPTIONAL previews.
It would make the buyer feel good and it would get them extra audience for normally losy movies. And it would get them web registrations of users. ((I hate doing the registration stuff, so mine would end up unused or I would pass the number to someone else, but I would still feel good about it rather than the current system))
They are actively punishing people for purchasing. The length of time of the punishment is not relevant. Pirating it is the only sane option. Paying for punishment is something only a few fetishists participate in.
Learn to love Alaska
I don't feel morally righteous or justified in downloading pirated shows, but it's just so damn convenient.
Yeah... because getting upset over principles when it is just easier to settle for less and wait 20 seconds is so much easier.
The more you are willing to settle for shit the more you will find you are eating it more often.
It's too much for me when it's completely pointless, yes. Quit wasting my time.
"What, 2 minutes too much for you? There are 24 hours in a day!"
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Good enough to post twice. I think I will post it to my facebook status... :)
VHS is better than DVD
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
I wish someone would craft a carefully worded Proposition for California which would make any unskipable content on media which is sold or rented unconstitional... Something about not being allowed to accuse people of crimes without evidence that they are at least thinking of committing the crime.
It would make for such a fun round of election ads - the more the studios argue that it is a good thing the more the population would be reminded just how irritating these warnings are.
Regards,
-Jeremy
Enough time to set up a torrent download for the movie and let the regret of purchasing set in.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Let's turn on the disc changer, shall we? OK, what DVD is in spot #1? 20 seconds..... plus whatever other load time there is.
Ok, disc #2? Hmmm, what about #3?....
What a waste of time for zero gain, only pissing off the general public.
As if I needed another reason to never purchase content made by these companies. So now they're effectively making pirated copies not just cheaper, but better, too.
Liberty in your lifetime
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
That's 20 seconds, AFTER the 45 or so for the damn thing to boot up, 10 to figure out that there's a disc shoved in it, AFTER 10 minutes of previews for "coming soon" titles that came and went 3 years ago, BEFORE the half-dozen splash screens from all the various production and distribution companies involved with the movie, etc, etc. Conveying the EXACT SAME DAMN information that I saw when I played the last movie, and the one before that, and the one before that.
I know a number of professional Mistresses, there's more than a few people who pay for punishment.
Though, mostly, it's negotiated in advance what is acceptable. Why is there no safe word for all this rubbish?
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Maybe this is the goal. If people stop buying the DVDs, then there will be no one to rip them and upload the files to The Pirate Bay or some other torrent site. Piracy problem solved!
"It's a trick. Get an axe."
I'm not in the USA, yet I have to sit through FBI warnings on every DVD or Blu-ray I purchase. Yes, they're impressive official seals and look very threatening, but the FBI has absolutely no jurisdiction in this country. Why on earth don't they edit the bloody things out?!
So I'm sorry because I know what's ahead of you. And you know, it's not the waiting that is annoying. It is the fact that I bought a DVD with *my* money thereby (at least I believed) owning it, and yet I am being forced to watch something I would prefer to skip. Again and again and again. If you are one of the people here who thinks it won't be annoying, then speak to me in a year's time when you've seen the same damn message 500 times.
To the idiots who decided to put these messages up in the first place: Nothing makes me want to pirate more than these messages. I am not pro-pirate, but you are making your product *worse* than I can get for free. Why make people who are doing the right thing already sit through a bunch of your preachy bullshit?
Gosh, I feel smarter already.
-- Sig under construction...
My old copy of Demolition Man on DVD has this stuff right. You put it in, the movie starts. There's minimal nonsense. No previews, no menus, just movie. The movie is the only thing I care about anyway, so this is great.
These days they're just annoying. As usual Hollywood is working hard to make the pirate version superior to the purchased one. They must be taking lessons from Ubisoft in how to chase off paying customers.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm always amused that every DVD I rent or buy in Canada has stern warnings from police forces in other countries. The day when the RCMP has their own warning before the movie is the day when I'll take it seriously.
Especially since a hell of a lot of those DVDs are pressed in Canada.
Three Squirrels
Anybody with a laptop knows it is far better to rip it and then play it back from low power silent storage than haul around easy to scratch (illegal to backup) discs that loudly whirl around wasting electricity. Plus there are all these devices without DVD or blueray on them...
If somebody sold software to rip legally purchased discs so you could easily access them... they would be shutdown.... unless it is music, where iTunes proved highly successful at doing just that.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Yes. It's my money, and as the customer I demand they not put bullshit in just to make me suffer through it.
If they can't manage that, I'll gladly not give them my money. Capitalism is grand.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
You've just spent more effort and time typing a response to somebody you don't agree with than it would have took you to simply sit through the annoying message and not worry about it. The mentality behind people who will do almost no end of legwork to get around or avoid something that they find inconvenient, but is ultimately less of an imposition on anybody, including themselves, than the effort that one would likely have to go through to avoid it is nothing less than baffling.
When you can download an entire pirated movie in less than the time it takes to sit through the warnings about piracy, then maybe you might have a point. Heck, unless it is really mainstream it probably takes you longer than that just to find a place that has a copy of it for you to download.
2 minutes is 120 seconds. Not 20.
That's not what I meant.
It's just pointless nonsense. And whether 20 seconds is annoying to someone or not will vary from person to person.
I'm compelled to wonder how you deal with things like traffic lights where you don't happen to see anybody else around.
At least traffic lights have a somewhat valid reason for being there. This is just... pointless.
Pirated versions have no annoying commercials, you can sit around and do other things while you're downloading, you don't have to go anywhere, and you don't have to pay for anything. What's the point of these commercials?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
And then come back and find the damn disk is still waiting at the "Select English or 40 Languages You Don't Speak" screen waiting for you to hit the OK button. Seriously, is it really so hard to detect the language I've already set on my Blu-Ray player and use that by default?
In any case, if "insert disk, go do something else, then watch movie" becomes a problem, I'm sure the studios will "fix" that by adding a EULA click to the Copyright warning screens.
You've just spent more effort and time typing a response to somebody you don't agree with than it would have took you to simply sit through the annoying message and not worry about it.
But... what if he likes replying to people? Perhaps it's more enjoyable than watching pointless commercials? There is a difference.
When you can download an entire pirated movie in less than the time it takes to sit through the warnings about piracy
Except that you can do other things while it's downloading, you don't have to pay, and there are no commercials. Furthermore, you don't have to leave the house.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I finally got a Bluray player last November and although I have the money to easily afford any movie I want, and would prefer to have the highest bitrate, I gave up after several movies in a row took about 5-10 minutes to start up. I even had one rental that went on for over 20 minutes. Hell, the studio identifications alone take 5 minutes. I may be willing to give the studios my money, but I can't afford to give them my time. I will not pay $40 to be annoyed when I can have the annoyless versions for free.
This puts the final nail in the Bluray coffin for me. I was on the fence and now, I will simply never buy another. Congratulations movie studios! You really know how to sell a product there.
Way to go guys. Make the versions available on bittorrent sites that much better than what you can buy. This will really encourage people to shell out their money to sit through warnings, ads and previews. Maybe if they looked at what makes people want the pirated version you'd actually be able to sell it. A) No ads, warnings, previews for movies I don't care about. B) Less clicks and handing out of personal information and jumping through hoops to get a copy. C) They play on anything, or can be transcoded easily to play on a specific device if they don't already. I'm not locked into viewing this just on a limited set of devices that I'm allowed to play it on. D) Movies are just overpriced as it is. Things are supposed to become cheaper over time (if you account for inflation) not become more expensive. E) Most movies are not very good, and nobody remembers them a year later, anyways.
Its like police with radar guns on the side of the highway stopping everybody going under the speed limit to remind them about the penalty for speeding.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
it's about making sure they public understand that "Intellectual Property" means what they think it means. They're trying (and outside of /. succeeding I think) to control the discourse and vocabulary surrounding works of art.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I don't see where he mentioned pirating content there...
But still, you automatically assumed that was the case.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I presume, then, that you perceive of lineups at a cashier as actively punishing people who choose to purchase items in the store instead of shoplift?
What? That's more out of necessity than anything else. You're not even considering intent.
What is the point of these commercials? There is none; they're simply needless.
But in the case of DVD's, you'll actually spend orders of magnitude more time and effort pirating it than you would have spent simply sitting through the warning. I trust you realize what such a choice of actions makes you look like.
You're not taking a number of factors into account: you don't have to pay (possibly a big reason here), you can do other things while it's downloading, you don't have to go anywhere to get the movie (assuming you did), and the warnings are nonexistent. The second one makes the whole "hassle" pretty much nonexistent. The fact that some people choose to pirate the content shows that they probably do not find buying it worthwhile.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Google your DVD player model. IIRC my old players 'safeword' was hitting three buttons on the front at the same time. Most of the non-name brand players have this 'feature'. New one came from the factory with noskip disabled.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Twenty seconds of clock time is not the same as twenty seconds of human time.
Imagine disturbing a heart surgeon for twenty random seconds in the middle of heart surgery.
Imagine disturbing for twenty seconds a poet reading a poem to a thousand people.
Imagine disturbing for five seconds making love to your SO.
The twenty seconds is not the thing, it's the destruction of the movie watching mindset and the hatred that colors thinking for far more than twenty seconds after.the "pick up that can!" message.
If your reaction time is over a second you should not be driving.
I have a 5-disc DVD Sony DVD player. I've had it for ages, and it's pissed me off to no end with the unskippable ads or warnings. The only reason I haven't replaced it is because it's also the head for surround-sound. My current plan is to toss the damn thing (or maybe inflict it upon some other poor soul from ebay) and buy a separate surround-sound head unit + a blu-ray player.
Finding a DVD player that doesn't have unskippables or region-locks is pretty easy, usually the cheaper brands work best.
Does anyone know of a decent blu-ray player that
a) Doesn't take 10000001 years to load
b) Doesn't prevent skipping the threats and ads sections
c) Preferable doesn't region-block
d) Is generally affordable (but if it does all the above, that's more important than cheap)
Yeah, there seems to be a whole lot of anonymous cowards jumping on people for piracy and starting childish arguments in defence of ICE in this article. Starting to get weird.
They are actively punishing people for purchasing.
In my case, I would estimate that they have cut their business from me by more than 50% with their warnings and other abuses. Every time I watch a DVD I am reminded of how much this industry detests me, a paying customer.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
For a human being, you are astonishingly clueless about human psychology. If the cashiers at your favourite store were given new instructions that, upon completion of the transaction with the person before you, they were to stand motionless holding up some inane sign about shoplifting for a full twenty seconds before beginning to assist you, I daresay you would soon find another store to frequent.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Up until the mid-1990s, it was pretty rare for a movie to hit the magical $100-million mark. Then, Disney animated features started doing that pretty regularly, and after that, most big-budget films started hitting that mark pretty consistently as well.
In 2002, Spider-Man became the first movie to hit $100 million in its opening weekend. Ten years later (almost to the day) The Avengers became the first movie to hit TWO hundred million dollars on its opening weekend, and one short week later, Wikipedia tells me that its box office grosses are THREE QUARTERS OF A BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS.
Tell me, again, how piracy is hurting the industry?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've been saying this for ten years now, but User Operation Prohibitions, just like region restrictions, on equipment that people own are simply not acceptable.
I have seen so many DVDs with unskippable previews, FBI warnings (on region 4 DVDs no less) and of course the stupid "You wouldn't steal a car.." campaign. No wonder this depiction is so accurate.
That said, I was pleasantly surprised when one DVD I rented recently had just one message that lasted about 5 seconds and simply said (paraphrasing) "For supporting the movie industry, THANK YOU". Presumably this is an attempt to give warm fuzzies (positive reinforcement) for not pirating (rather than punishment for those who do). Of course that could always end up on a ripped copy anyway but that's not the piont...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I was such a bad, naughty person before, but now I will bow to be spanked by the MPAA and the government!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
You aren't making an apples to apples comparison. You are comparing the amount of time it takes to acquire the illicit copy to sitting through the warning. However, DVDs don't magically appear in front of you. You have to go to a store to buy them, which includes travel time to a retail store, shopping, and going back, which takes a significant amount of time. In regards to effort, this will typically involve money, and that money is usually acquired as the result of a certain amount of labor.
A better comparison would be to the time it takes to open the file.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
That makes no sense. Why would the Hollywood executives that shoveled this shit down our throats complain about this?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It's not an inconvenience - it's a foot in the door.
First it's the little warning. Then it's the unskippable lecture. Then it's a required political 'lesson' - starting with something safe, like a reminder that all men must register with Selective Service. And then it becomes required that you cannot rip a legitimate copy without those government-imposed blurbs.
Bad enough there are 20 minutes of unskippable trailers on the friggin' thing, which is why I rip the things in the first place.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Get married and call me back
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I skimmed through the comments and I'd like to answer those who have the opinion that it's "just" 20 seconds, that you should get over it, that it's harder to pirate it so it's illogical.
First of all, it's not the length of time that is disturbing to me. I'm not a machine, I don't perceive every second as exactly the same amount of time. Sometimes I play a game and 3 hours go by as if it had only been 15 minutes. Sometimes I wait 15 minutes and it seems like it's been an hour. That 20 seconds of unskippable messages is disturbing because it affects the experience of watching the movie. I don't get irritated because I'm wasting 20 seconds of my incredibly precious time; I get irritated because the mega-corporation which produced this movie added an unnecessary step to watching the movie.
This isn't about how long or how short the unskippable message is. It's about the fact that it's there at all. If you accept the 20 seconds, you're saying it's okay if someone stops you for 20 seconds and makes you say "you're the boss, I'm following your orders, I won't disobey you". How would you feel if every time you went to pump gas, someone stopped you for 20 seconds and told you "it's our gas, don't steal it, alright? Swear it. Swear you won't try to steal it". And then every time you go to the grocery store, before entering, you have to stop for 20 seconds and say "I understand the food inside isn't my property. I won't try to steal it. I'll pay for it." This is what you're agreeing to if you're okay with those unskippable notices. What makes you think it won't become 30 seconds, and then eventually 40? A minute? A minute is nothing compared to 2 hours, after all. You should be able to live through that, right?
Long story short: it's not the length of the delay that's disturbing, it's the gratuitous addition of an obstacle that serves no purpose (pirates won't see it, ordinary people will just do something else until the menu appears), and it's the oppression of people's freedom to reaffirm their submission to the authorities.
I can start up a myth frontend from being completely unplugged in that amount of time. Once started, I won't have to worry about any of this nonsense no matter how many DVDs I might want to start watching.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For the Love of Dog, someone mod this anon up!
But in the case of DVD's, you'll actually spend orders of magnitude more time and effort pirating it than you would have spent simply sitting through the warning.
Apples/Oranges. Pirating a DVD is the action-equivalent of going out to buy one legitimately.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yes, why cant it detect the set language, crap HDMI allows all sorts of data and control, surely the player can detect what it, the receiver, TV and other devices are set to and select that language automatically.
Single snotball in your coffee... that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, just scoop it out with a spoon. You probably won't even notice any taste change.
If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.
Twenty seconds is longer than the average new movie's plot line.
I don't pirate Blu-rays or DVD's, I actually purchase any that I want. (I have a couple of hundred at least). However an additional 20 seconds of forced notices at the front will certainly encourage me to rethink my approach. If you want to educate me, don't try and do it by pissing me off or I will most definitely take the opposite view of what your trying to push.
You think that because you don't understand what principles are .
Irrespective of piracy, the exchange of consideration (paying for the shit) and the receipt of physical product (the fucking dvd) should allow one peaceful enjoyment reasonably expected under the spirit of copyright (those fancy legal entitlements).
I did my part paying for the DVD, and my family owns quite a large number. When Big Media sits there and thinks they can dictate how I enjoy my newly acquired legal rights to enjoy the DVD (the legal agreement between me and Big Media constructed by copyright laws), they have gone too far and become unreasonable.
They have no rational, ethical, or legal position to force me to enjoy the content in any way. That means I can media shift it, apply all the weird filters I want, and even watch the chapters out of order. It especially means I am not forced to watch any extraneous content they may have added.
When they figure out they can't actually control me and I might not act the way they want to (sit through all the bullshit before they want to play the fucking movie), they become abhorrent assholes by creating something called Prohibited User Operations. Really? Prohibit what mother fuckers? You mean I can pay $10 for the DVD and still have prohibitions which is completely contrary to the idea of peaceful enjoyment of one's property?
Now when they realize that I can bypass it and start creating laws like the DMCA and suing people in their delusional states they become enemies of the People.
So.... yeah.... I can bitch and moan about shit like this and base my discontent entirely on principles and not the fact I am inconvenienced by 20 additional seconds. It's the principles involved.
If you can't understand that, then move to someplace like Afghanistan or Pakistan for awhile, because Americans have bitched, moaned, and bled for principles in this country since it was founded.
Afghanistan will be an easy fit for you. "Sheesh.. what's with all these rude, impatient, self important jerks complaining about the Taliban forcing us to have beards? I mean all it takes is sitting back and doing nothing! How easy was that?"
DVD's are a valuable means of delivering advertisements along with product. However, in order for the ads to be valuable, the users must be forced to watch them. So, making the content unskipable is a major selling point of the format to content producers.
The fact that consumers hate it does not matter, consumers will buy it anyway since there are no ad-free alternatives at all (the force of law ensures that there are no other options, and it works perfectly).
unskippable content is nothing new and hasn't seemed to do squat. Childrens movies/shows are the worst. It's not just an FBI warning, its unskippable previews, unskippable ads for various crap, unskippable commercials for various childrens networks. I gave up. Every new DVD gets ripped, stripped to menus and movie and reburned before the kids ever see it. less than 10 minutes spent up front = hours saved at viewings. Of course now we've converted all our movies to MP4 and have them on a proper media server so discs are just a delivery method now days.
Anyway, I fail to see how MORE unskippable "education" is going to discourage anyone at this point.
Sure, ill rent it now n then... but they can go to hell if they think I will put up with this on something i OWN
And anyone who says 'oh but you down own it, you own a license' can go to hell...
Imagine the uproar if you got told AFTER you just bought a car, no you cant loan it to your friend/family, you cant use it on roads not approved by the manufacturer, and every time you got in, you had to watch a 20 second thing on why its important to use X brand parts (oh, and btw, no you cant change the colour/add in a new stereo/seat cushion) because 'its a license to use the car, not ownership)
I wonder if that translates to "Winning the hearts and minds..."
This is new. It starts a new bunch of messages _after_ you select 'play movie' from the menu.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The very last DVD I bought, years ago, had unstoppable trailers. I haven't bought a DVD since, on principle.
Good job, movie execs. You've made your products even less palatable compared to your black market competitors. Not only do the people downloading illegally not have to pay, they also get a better product that doesn't force them to sit through this crap. I'm sure this plan won't backfire at all.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Yes, but in this case, there's a cartell of grocery suppliers, and any store that wishes to sell groceries must hold up the the sign for 20 seconds. And if they don't, the U.S. government will kick in the doors with guns.
What you've said is very true. To be fair, though, you are acting somewhat ironically by gravely insulting the person whom you accuse of being clueless about human psychology.
The problem is that if just one person acts on principle like you describe, he'll get the downsides of his protest but ultimately will be ineffective. I.e., irrational.
Boycotts need some particular critical mass to be effective.
Not putting up with arbitrary useless nonsense is a more compelling principle in this country.
All this measure does is degrade the user experience and devalue the content. Getting rid of this kind of nonsense makes a DVD more valuable. Those of us that have actively sought to remove this nonsense probably account for ten times the revenue of corporate shills such as yourself.
Nonsense free content is much more valuable and more prone to beget more paid consumption.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
20 seconds is not a big deal.. Don't compare it to 2 minutes, or even 1. It's TWENTY freakin' seconds
If your yearly income is 1 million dollars, that 20 seconds is worth about $600.
If 20 seconds is too long for you to wait for something that is of no use to you, I'm compelled to wonder how you deal with things like traffic lights where you don't happen to see anybody else around.
Well if traffic lights were of no use to me, that might be relevant. But as they are in fact incredibly useful in preventing me and others from colliding in a twisted pile of metal and glass, I find them quite handy. 20 seconds is not a high price for me to pay when my physical well-being is at stake. If I have to wait 20 seconds before a soda machine kicks me out a soda, I'm moving on to something else.
The value of my time is for me to determine, not you, and not every 20 seconds of time is of equal value. When I sit to watch a movie, I'm trying to enjoy myself, suspend my disbelief, and lose myself in a false reality for a little while. That 20 seconds of disruption, in which I'm pressured to drop back out of my delusion and face "serious issues", is far more costly to my viewing experience than just straight time.
Besides, those warnings are a fucking joke anyhow. Seriously, I've actually read them before and I've seen movies slip shit into the fine print like "Are you really reading this? Why?" Almost nobody bothers to read them, and back during the 80's I knew multiple people with a wall of VHS tapes they pirated from rented movies, all complete with the FBI warning. It doesn't educate shit, what it does is let the movie studios claim that by watching the movie you have agreed to the license terms because you were forced to read the warning.
They are actively punishing people for purchasing. The length of time of the punishment is not relevant. Pirating it is the only sane option. Paying for punishment is something only a few fetishists participate in.
Yeah, let me get this straight...there are people not buying movies, but by putting an annoying screen on the movies people like me buy, they plan to somehow cause the other guys to start buying them.
The business plan of the studios that signed up to participate is literally:
1. Annoy your paying customers.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
What actually happened is that they finally managed to make me stop buying movies. There were many close calls before, but this is finally the last straw.
It takes me more than twenty seconds to fuck, thank you very much.
When I find a dominatrix that accepts payment to show people FBI anti-piracy warnings, then I will have seen everything and Rule 34 will be dead.
If that happens you'll see a growth in home gardens and hunting.
Do you?
Fire up torrent client, go make dinner, come back and watch movie.
It's mostly just the Democratic Party of the United States that is bought and paid for by Hollywood.
The No Electronic Theft Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act were passed under a Republican-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate.
Then rip the DVD and watch it later without the garbage.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Completion? They'd hold up the sign before completing the damn thing, so you'd stand there for 20 seconds thinking "Can I just please fucking pay already?".
I guess a warning would not be so bad if I could skip it like I did with the good old tapes. I get so particularly irritated when the studios have the guts of preventing me from skipping over the stupid warnings.
Some people believe that success can be derived from annoying your customers. I thought we were beyond that. Apparently not.
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
That's a hell of a marketing slogan.
I am not a crackpot.
Patent the algorithm and require you to implement DRM to get a license.
Patents on 1997 inventions run out in five years.
We have the same stuff on french DVD, thought not on all of them : I suspect they are not mandatory. However, there is a workaround. Selecting France's french gives me the lengthy antipiracy warning, but I skip it if I select Belgian french.
You've just spent more effort and time typing a response to somebody you don't agree with than it would have took you to...
But... what if he likes replying to people? Perhaps it's more enjoyable than...
This is easily the best exchange I've ever read on Slashdot.
......
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Like how phobias are infinite in variety, rule34 is a recursive rule. The instant you think you'll completed it, someone will create porn of you completing your rule 34 collection.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Yes, but they don't think of it that way.
I am John Hurt.
And I'll continue to rip my legitimately purchased DVDs and Blu-Rays to my hard drive, removing this (and all other) forced content and previews. And the MPAA and FBI, and ilk like them, can shove their heads up their asses. If I want to play my discs in my toaster oven I will do so, and I don't give even one single flying fuck what they think about it.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
... how you deal with things like traffic lights where you don't happen to see anybody else around.
I figure I'm smarter than the traffic light. Late at night, when there are no other cars/headlights in sight, and when I have good sight lines in all directions, then I treat traffic lights like 4-way stop sign intersections.
They long ago cut their business from me by 100%, and that's where it will stay.
This space available.
And people will find other sources. Many of the great falls in business can be attributed to not realizing the willingness of customers to go somewhere else when sufficiently annoyed. And that's the problem: once you piss of those customers, they stay pissed, for a long time.
I am John Hurt.
10 minutes to download it vs. 1 hour (round-trip) to buy one locally.
I am John Hurt.
Yes. It's my money, and as the customer I demand they not put bullshit in just to make me suffer through it.
If they can't manage that, I'll gladly not give them my money. Capitalism is grand.
I'm sorry citizen, but your right to not purchase something vital to a strong national economy and thus vital to national security has been superseded by the Commerce Clause.
Please send Notary-witnessed copies of your US media purchase receipts for this past tax year for verification of your compliance with the Federal Individual Minimum Allowed Yearly Purchase (F-I-MAY-P) including payment for any difference between your receipt totals and the minimum allowable media purchase to the IRS.
Remember, failure to prove compliance with the Federal Minimum Media Purchase requirements carries the same risk of felony prosecution and Federal imprisonment with the same level of severity and sentence-lengths as aggravated Federal income tax evasion.
Failing to make your patriotic media purchases helps the terrorists club baby seals to death with other baby seals for fur they sell to pedophiles to photograph naked children on.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
There, FTFY. YVW.
What are you talking about? Everyone values their time differently, and not everyone values each second the same way. You seem to think others should value their time in a certain way, and that's not going to happen.
This is absolutely pointless. This is a needless waste of time, and I don't think anyone enjoys it.
Additionally, as others have said, it's also the principle of the matter. And if you keep stacking on negative after negative, it'll eventually be too much for people to stand.
In a nutshell, it's more of a waste of time to gripe about it than to just put up with it. Either that, or go live in your own universe where everything caters to you.
Their criticisms are valid no matter what you think. They're their own feelings.
Oh, and there is an easy way: either pirate the movie, or don't buy it at all. To people sufficiently angered by this, they simply won't buy it.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
http://imgur.com/Intj2
Circumcision is child abuse.
Well it makes perfect sense to me, if you're still buying DVD's at this point you obviously don't know about piracy yet.
Can they make it longer? Maybe 1 minute 30 seconds in total? Just about enough to make a cup of coffee, prep some popcorn and visit the bathroom?
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
I hate to put too fine a point on it, but that's incredibly insensitive and unrealistic.
It's twenty seconds of legalese when people want to be entertained. It has no artistic value, and suggests that you're probably a criminal.
And it's on EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DVD.
Hey, I know, I'm going to come over to your house every night and yell at the top of my lungs that fellatio is a crime in some states. That should improve your sex lifre, right?
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
Yeah, you heard him right.
Reminds me of the Carl's Junior vending machine in Idiocracy...
"WARNING! Carl's Jr. Frowns Upon Vandalism"
"Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr."
"Carl's Jr... Fuck You, I'm Eating."
This space unintentionally left blank.
Twenty seconds of being threatened and treated like a thief when the very fact that I'm seeing it suggests I am nothing of the sort is just a bit rude, don't you think? Add in that they were so adamant about being able to threaten me whenever they like that they perverted the DVD spec and created a cartel to act as a bludgeon to keep manufacturers of DVD drives in line and just as a final insult, they tack the cost on to the DVDs and players so I have to PAY them to insult me.
If they're going to give me the finger after I give them money, perhaps I should just give them the finger next time.
An election is coming up here soon. The government IS dangerous
I wish I could vote to limit copyright terms....
Each time I watch a DVD I paid for they show be this black screen with words 'prison', 'illegal', 'fine'. I'll probably read though this text once or twice. After this - this screen will just affect my subconsciousness making very strong association from DVD I bought in Walmart with words 'prison', 'illegal', 'fine'. Result - I'll subconsciously feel guilty every time I watch a legally bought DVD and every time I even think about buying a DVD. Movie industry is putting great amount of effort to make their product subconsciously uncomfortable for people. The purpose of this move is a mystery.
at least with DVD's - one reason I now buy blurays as much as possible is not just the higher quality (and many are not even that) is that they don't, yet, have this (and, ironically, they are often cheaper than the DVD version).
And if I have to buy a DVD it gets ripped, sans warnings and menu, and put on my media server.
seriously I'll admit to torrenting a fair number of shows (all ones that aren't shown locally) but I have 3 whole shelfs on a bookcase full of legit DVD's and BluRays two deep two high (300+ at last count (that and a couple of thousand CD's accumulated over 20 years) and will pre order shows I know I like from viewing the torrents so odds on bet I'm one of their best customers....
and I hate that these people treat me as their enemy - every time I'm forced to sit through these stupid "you wouldn't steal a car why steal this movie" shite on a DVD I've just coughed up real cash for another straw is added to the camels back that will eventually say "fsck you twunts"
... an extra 20 seconds for me to get a soda before the movie starts. If you look at these little warnings as nothing more than extra time to grab your snacks they're not that bad. They don't think I'm going to actually sit in front of the TV actually watching their propaganda, do they? I do agree with other posters that they are more than a little insulting. I've paid for the DVD so it's obvious that I'm not a member of the population who they should be aiming these 20 seconds at. Surely the studios doesn't expect me to go to work tomorrow and tell all my coworkers about the riveting anti-piracy messages I saw last night. Or are they really that dumb?
Sure extra junk like these messages are annoying but since they come at the beginning of the DVD before the actual feature begins, I find that they're pretty ignorable. The thing about the newer DVDs that really makes my blood boil is when you have to wait and wait and wait for a cursor move to be recognized while moving around the menus. The older DVDs that we own don't seem to impose these silly delays. Next on my list are the DVDs that seem to screw around with our players and turn on subtitles. Add to that those multisecond delays as you navigate through the menus to turn the darned things off and you're in a foul mood before the movie even begins.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It used to be 5 seconds, then 10, now it's 20. Then some of the trailers for movies that you have already seen or decided not to 2 years ago become unskippable as well.
It will get longer and longer unless and until enough people say no loudly enough.
Next up, when you press the start button on your new car, you get a 20 second lecture about DUI before the engine starts. If you don't gripe too loudly, they'll throw in a commercial or two.
Without even having the decency of calling it rain. They think we're dumb enough for same sentence double speak... and for the vast majority they're probably right.
When I put a Blu Ray disk in to the player the booting up and handshaking takes several minutes to complete. I could rewind an entire VHS tape in the time it takes to start working. What is it doing during all that time? I am betting that is has a LOT to do with anti-piracy measures. I would love to have a player that simply played the damn movie that I paid for, not that I am buying many Blu Rays there days.
It isn't actually long enough to do much else. However, when you accidentally bump the eject button instead of the pause button and you end up having to wait for the disc to load, followed by that twenty seconds of crap, followed by the time to find where you were, that twenty seconds will make a big difference in how pissed off you get.
It is that sort of experience that has driven me to not buy DVDs from certain companies because of the ads that they make me watch. Now admittedly, that's three or four minutes worth of ads, but it's a slippery slope. The FBI warnings started at about five seconds, and now they're upping it to twenty. If we don't react negatively to this increased annoyance, a few years from now, they'll probably start making us watch one of those obnoxious three minute "You wouldn't steal a box of condoms" ads or whatever the heck they're trying to convince kids to want to steal these days.
Wait, you mean that wasn't meant to make us want to steal a car or a handbag?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
There is a Fox executive not yet ground into Executive Powder who is listening, he is listening to the caching of the cash register as your dollar votes come into the Fox bank account. You voted, in favor! Good for you and you can be sure he is listening and coming up with more ads for you to watch next time.
What has to be remembered is that customer relations is a very young field that is barely researched. For most businesses, they translate a sale to a positive customer experience. It is in reality possible for a customer to use a company time and time again, in fact to totally depend on them and STILL hate its guts. This goes anywhere from users of public transport to haters of big government using government handouts (is that you bankers?) and everything in between.
You buy their product, so they reason you must love them. You don't but how are they supposed to know? Nobody in their offices is going to tell the boss he is an idiot and that you a purchasing customer are hating the product you bought of your own free will with your hard earned money, they would look silly and not be in line for promotion and bonuses.
I have actually had to deal with these kinds of things as an underling, the disconnect is amazing. From transport companies that wanted people to give unfiltered twitter feedback on their home page, to advertising campaigns where the only message to reach the consumer would be that they are paying for ad support for things they hate on a product they have no choice to buy from that company whose prices have gone up (water companies in Europe).
You think some are getting the message but allowing you to skip it... NO THEY ARE NOT GETTING IT. If they got it, the ads wouldn't even be needed to be skipped, they would at most be an optional to the side extra. WHY do you think a company gets it if it thinks it can shove advertising on an already paid for product?
See how much you have been conditioned already? You are like a girl who thinks she found a new age modern man because he only beats her with his bare hands! Just because your new owner doesn't use the whip as often does not mean you are now free slave.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So basically, you replace 20 seconds of unskippable ads with about 20 minutes of them?
Smart.
Also, saying Green Lantern is crap when saying you watch Transformers a couple of times isn't going to impress anyone. It just says you won't every piece of dog shit shoveled in front of you. That does NOT make you a connoisseur, it just make you a finicky shit eater.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
20 seconds per movie seen.
The rental market in the US is approximately $7.5 billion per year. If we assume $3 per rental average (Redbox is $1.25), and 1.5 people that watch the movie that's 75 billion seconds per year. Or 2376 years per year - but round down to 2000, we don't have more precision than that anyway.
The full, entire time of 2000 people. That's what ICE Director John Morton and his pals destroy to stroke their egos.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
It seems it's only a matter of time before streaming from Netflix and similars is hit in the same way.
...but no-one wants my money!
Downloading a DVD quality movie takes about 20 seconds (250mbps here), fiddling with my tv remote to start the movie over dlna takes another 5 seconds
When i insert a DVD, it takes 10s for boot up, another 5 sec to load the DVD, 20s of warnings that do not apply to me (Europe), 10 sec of warnings that do apply to me (selling/distributing pirated copies is illegal here, downloading is not), 2 minutes of fast forwarding (if possible) through the trailers, 10s for the menu to load, 10s for the movie to load, 30s of studio logos....
So if i want to pirate the movie, it takes me (from the idea to actual movie) ~25 seconds. When i don't want to pirate the movie, it takes me 185 seconds (if I'm lucky) in addition to the trip to video store?
There are no streaming services available here (i would be more than happy to pay for Netflix) and movie studios keep making paying for their work harder and harder....
For BluRay, the time to start BR disc / download and play from net is about the same for me, but i can go make a sandwich while downloading instead of manically hitting "FF/Next/Play" on my remote
TL;DR.
Have gnu, will travel.
Beginning next month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will require that all new cars sold in the U.S. display a H.U.D. screen on the windshield for a full 20 seconds before the driver may put the car in drive. The screen will convey a message about the dangers of drinking and driving. A spokesperson from NHTSA says the purpose is not to prevent drunk driving, but to educate the public.
In July, all new hammers will require the user to listen to a 20-second public service message about watching out for your fingers. Accelerometers in the device will sense any attempted use prior to the end of the message, and will trigger a restart, this time being sung as an off-key duet by Adam Sandler and the Aflack duck. A spokesman for the National Hammer Thumb Safety Administration says the purpose is not to prevent accidents, but to educate the public that it too is known as the NHTSA.
Also, Nokia replied to criticism of its new Lumia 900 cell phone by saying that the perceived network problems are actually an enforced 20-second delay. A Nokia spokeswoman said, "sorry for the delay in returning your call. I was captivated by the beautiful interface on my new Lumia. The point of the generous -- we don't like to call it enforced -- 'respite' is not to prevent you from doing something dumb on the Internet. The point is to stop and smell the roses... To immerse the user in the Windows interface so they can become familiar with it and truly appreciate it."
To people sufficiently angered by this, they simply won't buy it.
I say keep it up. Maybe when it get real bad, it will drive people to start reading again.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I would guess it's just yet another person who hasn't looked up what "corporatism" actually means on Wikipedia, and is consequently misinterpreting that sort-of famous Mussolini quote.
I can see the FBI adds now: "You wouldn't grow a car in your backyard... Friends don't let friends grow DVDs... Yet these _criminals_ dare deprive farmers of their rightful income".
Can a person program a new solution to a problem? Why should anyone be able to stop such a thing? -Richard Stallman
Maybe you have sweet hardware... but are you sure it's not just powering up from standby-mode. People say this about phones too now days, but if you completly power them down it takes a lot longer.
Can a person program a new solution to a problem? Why should anyone be able to stop such a thing? -Richard Stallman
Last time I checked, my DVD player did not take 45 seconds to boot up, its instantaneous: just like a TV or VCR
DVD, sure. Try a recent Blu-Ray player.
This is one of the reasons we rip every DVD to our media server as soon as we buy it. No unskippable bits, no insults from FBI warnings or other time wasting, just the movie or set of episodes or videos that we paid for. There are a couple of drawers full of disks that are no longer needed for viewing (kept as backup and as proof of purchase). Another reason for ripping stuff to the server is simple convenience: not having to dig around for the right disk and stuff it in a mechanical device to play, hoping it has not gotten scratched through handling.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Powered off from the wall
Hardware is nothing special, just the cheapest Samsung that was available and the other is the cheapest Sony with DivX support that was available
But as someone else pointed out, could be because they are DVD only and not Blueray
I never buy DVDs. However, the wife does buy some second hand crap for the kids to watch every now and then. I typically put them on when I get out of bed and want some peace and quiet to sip my coffee. Waiting for a minute for this crap and having to sit it out because I still have to click the play button once its done with 2 impatient kids on the couch has made me destroy almost all those DVDs in frustration. The kids now hate DVDs and the wife doesn't buy any new ones. Problem solved. Fuckers.
0x or or snor perron?!
Hah! Then Inflatable Ingrid and I are way above average. Our lovemaking can sometimes go on for minutes.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
These people really seem to live in some parallel universe if they think forcing 'unskippable' content onto people that paid for disks is somehow 'educating' them.
I recently bought a British film on BR which has a "by buing this Blu-Ray, you're supporting our film. Thank you!"-message at the start. Doesn't take more than about 4-5 seconds (basically as long as it takes to read out the sentence to you)... Even if it is unskippable, I somehow don't mind that one too much.
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
You forgot the 20 seconds for the animated menu to run through the best clips from the movie before actually showing a menu that allows you to play the movie.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
i author DVDs for a living. thankfully in a slightly saner country.
this shit just pisses me off.
DVD retail sales were shrinking at a whopping 15% per quarter this time last year.
so how do you sell more DVDs? by punishing the only people loyal/moral/dumb enough to buy them!
FYI, if a client asks for their shit to be unskippable, i politely forget to disable skip and fast-forward. say "oh, crap, i forgot, you see our policy is to make all that stuff skippable, so i didn't change that bit from the template project". usually it doesn't come to that though.
myself and my colleagues are all painfully aware that downloads are faster, better quality and more convenient than DVDs. they're approaching blu-ray for quality, and shit all over them for convenience. do we really need to scare off what remains of our market?
These messages will be hard to walk out on, they will show when you hit play, there is not much you can do in that time. It's not "drop in the DVD and do something, the bad stuff will go away" it's "OK, you have had your time to show previews and warnings, I am ready, show me the movie... Wait, what is this crap?!". People ignored the previous warnings (they did not pertain to them) and these people hate nothing more than to be ignored. Piracy be damned, just WATCH OUR MESSAGES. One of the most idiotic ideas of these people yet, if they really were aiming to reach their stated goal.
Nice project. Now I finally have a good reason to revive my b0rked Toshiba laptop with the burned out video processor and turn it into a media player.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
And there's community-based black-market suppliers that, if you select the ones with good reputation, provide better products, don't call you a potential thief and don't charge you any money at all.
She...she didn't tell me she was seeing somebody else... :-(
I would happily and with a giddy demeanor spend hour upon hour working on a means to avoid ever having to sit through 20 seconds of Australia's never to be sufficiently goddamned "must play this" anti piracy advert. Why? Because my enjoyment of the successful completion of the project, even if it was negative would still be worthwhile in view of the irritation and anger I experience every single time I see that same ad, with the same immensely annoying soundtrack. Right at the start of what is supposed to be entertainment!!!!! . Reliably avoiding that negative experience would vastly increase my enjoyment of the product that I have paid for. Dull, repetitive garbage that treats the customer like a child in need of endless repetition of recording industry lies has no place in entertainment.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
If you hadn't posted AC, this would be +5 by now.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
You only think you're joking. Google Wickard v Filburn.
I wonder if a GOG.com type of scheme would work for movies? What do you think? No DRM, no bullshit, throw in some extras, possibly concentrate on older stuff only.
Some studios are playing nicely. Criterion Collection's discs don't have warnings, just their and occasionally Janus Films's logo. Same applies to Eureka's Masters of Cinema releases. Blue Underground's Zombi 2 has a 5 second FBI warning in the beginning, but to my astonishment the disc resumes playback from the previous position without prompting - the first disc I've seen that does this.
On the other end of the spectrum is Fox. Sigh.
"an ICE spokesman says the intent isn't to deter piracy but to educate the public that pirating DVDs and Blu-rays allows you to skip the bullshit and get right to the movie."
ICE: what a bunch of maroons.
There they go again, degrading the quality of their product, where the competitor already had a greater quality product, at a lower price.
Waiting for you by the bridge
I actually have not played a DVD on a TV for more than a year now; recently I have thrown away the DVD player as it was just taking space near the TV. I watch movies on netflix or saved programs on DVR. I cannot be bothered to go to the movie rental place which is 10 minutes walk from my house anymore.
SO is significant other, and the hand seems like a poor choice of significant other, though it does seem reasonable as a special other
Does anyone buy these any more?
Korma: Good
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.
Well, yeah. Except I stick the disc in to the machine, wander off to get a drink, or a snack, or take a piss, and when I get back the DVD is stuck on a language select screen, which is only there so that it can better serve me the copyright warning. So I still have to wait around to get to that screen, or come back and wait through the copyright messages. On a disc I've bought.
Then there are the discs that start playing the feature automatically after a short period of time, because, I dunno, they think some people are too stupid to work out how to start it running? So I stick the disc in the machine, go to get a drink, snack, or have a piss, and before I get back the film starts and I have to skip back to where I want to be.
No, on the level of frustration it's not particularly high, but it is a frustration. I only wander away from the machine because it has lots of unskippable crap. I have been conditioned to start a disc before I'm ready to watch it. This isn't right, and certainly not when I've been a good little consumer and paid for the product. I should be able to get myself ready, then start the disc, in much the same way that I do with a computer game, book, bath, car, washing machine, cooker, board game, any-other-thing. I have yet to find that I need to prime a toilet twenty seconds before I need to use it, just so that it flushes there and then and doesn't have me standing near my own filth waiting for it to be ready.
It isn't actually long enough to do much else. However, when you accidentally bump the eject button instead of the pause button and you end up having to wait for the disc to load, followed by that twenty seconds of crap, followed by the time to find where you were, that twenty seconds will make a big difference in how pissed off you get.
...
And add that to the unskippable ads that last several minutes. I already have the practice of "pre-loading" a Blu-Ray before viewing it - sticking it in the player several minutes BEFORE I am ready to sit down and watch it, then come back once it has reached the selection menu and then turn on the TV.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Having the screens up, ok, but having them unskippable is just stupid and even pushing people who buy them legit to download..
I've far too gorram many movies that already lock me out of the controls until I am forced to watch the government warnings, the anti-piracy commercials, the advertisements for the Blu-Ray format and how spiffy it is, the coming features...
I have one disk that literally forces me to sit there for 15 minutes before I can get to the menu, another 20 seconds of the menu's fancy-dancy artwork to finish, then another 15 seconds of the studio's bullcrap.
And they wonder why people go to piracy?
In my case I found a nice way to get around it. Quasi-legally in fact. And the idea came from the DVD/Blu-Ray Piracy software sector. When I found out that the software to defeat the copy-protection and the region encoding also defeated the control lockouts, I did my research and found one that was cheap and works. I went with Slysoft's AnyDVD software.
Now when I built my Media Center PC with the Blu-Ray drive, I have that program running. *If* I were to be pirating the movies, this program allows the next program (a ripper/compression/burner) to do its job. But as a nice side effect it deactivates the lock-outs and allows me to load a disk, bring up my DVD Software (VLC) and go straight to the menu. The only wait I have now is if there is the studio promo but I can tolerate 5-15 seconds as long as I'm not forced to watch 20 minutes of crap.
And this is why it's not going to make much of a difference. Either they're going to go up against people like us who are tech-savvy enough to do the same thing that I did and tell them to slag off, or they're going to up against pirates who are going to rent the movies from Blockbuster/Netflix/Redbox and burn copies (assuming that they just don't download .ISO's from The Pirate Bay).
Or they're going to shoot themselves in the foot by pissing people off to the point where they stop getting DVD's altogether and start using the online streaming providers. Between Netflix and Blockbuster's streaming services...I can get most of the movies and shows I want without having to worry about DVD lockouts and government warnings.
And there is the added benefit of watching over and over again and not having to worry about a physical disk to get scratched.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
If you live in the U.S., industry *is* your government in a very practical sense. They write the laws, and they choose who signs them.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
just name all those a-list actors, directors, film execs or people in related businesses like music who are big fans and donors to the GOP.
I always thought Rupert Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox was GOP-affiliated.
The pirate version is better, but they will claim people want it only because it is free.
Really? So the honest person who pays for his/her copy of the product will be forced to have this crap shoved down their throat. It's as stupid as gun laws. Those who abide by the law pay the price of the stupid ones enacted due to the not so honest folk.
Pathetic.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
All DVD's and BluRay's never get played until they are Ripped and stripped of that crap and then put on the NAS so the XBMC's around the house can play them.
I dont tolerate that crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It takes AT LEAST 20 seconds for the wife and kids to finish in the bathroom after I've put the disk into the player to show up in the family room when we are starting a movie. I can skip though the 'comming attractions' on the disk (though we actually find SOME of them interesting). BTW IIRC the Oppo-video DVD players do have some button press combo that will actually skip all this shit (including the FBI logo) and jump to the main menu. (They also can be hacked via a few button presses to become regionless ... it's all in undocumented 'back door' codes in the firmware).
So you're saying I should waste 30minutes to skip 20s?
I can see the living room now:
Dad: "Hey kids! I've just rented Termodemoblaster 5XX!"
Kids: "Yay! Let's watch it!"
Dad: "Sure thing! Let me just fire up my media center and rip it to the hard drive first."
Kids: "crickets"
I love the NIPRC eagle. Nice touch. Even the official seals of the armed forces don't have such menacing eagles on it. That logo practically screams, "Americuh! F*** yeah!"
Proverbs 21:19
That's the insidious thing about these new ones though - they won't play until *after* you press play on the menu. So you get all that shit you can just pre-load by putting the disc in before swapping the TV over the DVD feed, but you can't get past these new segments so easily.
It's only another 20 seconds. You already are forced to sit through 15 minutes of trailers of worthless straight-to-video trash on Blu-Rays nowadays, what's another 20 seconds?
Yes, but these new ones are going after you hit "play" and before the movie starts. Much harder to skip them by letting the disk do its thing while people are in the bathroom, getting drinks etc. This one won't start until you're all sat down and ready to start the movie.
Thus, much easier to just buy the DVD then either rip it or torrent it. *Much* superior product from a torrent site. With my connection I can get most HD content in about 5 minutes, so that can be downloading while people use the bathroom, get drinks etc, then it will play when I hit play. No bullshit.
The business plan of the studios that signed up to participate is literally:
1. Annoy your paying customers.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
What actually happened is that they finally managed to make me stop buying movies. There were many close calls before, but this is finally the last straw.
They started the "Annoy your customers" years ago by putting overly long menus and transitions in. Then it kept going when they added trailers and commercials before the main menu. Then they made those unskippable. These anti-piracy ads are just the latest in a long line of "Annoy the paying customer" business decisions.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Can someone tell me how to always play these clips? I normally use:
mplayer -dvd-device dir dvd://1 -vf ...
but occasionally the main feature is in section 2 etc.
Are these going to be in section 1 and 2 predictably? I want to update my script
so I do not miss these educational messages.
Thank you!
TL;DR
Can I buy a TV that can "learn" what these videos look like and when it recognizes one playing, mutes the sound and puts up a countdown timer:
"You have 20 seconds to use the bathroom" ...
"You have 19 seconds to use the bathroom"
"Bathroom break over in 3"
"Bathroom break over in 2"
"Bathroom break over in 1"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Interesting math. That's equivalent to being paid for 9.26 hours. Now, you might argue that millionaires don't work more than 9.26 hours in a year, but... *really*?
> And then it becomes required that you cannot rip a legitimate copy without those government-imposed blurbs.
*snork*
even watch the chapters out of order.
Some of the anti-ripping techniques employed by the studios these days actually encourage this!
If I had points, I'd mod you informative. There's already a precedent. All hope is lost. I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
You're not suggesting... Clearly, if that's what was going on, they'd have usernames and boatloads of karma.
What do people still live in the 20th Century?
I live in South America.. and I can't remember the last time I used such obsolete technology. Today is all about streaming content.. Netflix, iTunes.. who needs that obsolete region locked garbage?
I guess that means I won't be buying anymore plastic discs.
Well done, sir. Well done.
If your yearly income is 1 million dollars, that 20 seconds is worth about $600.
Um... it's probably a good idea for you to stop drinking and dividing.
Anyone know where I can find a torrent of the govt. warning video? I can't wait to see it. I'd even settle for a cam. Anyone?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Hmmm, over 1000 DVDs onto a server with how much disc space?
No, you didn't. It's twenty. lousy. freaking. seconds.
For twenty seconds it is annoying, stupid and useless, therefore it is bad. Argument over.
Literally all it does is piss some people off. That's all. It has no other function whatsoever.
Seriously, try this the next time you go into a supermarket: start picking people out at random and spend twenty seconds, each, loudly admonishing them not to steal anything. Make sure to block the path of their shopping carts until you're done. See how they respond. For that matter, see how the STORE responds.
From the curb, please take a moment to reflect on how it totally didn't matter that it was twenty lousy freaking seconds, and how no one seemed to care when you claimed to be educating the customers as a benefit to the store.
For bonus points, actually run a store where the staff does this. Track how long it takes before you have no customers.
That may well be enough to make me return the disc to the store as defective. Repeatedly.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
She only ever goes down on me
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Reading? You're kidding, right?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Next up, when you press the start button on your new car, you get a 20 second lecture about DUI before the engine starts. If you don't gripe too loudly, they'll throw in a commercial or two.
You need to pay more attention. You wont get a lecture they want to drug test you before your car will start.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
You are a thief and a criminal.
Or something like that.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The insanity for me was when Disney was able to patent "fast play" where a DVD inserted will automatically play the movie, if no other buttons are pressed. They used to call that "play" 20 years before with the VCR, but apparently the exact same thing done for decades is different if you change media.
Learn to love Alaska