Blasted films!

[Saracen]

....

re: format shifting - thought that was actually legal now? Although of course breaching any copy protection system on a disk to enable format shifting wouldn't be, so still a potential issue - yes, you can legally convert this film to another digital format to watch it on your fondleslab, but oh noes, the disk is encrypted and decrypting it to shift it to a different format is very much a nono! Sucks to be you

Not unless it's changed very recently and slipped past me.

The slippery bit is that copyright is a curious blend of national legislation reflecting the bits that are agreed in international treaty and conventions, and national legislation reflecting local preferences.

Format shifting isn't illegal in some jurisdictions, but unless it's changed, it still is here. Changes were recommended in the copyright white paper about 5 years ago, but IIRC, the provisions were taken out when the Act was rammed through right before the last election.

What makes sense, in my opinion, is that if you own the original, legit media, format-shifting to a convenient media for personal convenience is so widespread that its' common practice, and enforcing a ban is utterly unenforceable. I wonder who buys a CD, then buys again for their MP3 player? Probably about the same percentage that, 40 years ago, would buy an LP for the home, and then buy a cassette tape for the car. That is, almost nobody.

Format-shifting, for those that have a legitimate version, should be legal and it's patently daft, ridiculous, idiotic, moronic and stupid, not to mention unenforceable, for it to not be .... but as far as I know, it still isn't legal. Which says something about the state of some laws, and lawmakers.

[Mutley]

It's so people pirating can't say "Didn't see it" or "Nobody told me", it's only like software installers making you see and agree to the licence agreement before installing, they usually last <1 min and only really cause a problem if you get impatient and start pressing buttons determined to skip it resulting in confusing the player and you wasting more time by watching it repeatedly.

No not being able to skip trailers and go to the menu (once you've passed the anti-piracy message) that's a different thing and down to the studios. But as I said i've noticed all the DVD's I bought in the last month or so (10+) have not had this any more.

I understand that, but surely that is a bit like saying that wrapping cigarette packets in death warnings stops people smoking.

I think there is a wider issue here about how the music and film industry is stuck in the dark ages, and is fighting tooth-and-nail to stay there (as demonstrated by how the MPAA, MPA, and RIAA have been behaving).

Having said that, I have noticed that on recent Disney DVD purchases, they have made a point of saying how consumer-friendly their DVD is, and how you can skip adverts easily. This suggests someone like Disney has recognised that previous approaches were annoying too many customers, but more importantly, they had a marketing opportunity to improve their brand image by not only removing barriers to the film, but telling you how they had remove those barriers....

[Barakka]

I think there is a wider issue here about how the music and film industry is stuck in the dark ages, and is fighting tooth-and-nail to stay there (as demonstrated by how the MPAA, MPA, and RIAA have been behaving)

For me this is the crux of it, whilst I completely agree with it, and TBH most people in the industry do too, the problem is what to do about it. The Internet has created a world where no value is placed on Intellectual Property any more and it's how to find a way to get that recognition and value back... even iTunes as the biggest online seller of music has been known to strip parts of the meta data from files that give recognition to the producer, mastering engineer, studio etc how else can they be noticed ?

People have this assumption that the music and film companies are these massive companies with tons of people working for them and making money hand-over-fist, but unfortunately it's just not true any more. Recording studios and film production companies are going out of business on a weekly basis in the UK.

It's OK everyone saying the industry needs to change and stop milking everything for what they can etc etc but the end result will be X-Factor... just X-Factor

[subucni]

Haven't read all of this thread so it may have already been mentioned but thought i'd just add this little tip i picked up when i worked at a video rental store.

If you put in a DVD that pops up with a region/language selection at the start, rather that pick UK, go for Australia, this will often skip some of the ads at the beginning.

[Whiternoise]

@Saracen - to a certain extent people don't need to buy two copies any more. Some films are being released as dual-copies, one is the Blu-Ray (say) and the other is a digital copy. The downside is that the digital copy is almost always DRM-riddled and often is limited to something like 6 months.

Saying that, I really appreciated book companies that give you a PDF when you buy the paper version. Not many do, but those that bother to do it get my money any day. There are times when you need both and a PDF copy rarely cuts it for me when I'm learning, but if I need to look up a formula or a code snippet, it's damn useful to have the DRM-free PDF on my laptop.

I really have no idea why publishers aren't selling books with free (or cut price) Kindle downloads. Kindle purchases are massively hamstrung at the moment because they're just not cheap enough - go for the best of both and offer them together. I still buy most of my books from Oxfam... lots of amazingly good finds there!

Subscriptions have really worked for me. I have a Napster account (£5pm) and a Lovefilm account. Lovefilm has a decent selection of streaming films and TV shows (both with no adverts) and I get four discs at a time, unlimited per month at something like £60 for half the year. You still have to watch the crap when you rent the discs, but it's bearable because I don't feel like I've paid for each one individually and I'm not likely to rewatch most of them. Plus it's all freepost with no late fees, as they're quick to advertise

Napster is great, but they stopped giving out free track credits (used to be 5 a month) so I'm going to move to Spotify next time because the interface is just so much better. Interesting to see how the merge with Rhapsody goes. The one amazing thing about Napster is the playlist support.

Hope my VLC post wasn't considered border line.

That said sometimes the trailers can be useful especially if they show a film you'd not seen or heard of before

I wouldn't mind, but really if I'm watching the film 5, 10 years down the line then I don't care about the trailers for films that were out 5 years ago.

For this reason I like the adverts in the cinema, it's nice watching the trailers for stuff that's coming out on the big screen. Similarly they tend to only show well made product adverts. It's a little irksome when it takes nearly 30mins to go through, but hey. It's more the outrageously priced food that gets me.

[AD-15]

Andehh, just do what I do.

Whenever I purchase a new blu-ray film, I stick it in my PC, use software such as AnyDVD HD (expensive but extremely well supported) to decrypt the copy protection and copy the entire contents of the disc to my PC.

Then, I use BD Info to look at the structure of the data on the disc. I use that to pick out only the various video/audio/subtitle streams that I want and put the files containing those through an m2ts demuxer like tsmuxer. Remux those into an .mkv file using mkvmerge and I've got a far more efficient way of watching my films. No menus, trailers, copyright notices etc. Just the film and the additional subtitles/audio that I want. Playing back and skipping through the movie from the HDD/SSD is a lot smoother that from an optical disc too.

I also repeat the same for any bonus features I like to see, and copy the lot to my NAS. That way, I can watch them wherever I like; in the living room on the TV using my WDTV Live, my laptop, PC etc, without ever having to use the disc again. It saves a fair amount of cash too, as I don't have to have more than 1 blu-ray disc reader for my computers, or a player for the TV etc.

I honestly have no idea how people enjoy blu-ray in the more typical way. It's just so limited.

Apologies by the way to the mods if they feel this post crosses the line at all, I just don't really see how copying media for personal use in this way could be considered illegal.