New unskippable copyright warnings on US DVD/Blu-rays

Sad Professor

This won't affect Region B Blu-rays, but it raises a point which often come up: the way that paying customers are made to suffer for purchasing legally.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/dvds-and-blu-rays-will-now-carry-two-unskippable-government-warnings/

Full details in the link above, but basically all US DVDs and Blu-rays will now have two unskippable copyright warnings lasting 10 seconds each at the start of each film. The warnings will come up AFTER you select play from the main menu, i.e. just before the studio logos and rating. So they are in addition to whatever unskippable crap you already have to sit through after inserting the disc.

Goldstein

Read about this earlier too. I fail to see the point of these from both angles.

Scenario A: You've bought the disc and are punished for doing so by being annoyed by completely irrelevant messages every time you use your product. (Not to mention all the other unskippable crap)

Scenario B: You've downloaded the contents of the disc without paying for it - you won't ever see either message as they'll have been stripped out.

Dopes.

Charlie Haughy

Well for DVDs anyway, if you use VLC player on your pc, you can skip those annoying messages, but I wish modern DVD players included this feature also.

Corkfeen

The issue with all these piracy warnings is that it makes ripping and illegal downloads seem far more appealing. How many people have been reported for piracy as a result of those warnings? :pac: It alienates the actual buyers and is an idiotic concept.

Although if they attached this to every film it would be awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

Sad Professor

Yeah, it's ridiculous. The justification is that it's to "educate" non-pirating users. Many of whom may decide during those 20 seconds that it would have been much easier if they had just torrented the movie instead.

krudler

kyle123

hafto say this bugs the crap outa me. any films iv ever downloaded dont have it and ones i buy do lol

Galvasean

Punishing legitimate buyers. Stuff like that makes me want to download movies to spite them! (I won't though)

krudler

yeah I dont get it, buy legit disk, sit through ages of unskippable sh1te. download movie, press play, movie plays instantly, yeah that'll put off the people pirating movies alright.

Turtyturd

As has already been said this is going to encourage piracy.

Annoys the hell out of me when you can't skip through the ads on a dvd, right up there with sitting through the ad on an online video only to find out the video is blocked in your region. F*ckers. :mad:

jaykhunter

I imagine this stuff is actually an advertisement ("so many people pirate that we put up this sign" .... "why shouldn't I join them") and used as a half-assed justification to pirate.

On a side note, with video files u can change the zoom but there's no zoom for legit blurays on the PS3. That annoys me.

Silly move as others have said. This ONLY affects (ie pisses off) legitimate customers.

CL7

I don't think people that download pirate movies need much encouragement tbf. Yeah it's idiotic to treat paying customers like this but I doubt it will have much of an impact.

I'm one of those people who advocates that if you want to watch a film or TV show then you should do it through a legal avenue but in recent years I've found myself growing more and more tired of these imposed ads which do nothing to combat piracy. In fact more often than not these trailers, warning, whatever simply irritate the viewer.

I can't recall the film off hand but awhile back I was planning on watching a film and when I remembered that there was a good few minutes of unskippable content at the start I simply connected on my laptop to my TV through HDMI, found a torrent of the film was watching it minutes later.

pixelburp

Bone-headed move, really is. It's like buying a car only to be forced to sit througha 2 day seminar on car-thievery. Mind you, I use VLC to play my DVDs so I happily avoid all the pleas & threats.

In any case, this is nothing but a political move - pure smoke & mirrors so that the MPAA can be seen to do something, no matter how inneffectual it is in reality. Any useful tactic would be invisible to the public, so they couldn't garner attention for it (like flooding the torrent channels with fake / corrupted versions of movies - I've read of record labels doing this with some of their bigger album releases)

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

I've recently started to enjoy buying dvds and blu rays again after a stint of piracy. I dont have enough shelf space for the ones I bought recently so they're just sitting on top of the others in a pile, and I love looking at them. The fact that I own battle royale/dark city/Mesrine on blu ray actually makes me happy as opposed to last year when i'd have been delighted with a 1080p rip. I have every intention of buying many more as the year goes on but.. **** this

I'm not sitting through more unskippable ads. I can just about barely handle the ones that are there now.
I could just buy a br drive for my pc and watch the movies on vlc.. and yeah it'd probably be the same technical experience. But I like putting the disc in the player, fiddling with a remote.. it feels like a more complete movie experience than just dragging and dropping a media player onto the tv and fullscreening it.

I forget which br it was, but I stuck one on earlier in the year.. there was the usual piracy related unskippable and then.. a snickers advert
an unskippable snickers advert on the blu ray I had paid money to own. I had paid money to watch a snickers advert and I wasn't being given a choice in the matter.

Duggy747

At least with VHS you could fast forward through that stuff :pac:

Silly move for nothing more than appearances that something is being done to combat piracy effectively.

Sleepy

With the quality of the broadband on offer these days, you can almost download a HD copy of a movie directly to your media pc as quickly as it'd take you to get off the couch, locate the BR/DVD, insert it into the player and wade through all the crap before the movie starts.

You're getting "better than free" wrong people...

kitakyushu

Sad Professor wrote: »

This won't affect Region B Blu-rays, but it raises a point which often come up: the way that paying customers are made to suffer for purchasing legally.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/dvds-and-blu-rays-will-now-carry-two-unskippable-government-warnings/

Full details in the link above, but basically all US DVDs and Blu-rays will now have two unskippable copyright warnings lasting 10 seconds each at the start of each film. The warnings will come up AFTER you select play from the main menu, i.e. just before the studio logos and rating. So they are in addition to whatever unskippable crap you already have to sit through after inserting the disc.

Whilst completely not in favour of it it might even become a mini event in itself if the warning was useless enough eg like this guy back in the VHS days...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi6hiaSBSkI

OT, interestingly if there is a really bad lock on a DVD/BD you can often get round it by selecting chapter2 from the menu and then backchaptering to the beginning of the movie (I remember many of my X-Files DVDs had locked warnings before each episode so I just got round them that way). Would certainly take less than 20 seconds if you're stuck anyway.

Speaking of skipping stuff doesn't it vary from player to player sometimes whether unwanted blocks get presented or not presented. It might just happen that new BD players will have the sense (like VLC player) to just skip stuff like this.

Nothing worse than paying for a movie and being forced to watch unskippable crap and trailers/ads. Especially on Buray because the damn things take so long to load up with all the java sh1t and protection.

I have a decent-sized DVD and Bluray collection so im not one of these people who downloads everything and never buys things, but this stuff genuinely puts me off buying Blurays and has cost them quite a few sales over the years.

Sad Professor

Just to be clear, this only applies to US DVDs and Blu-rays. UK/Irish discs will be unaffected... for now.

It should also be noted that legal downloads don't have any of the long delays associated with Blu-ray. Or at least iTunes movies don't. You press play and the film starts instantly. So the "torrents are more convenient than Blu-ray" argument doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny. I agree with CL7 that pirates don't need much encouragement.

Early Blu-rays were terrible for forcing you to watch previews and taking forever to get to the film. Newer ones, I notice, start much quicker, often skipping the menu completely. There seems to be less BD-Java crap these days as well. The Gladiator Blu-ray is completely bogged down with it.

kitakyushu

Sad Professor wrote: »

Just to be clear, this only applies to US DVDs and Blu-rays. UK/Irish discs will be unaffected... for now.

It should also be noted that legal downloads don't have any of the long delays associated with Blu-ray. Or at least iTunes movies don't. You press play and the film starts instantly. So the "torrents are more convenient than Blu-ray" argument doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny. I agree with CL7 that pirates don't need much encouragement.

Early Blu-rays were terrible for forcing you to watch previews and taking forever to get to the film. Newer ones, I notice, start much quicker, often skipping the menu completely. There seems to be less BD-Java crap these days as well. The Gladiator Blu-ray is completely bogged down with it.

I've bought some 'region free' BD's from Amazon etc that clearly have an American vibe to them (eg it's playing at the correct american frame rate of 24fps rather than the converted 25fps and more tellingly it'll have MPAA ratings at the start that are of no concern to a European. I think pretty much any Warner Brothers BD I've got this is the case.

Could those type be effected in future even those they're strictly not US region? I ask because I can only imagine I've bought the same disk that people in America are buying.

Sleepy

Sad Professor wrote: »

Just to be clear, this only applies to US DVDs and Blu-rays. UK/Irish discs will be unaffected... for now.

It should also be noted that legal downloads don't have any of the long delays associated with Blu-ray. Or at least iTunes movies don't. You press play and the film starts instantly. So the "torrents are more convenient than Blu-ray" argument doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny. I agree with CL7 that pirates don't need much encouragement.

Early Blu-rays were terrible for forcing you to watch previews and taking forever to get to the film. Newer ones, I notice, start much quicker, often skipping the menu completely. There seems to be less BD-Java crap these days as well. The Gladiator Blu-ray is completely bogged down with it.

That's the thing: the stick is the wrong tool here. It doesn't hurt studios one bit if someone who'd never have even considered paying for the content torrent it. The market consists of those who are prepared to pay for content so you need to find a way to encourage them to do so: i.e. make sure what you're selling is better than what they can get for free via good extras, higher quality (in the case of Bluray), nice packaging etc.

IMO, some form of loyalty system (e.g. buy 10 BR's get a voucher for an 11th free or collect points to redeem against merchandise, preview screenings etc.) could work very well for the studios if they looked at this the right way: when dealing with their potential customers they need to use the carrot, not the stick. Sure, go after those creating the torrents or pirating the discs commercially but beating viewers around the head with warnings, DRM etc. is clearly failing them badly.

Sad Professor

kitakyushu wrote: »

I've bought some 'region free' BD's from Amazon etc that clearly have an American vibe to them (eg it's playing at the correct american frame rate of 24fps rather than the converted 25fps and more tellingly it'll have MPAA ratings at the start that are of no concern to a European. I think pretty much any Warner Brothers BD I've got this is the case.

Could those type be effected in future even those they're strictly not US region? I ask because I can only imagine I've bought the same disk that people in America are buying.

Actually all Blu-rays of films generally play at 60p or (if you tv supports it) 24p now, regardless of region. 50hz/25fps and the associated PAL speed-up is mostly a distant memory - and thank god too because I hated it!

But yeah, I've come across a few UK Blu-rays that looked like the distributor just released the same identical American disc. Se7en, for example. This is precisely due to the reason I mentioned above - they don't have to make separate PAL transfers of the film anymore, which means that when the distributor is the same we usually get the exact same transfer and extras as the US.

So you're right, this could potentially end up affecting us as well. However, I'd imagine most distributors will disable it on non-US players.

Technocentral

Doesn't bother me in the slightest, I just put the disc in then go and stick the kettle on, go for a slash or get a beer from the fridge,(just like when ads are on the telly) people are hilariously impatient nowadays.

Sad Professor

Sleepy wrote: »

That's the thing: the stick is the wrong tool here. It doesn't hurt studios one bit if someone who'd never have even considered paying for the content torrent it. The market consists of those who are prepared to pay for content so you need to find a way to encourage them to do so: i.e. make sure what you're selling is better than what they can get for free via good extras, higher quality (in the case of Bluray), nice packaging etc.

IMO, some form of loyalty system (e.g. buy 10 BR's get a voucher for an 11th free or collect points to redeem against merchandise, preview screenings etc.) could work very well for the studios if they looked at this the right way: when dealing with their potential customers they need to use the carrot, not the stick. Sure, go after those creating the torrents or pirating the discs commercially but beating viewers around the head with warnings, DRM etc. is clearly failing them badly.

Even just making Blu-ray a more user-friendly experience would be a start. Nobody cares about fancy Java menus, they just want to watch the film. They also need to make legal downloads cheaper and more appealing. And DRM is a disaster altogether. I really don't know what it's supposed to achieve except discouraging people from buying legal downloads. I actually think this suits the studios at the moment because they'd rather people buy Blu-ray, which means DRM probably isn't going anywhere until Blu-ray is gone.

Technocentral wrote: »

Doesn't bother me in the slightest, I just put the disc in then go and stick the kettle on, go for a slash or get a beer from the fridge,(just like when ads are on the telly) people are hilariously impatient nowadays.

These warning don't appear when you insert the disc though. The are just before the film starts.

So: insert the disc, go put the kettle on, come back when the menu has loaded, press play, go back, make your tea, get delayed, you've missed the first minute of the film, press rewind, etc, etc.

Technocentral

Sad Professor wrote: »

Even just making Blu-ray a more user-friendly experience would be a start. Nobody cares about fancy Java menus, they just want to watch the film. They also need to make legal downloads cheaper and more appealing. And DRM is a disaster altogether. I really don't know what it's supposed to achieve except discouraging people from buying legal downloads. I actually think this suits the studios at the moment because they'd rather people buy Blu-ray, which means DRM probably isn't going anywhere until Blu-ray is gone.


These warning don't appear when you insert the disc though. The are just before the film starts.

So: insert the disc, go put the kettle on, come back when the menu has loaded, press play, go back, make your tea, get delayed, you've missed the first minute of the film, press rewind, etc, etc.

Well that is a bit silly, still, I'm fairly patient, 10 or 20 secs out of 2hrs or so doesn't really bother me.

kitakyushu

Sad Professor wrote: »

Even just making Blu-ray a more user-friendly experience would be a start. Nobody cares about fancy Java menus, they just want to watch the film.

This is true also in many regards. For instance I think Picture In Picture docs and PIP commentaries are absolutely useless and painful to operate. I don't want to spend 150mins watching a movie just so I can get maybe 30mins of badly edited clips that don't really tell you much and visually appear to take up about 1/10th of the screen. Is society really becoming so ADD that they have to watch two different pictures at once anyway? Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Universal BD titles seem to be the biggest culprit when it comes to including crappy PIP extras.

WRT to extras every DVD should have an option to just "play all" and any inline text/bubble features like "trivia subtitle tracks" etc should be just downright banned. I like to try watch everything on my DVD's but I've a few titles I'll never complete mainly because it would mean sitting through the movie itself solely to get at the special features. Waste of time.

Sad Professor

Yeah, I've always hated in-film/PIP extras and never bothered with them. That feature was a flop on DVD and few films took advantage of it, so I'm surprised they're wasting everyones time with it again.

And the lack of a "play all" button on some Blu-rays is infuriating. There must be about 3 hours worth of extras on the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Blu-ray and they are excellent, some of the most insightfully behind-the-scenes material I've ever seen. But they are all broken into short 10 minute segments and there's no "play all" option so you have to constantly navigate between confusing menus. Grrrrr!

Rabidlamb

Kids talked me into buying a Handy Manny DVD over the Christmas.
Imagine my delight when we had to sit through 3 unskippable coming soon Disney trailers.
Then there was some other crap & the warning saying it's illegal to play on oil rigs, then eventually the main menu.
Daddy visited megaupload that night, got rest it's illegal banned soul.

the purple tin

If the film companies put their money where their mouths are they would have anti-piracy ads on TV and in newspapers/magazines etc.

Of course that would mean actually spending money and they would rather stick them on your disc which doesn't cost them a penny.