DVD Mumble

I started my DVD collection in 1999. So far I've bought and own more than 2000 DVDs to date, so please bear with me while I "ramble" on the subject a little.

Forced Subtitles

Some DVDs in Germany are coming with the original English sound track and German subtitles which can not be turned off. This is very annoying! Please don't do this.

Copy Protection Idiocy

I didn't pay a lot of money for DVDs so that I can't even make backup copies for my personal use which I'm entitled to by copyright laws (at least in *civilized* countries).

Like all copy protection schemes the only people suffering from it are the honest paying customers.

A criminal will never be stopped by any mechanism nor law, also not if you try to make the process of decoding illegal. They don't care. The industry only pisses off honest customers with that. They sure do that to me.

Those who are supposed to be allowed to make copies (we paid for this, remember?), pay the price for some paranoid studio marketing droids, technically ignorant lawyers and antisocial engineers who think in order to stop one thief it's OK to punish millions of honest paying customers. Get a life!

Ideally there would be no copy protection at all. What for? Since it can't be undone of existing titles, I demand not only to be allowed to use tools to copy DVDs in any technical way I please, I demand that those tools should be both legal and for free since it was not my fault those DVD producers thought it would be clever to encrypt the data I paid for wasting resources like memory and CPU time and energy. Actually I didn't just pay for some data or media, I've paid for the right to watch a particular movie/series/whatever. It's not even really bound to the media. Think about this and what it means...

Looking at my list of DVDs there should be no doubt I'm not interested in making illegal copies. Why else would I have spent so much money on original DVDs?

I really have no problems to buy a DVD as long as it's price worthy, so instead of making this more expensive by coming up with idiotic copy protection schemes, make sure the price is right and people will go for it.

My current price limit is EUR 10 for single movie but on occasion I may pay more. If I have to pay more it means I don't buy some other DVD I would have bought if it was cheaper. So think about that for a moment (hint, hint).

It's about time we, the *paying* customers, say out loud that we will not accept nor tolerate copy protection, encryption and people who want to make any copy illegal violating *our rights*.

I think we've made those DVD producers rich enough already and as a customer I'd like to have some say here, too.

Where is customer service when it comes to DVDs? DVD producers should think about who pays them. If they keep on harassing us, they will see how much it hurts if we stop buying their stuff.

FBI Warnings are Insulting

All the FBI warnings and "don't do this and that, you bastard" messages, which are shown at the beginning of most if not all DVDs, annoy me greatly!

I pay for the stuff while those "warnings" constantly imply we're potential thieves or what did you think this reads? That's quite an insult, don't you think?

In other industries the first sentence you read in the manual is "thank you for buying ...". How about trying that for a change?

If the DVD industry treated their paying customers more like customers and not like their enemies a lot would be won. I wonder when they get it - probably never.

DVD and Beyond

For some time now I've been following the battle between HD DVD and BD. I'm not entirly sure the better system won. The system with encryption and copy protection won. That's not good for the paying customer. Even though I own a Sony Playstation 3 and a BD Writer in a PC, which enables me to watching BD, so far I bought only one single BD so I could compare it with DVD.

It doesn't cut it for me. The price for a BD is ca. 2.5 times as much as for a corresponding DVD. Is it 2.5 time better? Not for me, it isn't, not even on my 28" TFT monitor with 1920x1200 pixels. Also I can't play BDs anywhere I want. DVD players are down to EUR 30, so really everybody can have one. The same does not and will not apply to BD players for quite some time, so why should I switch formats?

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