Warning: Rant Ahead
Windows does it again. This evening I rented a DVD from our local movie store. I decided to watch it on my PC, a Dell XPS M1210, which I recently purchased for almost $2K. I had already watched a movie on it and had used Dell’s CinePlayer, which worked well.
On loading the movie (an older movie: Memphis Belle), I couldn’t get it to run in CinePlayer, Creative’s Media Center, RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. Here was one of the messages:
Windows Media Player cannot play the DVD because a problem occurred with digital copyright protection.
Basically, I was locked out by my software. I put the the DVD on my older Windows PC and it played like a charm.
So; I can rent a legal version of a movie and my software can decide that I cannot play it. Who are the pirates here? The oligoplolists who try to control every aspect of our lives with usurous “End User Licence Agreements” and copyright protection that protects everyone but the paying customer? I say bring on the “pirates” and bring down the big media oligopoly! Let’s keel-haul the bilge rats.
There cannot be too many rants about this problem.
Try the open source VLC player:
http://www.videolan.org/
If it works, we expect a follow-up rant!
Thanks, Roger, downloading now. Rant to follow ;-)
I can attest that the VLC Media Player works like a charm on Windows XP :-)
I’m still trying to get it to work on Linux Ubuntu 6.0, but that’s another story …
I thought it might solve your problem.
It illustrates one of the chief advantages of open source– the focus is on the end-user. DRM and regional encoding schemes are of no possible interest to users, and in fact make the DVD “software” less useful to consumers.
Dave Weinberger gives a good synopsis of what the purveyors of DRM are trying to do:
“Pardon me while I state what’s been dead obvious for years now: Microsoft wants to be—is—in the entertainment business. Microsoft thinks it will win if it can be the preferred player of Hollywood content. So, to persuade Hollywood (and other Big Content providers) to offer their goods in Microsoft proprietary formats, thus locking the audience into the MS platform, Microsoft has spent billions of dollars devising the uncrackable platform. If that means turning your PC into a player rather than a computer, so be it. Vista is all about protecting Hollywood from its audience, even if that means degrading the utility and performance of the PC that runs Vista.”
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/the_vista_suicide_note.html
There is a good discussion of the perils of the DRM features in MS Windows Vista over at The Technology Liberation Front blog:
http://www.techliberation.com/archives/041620.php
OMG Roger, this is scary and confirms, once again, why I have I have made my LAST Windows installation – EVER.
Hey,
just to add to this – you’re not alone, half of my DVD collection is rendered useless due to windows giving these messages about copyright (even though they arent copies). Does installing VLC get round this??
Emma: VLC Player has worked with all the DVD’s I’ve played, even those that cannot play on other systems. Can’t hurt to install VLC Player and try it.
Amen. Same thing happened over here. Carbon copy, just got a movie from my local rent store, and was looking for a quite night in before going to work tommorow. I ‘ve spent a good four hours, updating video card drives, restoring the system to various set points etc. etc. to no avai. This is pathetic, and your rant well earned. If I could get my hands on any of these prissy little f&*%ers trying to “safeguard” THEIR multitrillion dollars from US blood thirsty “pirates” renting out a movie. And this is xp, I can’t imagine where they are taking this with vista…Thanks for suggesting the vlc player, will be my last resort I guess, if somehow they’ve not managed to render the whole dvd viewing inoperable.