Rod wrote:


Indeed. I always feel that even from the advent of ordinary DVDs the
consumer has been victim of a sophisticated "bait and switch" con.

We were all sold on the convenience of true random access to our films
- no need to wind though bits you don't want to see etc - jump
straight in where you want. Plus loads of "special features". It
interesting to see now the format dominates just haw many controls
they try to impose. You must watch the copyright warnings, the
trailers, and any amount of other crap to get to the main menu even,
an the player controls are disabled until the producer of the disk
deems it allowable for you to have the use of your own player again.
Even many of the so called special features are nothing more than
advertising for more of their wares.

(still full credit to Techtronics who chipped the first DVD player I
bought more than a decade ago - it still plays and defeats every
attempt at region coding, or player control restrictions) ;-)

Their stealing of our time and convenience is a crime against an
innocent consumer. I have no pirate (or otherwise dodgy) DVDs. But I am
jolly tempted to if that means I don't have to decide to watch something
several minutes ahead of time just so that they can force my machine to
play those clips/warnings. And it seems especially bad when it is a
multi-DVD series...

There are some discs where I have ended up making a stripped out[1] copy
of my original which I keep in the same case - and play instead of the
original since it is so much quicker and simpler to get to the bit you want!

[1] DVDShrink is good in that respect - you can re-author a disk to just
include the main movie and nothing else if you want. Particularly good
if you buy any ex-rental DVDs, as many of these seem to have the most
irritating restrictions and often lack any worthwhile extras.

--
Cheers,

John.

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