The Home Tech Place

Okay, looks like its time for a new category.  I’m going to call it Rants.  My first rant is going to be against the assclowns who make commercial DVDs.  You may have noticed over the last few years that it is becoming increasingly difficult to skip the lovely previews that appear at the beginning of DVDs.  The first step these jokers took was to disable to the ability to jump to the DVD menu until you had made it through all of the previews of upcoming DVDs.  For a while the workaround was simply to hit the fast forward button to speed through these annoying commercials.

Tonight though, the DVD makers crossed a line.  My wife and I sat down to watch the third installment of the Chronicles of Narnia – Voyage of the Dawn Treader and we discovered a new trick that the DVD makers have employed.  They have now disabled the fast forward capability on the previews so when you get ready to watch the movie, you need to sit through 6-10 minutes of idiot commercials and previews before you get to the DVD menu.

Legality of what I’m about to discuss aside, fact is that this, more than anything else justifies in my mind software like AnyDVD which is primarily designed to allow you to bypass the CSS encryption on commercial DVDs so that you can either copy them or else rip MP4 versions of the movies.  Besides doing the CSS decoding, you can set AnyDVD to disable to blocks that DVD makers put on their DVDs and go right to the menu without having to watch the up front garbage.  Unfortunately to do this, you need to either be using a computer to play the DVD so that AnyDVD can be running in the background or else you need to copy or rip the DVD first.  Granted that this is an extra hassle and at least in the U.S. doing so violates the DMCA, but in my mind this latest move by DVD makers justifies this.  If I buy a DVD, I should not be forced to sit through previews every time I sit down to watch the movie that I paid money for.

All right.  ’nuff said.  Just needed to get that off of my chest.