Blu-rays Will Now Have Two Unskippable Warnings - Page 2  

For those who rip to remove the stupid warning screens, do you also cutout classic movies that have 15 minutes of Overtune with a static wallpaper?

There are discs that don't let you skip those?

Look, these things are a bit of a pain, I agree.

And yes, forcing them on us while the pirates strip them out is counter-productive. No argument there.

But let's keep a bit of perspective. It's not the end of the world. It's not rampant DNR over every disc. It's not a 30 minute lecture.

To suggest we 'vote with our feet' (implicitly suggesting we buy a pirate instead of the real thing) is pushing it a bit.

Buying pirate copies will result in fewer sales and subsequently fewer releases. I'd be happy to sit through 30 seconds of warnings on every Blu-ray Disc if it meant just one more of my favourite films appearing in high definition.

Steve W

Exactly!

This image is awesome (outside of promoting piracy, but it's missing several things, such as:

1. the digital copy commercial
2. Other commercials (I've seen car commercials, video game commecials, anti-tobacco commercials, American Film Institute commercials, etc).
3. The "Because Blu-ray is a new format, not all features may work on your player" warning
4. The "The expressions contained in this blah blah don't necessarily reflect the views of blah blah blah" notice.

Thank goodness BD has outstanding PQ and AQ once you actually get to the movie, because everything else about it is a step back from DVD. I suppose being able to access the menu without stopping the movie is as well.....but all the unskippable things at the beginning, the inconsistency (some titles can resume, some can't, sometimes you can chapter-skip previews, sometimes you have to FF, etc). And don't get me started on the plethora of rental versions that are stripped down (or worse, present the special features as a tease then tell you in order to watch their crappy features you have to buy it). It's really quite frustrating.

Just to be clear, the below image is not really "piracy". While it is true that most pirated movies you can buy on the street have extras stripped out, the whole concept of piracy is the actual selling of copies. That is a "lost sale" since money has changed hands and the studios did not get their cut. Just as the actual pirates of the high seas steal products and sell them.

Lumping the PTP downloading of digital content (file sharing) and the backing up personal copies of legally purchased content is ambiguous at best. 5 Million downloads of a movie does not equal 5 million lost sales. A person using software to back up his disc to a media server and strip out all the extra crap is certainly not a lost sale and certainly not piracy.

This is a sensitive topic to me, sorry for the tiny rant.

Great picture otherwise!

Just how long will the studios survive if they release fewer titles just because a small percentage are lost sales? Seems to me like a "cut off your nose to spite your face" approach.

Hell of a way to kill consumer sales if you want to move to a PPV basis though.

Good way to drive away potential customers!

Lets see.... purchase factory BD for $20+ retail, get loads of unwanted trailers/commercials, and now unskippable segments...

...or

Usenet/internet DL movie only for $0.00 at 100% BD quality with no advertisements or forced warnings...

Hmmmmm.... gotta think hard about this one.....

I'm pretty sure buying pirate copies died out at least 10 years ago.

People buy them on the subway trains here in NYC. Camcorder versions of in theater flicks. I've never bought one and cannot understand how anyone would. But it happens all the time.

I didn't mean to promote piracy. I was just to lazy to clip that last line from the graphic. I've bought over 1200 legit BDs myself.

If anything, the cam versions would drive people TO the theater due the horrendous quality.

Nice to see my (valid) comment removed for no reason at all. Seems I wasn't the only one. And it's wasn't even as controversial as the privacy discussion above.

Thanks mods! You're doing a heck of a job!

You forgot the DVD vs Blu-ray "picture" comparison which is kind off redundant. I know DVD sucks, that's why I bought the Blu-ray...

What a stupid, stupid decision.

I have zero copied movies and will continue to buy 100% legit Blu-rays. However, this nonsense has me thinking if I want to add a legal copy to future Blu-ray purchases affected by this so I don't have to deal with this crap. It takes the moronic choices of the industry to drive people towards options they otherwise wouldn't consider.

BTW, would it be possible to skip it by going to chapter select before a movie begins, start it up in the middle, and then manually hitting back-chapter towards the start of a movie? At least that would be somewhat more tolerable if possible.

I'm a little strapped on cash but my next purchase is going to be a dedicated HTPC and media server to rip lossless copies of my movies too. There's some nice software out there that can categorize and even add in extras and the synopsis.

It be nice to have everything DRM free and at my fingertips to play as quickly as I can via my DVR.

^^^ maybe they closed it because nothing relevant was left to be said. I mean once everyone agree that it 1/it won't stop piracy 2/it won't stop people from buying Blu-rays either you pretty much have the issue covered no?

...until the next 10 secs unskippable warning is officially announced of course

Off-topic:

No offense to moderators intended (because honestly not all of them are abusing their position, just a few), but I've honestly felt that "forums" (like AVS and blu-ray.com) need to ditch their moderators and replace it with a Slashdot-style moderation system where the readers effectively moderate comments.

As with Slashdot, people would be given "mod points" periodically that they could use to promote/demote posts they see as valuable/spam/etc. Those who get points would be chosen based on how many of their posts had been promoted, and how active they are within the community. The site owner would need to "seed" the site at first, promoting posts and getting people up and going with the moderation system, but it's far more effective and keeps it honest. Things that are actually interesting wouldn't get shut down unnecessarily, while things that are obvious flamebait/trolling/spam would stand a decent chance of being hidden completely (or such that you'd need to browse with your settings set to see things modded as spam/trolling).

Don't get me wrong, I like AVS (and to some extent, blu-ray.com), but whenever I see a mod on here wielding the ban hammer or locking things up saying it's "over and done with" I feel like it's heavy handed and presumptuous.

Things get far too heated and emotional over here are you out of your mind?

It's fair to gripe about this stuff... but I wish people would not draw the line between mistakes made by the producers and being "ok" to steal.

Blu-rays have unskippable things, so I'll just steal some.
Working is hard, so I'll just rob a bank.

Complain all you want, all the way up the food chain... and vote with your wallet by not buying Blu-rays too... but don't use this as justification to steal copies.

You are 100% in your rights to not buy product... but ZERO rights to steal it... under any circumstances.

I don't like the practices, so I boycott products... but when I boycott them, I don't steal them and I don't take free copies if someone else buys and gives to me as a gift.

As far as I can tell they are usually scaled down and/or have crushing compression.

You are correct that the warnings are not justifications to pirate the movies, but I think your comments miss a common point and frustration among many buyers of Blu-ray discs (and DVDs too).

The poster who commented about the lack of audible piracy warnings on CDs is spot on. Imagine if every time you cued up a CD it was preceded with a non-skippable 30 second lecture about how peer to peer sharing of unauthorized copies of music files is stealing and it's a crime, and you could go to prison for a long time for it. Don't you think that would turn off the very target market for CDs, the legitimate buyers of them? Hell yeah, it would.

Why then, does the MPAA (and its constituents, the studios) think doing the very same analogous thing, placing unskippable piracy warnings complete with FBI and ICE logos and citations to the relevant criminal statutes and penalties, is not a huge turnoff for buyers of their Blu-ray discs? It's exactly the same thing. They are preaching to the choir. Legitimate purchasers don't need the warnings. Pirates do, but they won't heed them. Who then, are the warnings for? Answer: no one. Why the hell put them on the discs we wish to buy? All it does is discourage some legitimate sales due to having to put up with unnecessary and counterproductive lectures.

No thanks. I, too, like several other posters in this thread, have bought 100s of perfectly legitimate, legal retail Blu-rays through the most common outlet today -- Amazon. It pisses me off royally to see the MPAA lecture me about piracy while I'm lining their pockets with my legitimate purchases. I'm the guy who keeps them in business. Don't piss me off with unnecessary lectures just because you can't stomach losses due to other people's piracy. You don't want to lose my business.

Who tried to justify stealing?

Hahaha nice

With available hard drive space going up and prices going down, most piracy involves just ripping the main movie stream(s) and putting those online for P2P. Certain releases still need to be losslessly compressed with something like WinRAR or 7zip (think BD3D releases which often have lots of redundant data that compresses really well).

The state of the art for piracy is identical to what's on Blu-ray Disc. Minus the annoying anti-piracy notices and unskippable trailers/advertisements.

Actually... that was me too

But the point brings us full circle here to both things I posted... Has the lack of those unskippable things on music CDs kept people from buying the product to support the lack of annoying features? Nope. People have been stealing music (and trying to justify it) for years.

I'm surprised they never tried to put the "don't steal this" stuff in audio format on CDs... but I guess they figure that ship had sailed long ago... whereas videotape had the warnings, and that carried over to DVD, and now Blu-ray too.


You don't have to look very far in this thread to see people posting either how to pirate or "rip" and then others who claim it is "ok" to do since the industry is making it difficult to skip things.

I wonder... since movie theaters have movie trailers that you obviously cannot skip... would this justify sneaking into the theater instead of buying a ticket? Some movies cost nearly as much as some Blu-rays... more if you factor in the bloated prices of drinks + popcorn + candy.

I'm always divided on these things, because the anti-piracy stuff bugs me, and I hate having to deal with it... but I also know I have to deal with it because of all the people who are stealing stuff... so then when I see people say things to the extent of "if they keep doing this, I'll start downloading ripped versions"... well, that frustrates me just as much.