"PCFriendly" doublespeak
Dec. 10th, 2007 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI just spent hours yesterday and this morning trying to work out why I couldn't get some of my DVDs to play. They are Region-encoded for this region. (Actually, Australian law has ruled that region-encoding is not applicable in Australia -- it is not illegal to defeat it here, but the spineless worms stopped short of making it illegal to force encoding on the Australians.) I simply couldn't get Linux to recognise the DVD. I know I used to play it on MSWindows, so I booted one of my older machines into MSWIndows. It refused to play the DVD too, though it at least recognised that it was a DVD. This had me puzzled till I noticed a program in the root directory of the DVD, called "PCFriendly". It seems that, in truly Orwellian style, this program lets the movie studio make the disk PC unfriendly. After installing the program, which requires you fill out your details (I always fill out such forms with gibberish), suddenly I was able to access and play the DVD... on my MSWindows machine, but still not on my Linux machine.
I decided to do a little web research on this "PCFriendly" program to find out more about it... and was horrified. It tracks the user, keeping details of all DVD titles played from then on, passing on details through the internet, giving all the user's details away (or more likely selling them) to advertisers and other shadowy organisations so that the user's habits are reported on and they can be targetted with advertisements.
So what this has forced me to do is rip the DVD so that I can watch the content on my main, fast computer which is Linux-only. I almost never use Windows nowadays and I only have it dual boot on an old, slow machine.
This makes me wonder what will happen after Windows goes bankrupt and nobody has copies of the OS anymore? These DVDs will become unwatchable, just as so many of my old documents made with "protected" programs are now unusable.
These people in the film industry are truly disgusting. One wonders how long they will continue to get away with pulling such con-tricks and inconveniencing their customers.
If you want to read more about PCFriendly:
http://www.interhack.net/pubs/pcfriendly/
And now I should get back to writing the last couple of chapters of my story. Slackness, thy name is Miriam.
I decided to do a little web research on this "PCFriendly" program to find out more about it... and was horrified. It tracks the user, keeping details of all DVD titles played from then on, passing on details through the internet, giving all the user's details away (or more likely selling them) to advertisers and other shadowy organisations so that the user's habits are reported on and they can be targetted with advertisements.
So what this has forced me to do is rip the DVD so that I can watch the content on my main, fast computer which is Linux-only. I almost never use Windows nowadays and I only have it dual boot on an old, slow machine.
This makes me wonder what will happen after Windows goes bankrupt and nobody has copies of the OS anymore? These DVDs will become unwatchable, just as so many of my old documents made with "protected" programs are now unusable.
These people in the film industry are truly disgusting. One wonders how long they will continue to get away with pulling such con-tricks and inconveniencing their customers.
If you want to read more about PCFriendly:
http://www.interhack.net/pubs/pcfriendly/
And now I should get back to writing the last couple of chapters of my story. Slackness, thy name is Miriam.
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Re: PCFriendly? Bah hum bug!
Date: 2007-12-10 10:45 pm (UTC)Standalone DVD players certainly have their uses, but I find them really annoying. You are forced to sit through all the screens and stupid shorts telling you that they'll sic the law on you if they don't like what you do and that piracy funds terrorism, for crying out loud! And then you have to go through a bunch of sloooow menus. In the past I found myself preferring to watch inferior, ripped content rather than having to go through all that crap. I could simply click on the file I wanted and just watch it. Nowadays, on my Linux machine using mplayer I can do the same with a disk. I put a DVD in and go straight to the title that I want within the disk. Since getting this program I watch more DVDs and less ripped content.
One of the things that really annoys me about this whole "PCFriendly" event is that the only way I can watch these afflicted DVDs is by cluttering up my hard drive with ripped copies instead of the disks that I bought legitimately and wasted close to $100 on.