what is it with big video companies?
Monday, 21 June 2010 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eIt seems like the rationality of some companies decreases in direct proportion to their size.
Often when I watch a TV show (I don't have TV so I watch only DVDs or downloaded shows) I go to http://epguides.com to find how many episodes were made, what they were named, and when. From there I generally went (through a link on the epguides page) to tv.com to look at the detailed episode guides for information on writers, directors, guest stars, plot summary, and so on, which was a wonderful resource until recently, when CBS seem to have bought it. Now it is a couple of trashy lines about the plot and some pretty pictures... oh, and heaps of advertisements -- hefty flash animations sprinkled all around to slow your web browser to a grind.
All that cool reference data had been put up there by hundreds (perhaps thousands) of interested viewers -- not "professionals" paid by big companies to do so. When I found that this goldmine of information was gone I despaired, searching for a button that might make all the details come forth. There was nothing. Eventually I noticed something on the preceding http://epguides.com page that never used to be there before -- a link to "switch to TVRage list". On clicking that I was shown almost exactly the same epguides page, except that the link to the detailed episodes listings was no longer "Printable Guide @TV.com", but now "Printable Guide @TVRage". Yay! That took me to the old, complete listing, no longer debased and gutted of all useful data, but kept out of the hands of the brainless giant.
Another example:
I recently bought the third season of an old TV series called "Moonlighting", starring the beautiful Cybill Shepherd and a younger, rather zany Bruce Willis. I did notice at the time, that it was marketed by Sony -- a company which has been lurching badly into insanity lately. Remember how they tried to destroy George Michael? Remember the stupidity of deliberately infecting people's machines with rootkits in their attempt to control their customers? I have tried to read Sony DVDs before and been unable to, so I was a little concerned about forking over good money for this DVD set.
When I tried it out at home I found some of my fears confirmed. Sony had fiddled with the timing of the show so that it wouldn't play properly from my computer. At first I thought I might have lost my money, or would at least need to return the DVDs to the shop for a refund, however I had recently compiled a new version of my favorite video player on Linux and it included a new command which let me play a DVD similarly to how a stand-alone player would. It worked!... mostly. I could play the episodes, but couldn't pause, rewind, or jump forward in the episode. I found that out when I received a phone call when I was a little more than halfway through one of the 50 minute episodes, and paused it. After the phone call I tried to resume and it wouldn't. I had to watch the episode from the start again. And I actually had to wait through the half hour I'd already seen because there was no way of jumping forward -- it would simply restart.
There was another problem. The normal way I watch my DVDs is to rip them to my computer, store the DVDs away from possible damage, and watch only the ripped files -- it is easier, simpler to keep track of where I'm up to, and it doesn't endanger my precious, easily scratched disks. Well, because my mode of ripping was rendered impossible by Sony's screwing around with the timing, I was for some time stumped. I put the DVDs aside, fed up with the inconvenience and vowing never to buy anything from Sony ever again. However I came up with a brainstorm. Might mplayer's new command also be used to rip tracks? It turns out that it works. So, using
the second track on a DVD can be ripped to the computer as "moonlighting.vob", which I can then re-encode as a more efficient video format so that it takes up a fraction of the space.
The irony is that if I hadn't been able to defeat the anti-ripping technology on the disks I would have returned them, largely unwatched, and would never have bought anything from Sony again. Being able to rip them means I'll keep these DVDs, and will buy further Moonlighting DVDs. This is exactly the opposite behavior that the deliberate corruption of the disks was intended to achieve.
I'm unlikely to bother with other Sony stuff again though -- I expect they will continue going more and more insane, and sooner or later I'll get stuck with something I'm unable to watch.
Often when I watch a TV show (I don't have TV so I watch only DVDs or downloaded shows) I go to http://epguides.com to find how many episodes were made, what they were named, and when. From there I generally went (through a link on the epguides page) to tv.com to look at the detailed episode guides for information on writers, directors, guest stars, plot summary, and so on, which was a wonderful resource until recently, when CBS seem to have bought it. Now it is a couple of trashy lines about the plot and some pretty pictures... oh, and heaps of advertisements -- hefty flash animations sprinkled all around to slow your web browser to a grind.
All that cool reference data had been put up there by hundreds (perhaps thousands) of interested viewers -- not "professionals" paid by big companies to do so. When I found that this goldmine of information was gone I despaired, searching for a button that might make all the details come forth. There was nothing. Eventually I noticed something on the preceding http://epguides.com page that never used to be there before -- a link to "switch to TVRage list". On clicking that I was shown almost exactly the same epguides page, except that the link to the detailed episodes listings was no longer "Printable Guide @TV.com", but now "Printable Guide @TVRage". Yay! That took me to the old, complete listing, no longer debased and gutted of all useful data, but kept out of the hands of the brainless giant.
Another example:
I recently bought the third season of an old TV series called "Moonlighting", starring the beautiful Cybill Shepherd and a younger, rather zany Bruce Willis. I did notice at the time, that it was marketed by Sony -- a company which has been lurching badly into insanity lately. Remember how they tried to destroy George Michael? Remember the stupidity of deliberately infecting people's machines with rootkits in their attempt to control their customers? I have tried to read Sony DVDs before and been unable to, so I was a little concerned about forking over good money for this DVD set.
When I tried it out at home I found some of my fears confirmed. Sony had fiddled with the timing of the show so that it wouldn't play properly from my computer. At first I thought I might have lost my money, or would at least need to return the DVDs to the shop for a refund, however I had recently compiled a new version of my favorite video player on Linux and it included a new command which let me play a DVD similarly to how a stand-alone player would. It worked!... mostly. I could play the episodes, but couldn't pause, rewind, or jump forward in the episode. I found that out when I received a phone call when I was a little more than halfway through one of the 50 minute episodes, and paused it. After the phone call I tried to resume and it wouldn't. I had to watch the episode from the start again. And I actually had to wait through the half hour I'd already seen because there was no way of jumping forward -- it would simply restart.
There was another problem. The normal way I watch my DVDs is to rip them to my computer, store the DVDs away from possible damage, and watch only the ripped files -- it is easier, simpler to keep track of where I'm up to, and it doesn't endanger my precious, easily scratched disks. Well, because my mode of ripping was rendered impossible by Sony's screwing around with the timing, I was for some time stumped. I put the DVDs aside, fed up with the inconvenience and vowing never to buy anything from Sony ever again. However I came up with a brainstorm. Might mplayer's new command also be used to rip tracks? It turns out that it works. So, using
mplayer dvdnav://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile "moonlighting.vob"the second track on a DVD can be ripped to the computer as "moonlighting.vob", which I can then re-encode as a more efficient video format so that it takes up a fraction of the space.
The irony is that if I hadn't been able to defeat the anti-ripping technology on the disks I would have returned them, largely unwatched, and would never have bought anything from Sony again. Being able to rip them means I'll keep these DVDs, and will buy further Moonlighting DVDs. This is exactly the opposite behavior that the deliberate corruption of the disks was intended to achieve.
I'm unlikely to bother with other Sony stuff again though -- I expect they will continue going more and more insane, and sooner or later I'll get stuck with something I'm unable to watch.
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Date: 2010-06-21 04:12 am (UTC)