Floppyhead - Digital Media and Home Theater Computers

One of the advantages of a Media Center/ HTPC is the ability to rip your DVDs to a hard drive and access them through a user interface. For some reason, this really bugs the movie industry. ProtectDisc has released a copy protection dubbed Protect DVD-Video which actually will not allow HTPCs to read the DVD in question, regardless of the fact that it is an original disc. As always there is a word around to the protection scheme. AnyDVD has been updated to remove this new DRM. I hate to think though that you have to buy a $40 piece of software to watch a DVD that you bought legally. I wonder when digital rights managment is going to become a mainstream issue that people actually pay attention to before they buy a product. The frustrating thing to me is that there is so much potential in media centers and home theater computers yet Big Content keeps putting up roadblocks.

From ZDNet:

The movie industry seems determined to continue on a course where it happily erodes the rights of legitimate users, all in the name of securing profits. The latest example of this comes in the form of a DVD copy protection technology called Protect DVD-Video which actually prevents a DVD being played on a Windows PC using Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center Edition or any software players based on DirectShow…

The upshot of this is that if you have a DVD disc protected by Protect DVD-Video and you try to play the disc in a PC-based system using, say, Windows Media Player, the process will fail. Now, lets be clear here, we are taking about a genuine, legitimate DVD disc not working in a PC, not a pirated disc or a download via a torrent. Protect DVD-Video protects a DVD by basically making it un-playable in a DVD drive that’s in a Windows-based PC (I’ve no information on whether this also locks out Linux users - I would imagine that it does).

I orgininally learned of the ZDNet article from PVRWire