I’m currently in the process of backing up my DVD collection on to my Xbox. It’s a slow process, it takes about half an hour to extract the content from the DVD then a further three to four hours to encode it to an AVI. Bearing all of this in mind I find it strange that more and more companies are releasing portable video players. These companies can’t advise their customers as to how to transfer a DVD to the device they sell as it is still a legal grey area. Why should customers buy a product that they can’t (legally) use? Yes, there are legal downloads becoming available for video content but the question remains why should the customer pay again for the same content?

The model of portable music players seems to work;

• The customer buys a portable device.
• The manufacturer has the opportunity to sell content for the device.
• The content provides them another form of revenue and if they provide a decent service it will lead to more customers buying their device.
• The customer has the opportunity to use their own content and the manufacturer provides the tools or instructions as to how to do this.

Why shouldn’t this be the case for video? The only reasons I have ever seen have been along the lines of piracy and to me they don’t make sense. Currently I have nearly two hundred films in my collection, films that I have handed over money for. By telling me that I can’t convert these films to use on a portable device, where is my incentive to buy films in future and more importantly what am I actually paying for?

Pirate films available all over the internet are in a format already suitable for portable players and can be downloaded, albeit illegally, for free. The movie industry needs to wake up, their current stance is not going to end piracy nor is it going to increase sales. Why not include a pre-formatted version of the movie on the DVD along with the standard version. If some standard resolution and filesize were decided upon it is not inconceivable that this could work, I’d even put up with some form of DRM provided it wasn’t intrusive.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Geek Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.