Warner Bros. Gets It Right…Almost
Here’s the conumdrum for the 21st Century Movie Consumer. That great new movie you like just came out to buy. You want the DVD so you can watch it in 5.1, see 5 hours of fluff pieces on how wonderful everyone is, listen to inane commentary and watch those animated menus that take 5 minutes to start are unskippable and just aren’t that impressive anymore. But you’re going on that business trip tomorrow and would also like a (non batterty sucking) way to watch it on your notebook computer on the plane or (heaven forfend) an i(Pod Touch, Phone, etc.) You’re also a DMCA abiding citizen. What do you do? Pray it’s on iTunes so you can spend another $10-15 on a movie you already bought or say DMC-what and introduce yourself to Handbrake.
However, wouldn’t a better idea be for the Movie studio to remove two or three of those inane puff pieces and put the frickin video file on that 9GB disk for you?
Well, Warner Bros is going to do just that. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which admittedly sucked quite a bit, will have a video file for use on computers and portable media players. Genius! Well, almost genius. Word is that it will be protected by the quite sucky Windows Media DRM which means it will only play on a Windows Computer or one of those devices that 5 people have (I don’t even know which ones they are) that can play Windows Media Protected content.
So the other 85% of people who have iPods can’t Trash their copies of Handbrake quite yet, but this is a step in the right direction.
