Digital Home Thoughts: The Ugly Side of DRM

"DRM is actually a part of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system and has been for a while, but it wasn’t until I picked up a dvd recently that I witnessed the ugly and very user unfriendly side of DRM in person. The dvd in question, T2: Extreme DVD, produced by Artisan Home Entertainment Inc., is a two-dvd disk set, which holds a digitally optimized version of the T2 movie on one disk, and a high definition version of the same movie on the second disk, encoded in WMV9 format. As I already own a, legitimate, copy of T2, that wasn’t the reason I bought the two-dvd disk set, I was looking forward to playing back the hd version, which promises the very best image quality and a great way for me to enjoy the full potential of my, hd capable, home theater installation. To make sure I could make full use of the dvd I double-checked the cover for any requirements on the computer hardware, or any region specific coding. The dvd cover was clear about the minimum requirements in terms of computer hardware for playback of the WMV9 content and since it had no warnings of the content being protected or only playable in certain regions I saw no reason to not buy it..."

The article goes on to recount the pains the author had to go through in order to play back the content. This relates to an earlier rant I did about being forced to install the InterActual player in order to access special DVD content. I'm extremely particular about which software I install on my PCs, and unless I absolutely need to have something installed, I won't let crapware get installed.