April 11th, 2008
Friday Rant - Here's a perfect example of why DRM sucks
It’s a Friday (again!) so that means time for another Friday Rant! Today a cautionary tale for those of you buying HD DVD players and discs.
If you’ve been looking at the slew of cheap HD DVD discs and players on the market and feel that this is the perfect time to hop onto the HD bandwagon is a cost effective way. Be careful. Be very careful, because as soon as your player dies your investment in HD DVD movies will be good for little more than coffee coasters.
HD DVD seems to be experiencing a blip in popularity since the standard crumbled. However, signs now point to this format being eradicated swiftly. For example, take Cyberlink, makers of the popular PowerDVD software. The HD DVD standard has only been dead for a few weeks and the company has already removed support for the format from PowerDVD 8. If you want support for HD DVD then you need to have version 7.3 of PowerDVD installed (one consolation is that you can have both versions installed on the same PC).
Now, I expected that support for HD DVD would diminish over time, but I didn’t expect to see the plug being pulled on the format this quickly.
So, once again we have a situation where the losers in this format war are the customers who’ve paid good money for players and media. Now the format is dead, support for it is dying too. Oh, and thanks to lavish amounts of DRM, customers will be forced not only to buy new hardware, but also new discs. Welcome to the world of DRM where you pay multiple times for the same content.
On a related note, it seems that the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) have issued an update to the Blu-ray content protections scheme (AACS MKBv7). However, just to show how pointless this update is, SlySoft, makers of AnyDVD, have updated the software to allow users who cannot update their software or hardware players to be able to make use of the latest movie releases.
Thoughts?
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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