In the recent Family Guy release, Blue Harvest (the Star Wars parody show), they included a second DVD with copies of the movie in portable formats for users to watch on their PlaysForSure device as well as the iPhone/iPod. The experience was painful. Here is how it went down.
On Tuesday, I had downloaded the iTunes 7.6 upgrade, which is required to be able to pull the digital copy off of the DVD and incorporate it into iTunes. On Wednesday morning, I tried to copy over the file before my plane flight across country. Low and behold it didn’t work.
One of the things iTunes 7.6 appears to be able to do is “download” from the DVD media instead of over the internet. I was curious when I saw my download speeds around 50Mb/s. I was trying to see how exactly that was happening, considering my internet connection speed is only 10Mb/s. Window’s task manager was showing my ethernet connection at 50% of my 100Mb/s connection consistently, yet I was positive it wasn’t download the movie from anywhere in the house except for my DVD drive. So the first issue solved – how I was supposedly downloading at extreme speeds; it was just really downloading the movie through the use of a program that opened a TCP port to allow access to my DVD drive from iTunes.
The feature is really a great idea, allowing all companies that sell stuff (music, movies, TV shows) on digital medium like CDs or DVDs to include a digital copy that will not only be copy protected (so the user cant send or share the files with their friends) but also be faster for everyone when it comes to ripping DVDs. And considering the short run times on CDs nowadays (50 minutes or less) there is adequate space for WMA and AAC copy protected digital versions. Users may still prefer to rip to MP3, and I don’t expect Apple to remove this function anytime soon, but it allows DRM to get its foot in the door with respect to music. With movies, the average user doesn’t know about the various sets of tools to rip movies and TV shows to a format that will play on their iPod or iPhone, nor does the average person have the CPU horsepower to do it in a timely fashion (faster than 0.5x real time – though quad cores will help immensely with this issue), so this is a huge win in getting folks to continue to buy the DVD instead of just opting for the digital download.
However while this may all sound great in theory, it doesn’t always work out well in practice, as it did the morning of my flight. After five attempts to get the digital transfer working properly and receiving the error, “an unknown error occurred (-50)” I finally gave up, broke out Handbrake and proceeded to rip the movie like I normally do. I barely managed to get the video done and onto my iPhone for the trip. Good job Apple…
I did try this again today (1/20), as several websites have reported that the issue is now fixed, and I was able to successfully import the digital file without any problems. But the initial taste in my mouth is still a sour one, even before you factor in all the DRM.
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