Cheating the cheats
My daughters birthday was last month. One of the gifts she wanted was the Speed Racer DVD (yea, I dont know why either). I went to the video store to buy it and on the cover was a tag that says “Get a Digital download”. Great I thought, I dont have to rip the DVD, encode it and copy it to my iPod.
Not so easy, at home we opened the small leaflet attached to the DVD box and opened it, after my daughter read it (the print was to small for me), it said that this Digital download for Speed Racer will not work with any iPod, it will only work with Windows Media devices. Great I said there goes 95% of the market. So, i pulled out my brown Zune, which I just upgraded to the new 3.0 firmware/software.
Getting onto the Warner Brother digital download website, more details, it only plays on “Plays for Sure” types of Windows Media players (which Microsoft offically stop supporting recently), which Zune is not one of. So now it doesnt play on 99% of all portable video players.
OK, I said, I will download the movie anyways and watch it on my computer (which is actually useless since I can just play the DVD). Well, Warner Brothers is using the video download service called Cinema Now and they want to charge me an additional $1.99.
So, I bought the physical DVD, the extra digital download doesnt work with any iPod or Zune AND you want to charge me an extra $1.99 ?
These braniacs wonder why their video revenue is drying up ?
Back to ripping my DVDs
sigh
