This will be boring to many, but in the spirit of All Politics is Local, I will keep you abreast of this year’s wrinkle in the Academy Screener controversy. To avoid DVD piracy by members of the Motion Picture Academy (You?–ed. Everybody’s got his price? How much for a hot copy of Benji Off the Leash?), each of us will be given DVD players this year from a company called Cinea. These machines are capable of playing special encrypted DVDs which many, although not all, of the studios will be sending us. Besides supposedly putting an end to member piracy (of which there was very little, I am sure), this also means no more lending discs to friends and family – a well known Southern California sport – unless you want to lend the entire DVD player along with them (it was hard enough getting the discs back!).
Betcha a dollar that the encryption is cracked before the Awards are announced.
Bet you another dollar that some of those super-duper, specially made DVD players turn out to be defective, or else the encryption algorithm on some of the DVD’s turns out to have a bug that renders them unplayable even on the dedicated units.
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
Gee, Joe, it sounds like one of us just won a dollar.
Last time I heard they broke an ecryption by drawing on the cd/dvd with a marker.
Well, the fact is, as mastermind of the multidollar-per-year global Betamax screener piracy network, Roger just considers this insult added to injury…
You don’t need to crack the cipher. Just hook up a laptop with DVD record capabilities to the video and audio outputs of the gadget, and record as it plays – unless the video display is built in.
John Moore ó Heck, if you’re old school, just hook up the DVD player to an RF modulator and lack that puppy into the VHS recorder…