If you haven’t seen it yet – then the new take of Mel Brook’s The Producers with Matthew Broderick & Nathan Lane is very much worthy of a viewing, so much so in my opinion that we’ve purchased the DVD. Bully for you, I hear you cry. Well, being a techie I’ve got the house setup to handle streamed media – including video, so now rather than trawling through our DVDs to choose something to watch; we simply flick the TV over to the media device and then navigate through our online collection. The DVDs themselves get stored away, keeping the place nice and clutter free. To store the DVDs, I convert the film to the popular DIVX format which gives me a nice compression of 50%-75% without seriously compromising quality.

Now the point is, the studio has so kindly put some form of copy protection on the disk so I can not do the conversion, so much for the networked home media solution if they keep that up. So what can I do? Well ironically, I can either keep the DVD laying around – not desirable got too many to easily store anyway; or I can turn to the one thing the media moguls love to tell us is both illegal and the source of inferior versions – P2P, and hey thirty seconds and I’ve found someone who is sharing a DIVX conversion of the DVD film. So what has been gained by the effort in figuring out how to stop me converting a DVD to meet my home media requirements, aside from from really annoying me?

The silly thing is, if I download the converted form of the DVD then the studio will scream thats another lost sale. I was going to say that of course this is rubbish in this case, but it  occured to me that if you’re looking to do the same thing you may well not bother buying the DVD – not because I’ve said you can find downloads available on the net, but because you like me want to show the film within in your streaming media environment and wont bother buying it now given that you can’t load it into your media system! Not the intention that the film studio or distributors wanted to achieve.

Incidentally, Sony who have a huge investment in both music and film have announced such a home media streaming device – and I bet you that it wont help you transition from their DRM/protected content to their media network.