Feeling Blu

Last December I wrote that I got a Blu-Ray player for Christmas.  Well, you may have noticed that I haven't reviewed any blu-ray releases on here, and there's a simple reason for that:

Blu-Ray sucks.

Oh, not in picture quality.  The picture quality is awesome.  So is the data capacity.  No, the problem is summed up in one acronym: DRM.  Digital Rights Management.  Look, there's DRM on DVDs.  Back when they first came out I railed about them because a) I thought it was all a plot by the entertainment companies to take our money by forcing us to upgrade our already existing VHS and LD collections (I was right, but at least DVDs have one million times the picture quality of VHS and are 50 times cheaper than Laserdiscs) and b)they had region encoding, which prevents people in one part of the world from buying discs from other parts of the world.  I was right on that one too - the companies did it to prevent reverse importing from cheaper countries but in the process it means that a large number of foreign movies will never be legally released in the US.  In fact it still pisses me off, but at least you *can* get a region-free DVD player if you look hard enough.

Blu-Ray is a hundred times worse.  First, I can't even get screengrabs from the discs to put on this site, so that nixed any chance of me reviewing the original Star Trek series on here.  Second, the player software NEEDS updates, or it won't even function at all.  Not even to play a DVD.  And I can't play BD's with Media Player Classic or any other free software.  You have to buy one of two officially sanctioned players if you want to watch Blu-Ray discs on your PC, and you NEED to have an internet connection in order to update them, no matter if you don't have internet (still a possibility these days in some remote areas or if you can't afford it) or have spotty internet (which is more of a possibility).

In the end it's the increasing corporate control over everything.  They NEED to control everything you see and hear - you are now in the Outer Limits.  Personally I do not like being dictated to by the corporations how to entertain myself.  I can watch my DVDs, even with their level of DRM - at least I can grab screenshots if I want or use a free player to play them.  And you know, it's really sad because I *wanted* to like Blu-Ray, I had wanted a BR player for a long time... as I said the picture quality was tremendous.  I enjoyed watching Star Trek on it but I can't use it anymore.  I'm actually going to have to "downgrade" my Star Trek collection to DVD.  Fortunately that is the only thing I got, so I didn't invest too much in this ultra-corporate-controlled format.

See, thinking positive!