Fair warning. This one is a rant! 🙂
I recently installed a blu-ray drive into one of my Linux systems. I then learned more about blu-ray media than I ever cared to know. The “protection” features placed in blu-ray makes it difficult to play a blu-ray disc on a Linux distribution that one installs on their own.
Now I know that Linux has its issues when it comes to ease of use. I base that statement upon my experience of using various distributions of Linux for years now. I also do not tolerate piracy of any sort. If you do not want to pay for something do not watch it and let the market decide the product’s price or fate. I will not even touch upon blu-ray versus HD-DVD.
Yet when I buy a piece of hardware and cannot use it with a piece of media that I purchased because I chose to use an open source operating system, well it makes me wonder if I should invest in blu-ray any more.
When I purchase a film and get discs for the 3D blu-ray, blu-ray, DVD, and a digital copy (which also will not play on Linux) as an incentive to purchase the product but I am then forced to use either Windows or an appliance to play the media with what good is the incentive? I have the choice to watch any of four different media types, but I cannot use the device of my choosing to do so.
Why? To prevent priacy? How does giving me 4 different copies of the film prevent piracy? I can easily buy one copy and then just give people the versions that I do not want. I can use any of those copies to make a new digital copy with (if you can see it and hear it you can record it). By giving a person several copies of the content you provide several different ways for a pirate to potentially circumvent your anti-piracy measures. Even worse, by forcing me to choose to use a device for playback you are giving me incentive to crack your anti-piracy measures so that I can play it on any device.
But in this situation I just will not purchase the product again.
Blu-ray has good quality, but it is not that good. It is in may ways a dead technology already. Why do I even need a physical disc in this age of streaming content that is continuously improving in quality? The answer is that I do not need blu-ray at all.
Just another example of how technology used to achieve a stupid purpose will not achieve great results. I just wish that such stupid decisions would result in the industry executives who made such stupid decisions finding themselves out of work. Unfortunately I am more confident that blu-ray will be gone before those executives are.