Rather, the problem with people who manufacture DVDs is that we’re moving to a world where physical disks aren’t useful or needed. Between smart phones that can play pretty much any content and devices like the AppleTV or the Boxee Box, all of our media that our computers have on file is now available on all of our devices. The trouble is, most of the content we want isn’t available for our devices or it’s licensed in ways that would make Stalin pause and take note. Randall Munroe, the author of XKCD has summed it up perfectly:

The further trouble is that while Apple and Amazon and all the other media retailers are starting to get onboard with the idea of DRM free music, nobody is willing to touch video. I’m not going to name names or mention specific titles, but a number of DVD’s I’ve run across that have intentionally broken blocks, bad tracks, or other garbage inserted to throw off pirates. They only work in a dedicated DVD player which is somewhat lenient to errors.

Which brings me to my next problem: I recently got rid of my dedicated DVD player – one less thing to hook into my television, one less remote to manage and teach to the rest of the family, one less set of things to buy, move and replace. I’m also working on getting rid of my DVD collection – keeping the disks, but putting them into deep storage. Using Handbrake, I transcode disks I own to m4v files that my AppleTV can play back, and save the files to my file server. I never share the files I create, and I’m not trying to make any money off of this. I just want to enjoy the movies I paid for in the format that is most convenient for me.

So, now I’ve got to go through a huge song and dance to convert the DVD’s I already purchased into a format I can use. Makes me want to scream.