With the impending move to Australia coming up I decided to rip all of our music and video to the computer and abandon physical media altogether. We have a few hundred CDs and over a hundred DVDs so it wasn’t a trivial nor insurmountable task to rip them all but the switch away from physical media raises a number of questions.
The first decision I had to make was which format and quality to use to rip our existing content. I’ve had a number of conversations with my dad over the last few years about the quality of the encoding versus the quality of the content. The argument basically boils down to this. If there’s a song or piece of music you really love, you’ll enjoy listening to it on an AM radio almost as much as you would from a CD. The same goes for your favourite film. You will enjoy watching it on an analogue 14" TV from a VCR almost as much as on a 50" LED backlit 1080p TV from a BluRay disc. The bottom line is that the quality of the content is the most important part of the equation because that’s where you derive the majority of the enjoyment. So long as the quality of the encoding is good enough, then very little of the enjoyment will be lost.
Whilst I would have liked to use the open source and patent free FLAC or Vorbis codecs to encode the audio, I also wanted to make it as easy as possible to play the files back on as wide a range of devices as possible. That really meant the only available choice was MP3, since AAC is probably better quality for the same size but is not as widely supported. As for quality, I chose 256kbps because I can’t really hear a difference between that and a CD whereas I sometimes can at 128kbps. With the DVDs, I would have liked to use H.264, but it took 4x longer to encode than standard MPEG 4, and there are still a lot of devices that don’t support it properly, so I opted for the latter. Ideologically I would have used Theora (open source and patent free) but it is very poorly supported.
Having liberated all of our content from it’s physical medium, the ongoing challenge is to avoid acquiring any more physical media. With audio this is not too difficult, thanks to the likes of Amazon MP3 and 7Digital offering high quality, DRM free MP3 downloads, or if you’re really pushed, iTunes DRM free AAC downloads. Video however is another matter.
Just as the music industry has recognized that the only way to beat piracy is to make it easier to buy their content than to steal it, the TV and movie industry start making all the same mistakes! I can’t find anywhere to legitimately download DRM free video content. The iTunes store offers the best choice, at least in the UK, but all the content is protected by Apple’s Fairplay DRM, which means I can’t play it on anything other than iTunes or Apple’s portable media products. Tesco and CoolRoom also offer video download but only in WMV format protected by Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM technology that doesn’t work on Mac or iPods!
Case in point is the J. J. Abrams Star Trek movie that has just been released on DVD in the UK this week. I paid to watch this movie at the cinema and I enjoyed it so much I want to pay again to own a copy but I don’t want any physical media. My first port of call was the iTunes store who have it for £10.99 including extras but with DRM. Next stop, Google. None of the top 10 Google results for “star trek movie download” were legitimate links. One of the sponsored links was FindAnyFilm which lead me to CoolRoom where I can also download it for £11.99 without the extras but with DRM that won’t work on anything I own!
The simplest way for me to get this movie would be to bittorrent it, and I would have the option of a HD version to boot. When will the movie industry realise that it is currently easier to pirate their product than it is to buy it legitimately, and that is why piracy is rife? Why are they making it so hard for us to give them our money? The best legitimate option I have is to buy it on DVD (£8.00 from Morrisons), rip it straight to the computer and place the DVD in storage. That’s time and effort I would gladly pay an extra £2.99 to avoid if they would just get rid of the stupid DRM!
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Copyright ©Craig Aspinall 2011