So, I'm in love with my MacBook Pro. Even more so with Boot Camp, because now I have a small partition for gaming and other such Windows-only activities. One of these activites that excited me recently was the realization that I can finally look at DVD-ROM content available only to Window's users (my previous PC didn't have a DVD-ROM drive). So, after today's purchase of Mission Impossible and Mission Impossible 2 I decided to try and get into some of the DVD-ROM content on the later.
So, I pop in my shiney new M:i:II disc, and guessy what I get. A program installation notice to the effect of "In order to get the goodies, you have to install the program we want you to install." It's a very nice sounding program called PCFriendly. I do a quick Google search and get about a thousand hits title "PCFriendly Enables DVD Backchannels." For those of you who don't know what this means (as I was previously unaware), it boils down the the program opening up back doors into your computer so it can send out all of your personal information and computer use habits without being caught by spyware, firewalls, and most other security devices.
I filled out some bogus information and was going to try and go ahead and look at the content and see what the program might have had to offer, but there was some error and the DVD wouldn't play. So, looks like Ethan Hunt is going to have to be viewed sans DVD-ROM features for the rest of eternity.
But, I have quite a DVD collection if I do say so myself, and so I grabbed another I knew had "interactive content." American Pie got to be attempt #2. Yet again I have to install their software. But it's something different: InterActual Player. Hmm, that sounds familiar. Oh wait, I remember why. It's because the liscense agreement for PCFriendly said it was related to InterActual Player. So now the movie studios are trying to two seperate programs, both of which have the save DVD-playing cover, to moniter my activity and sell it to the highest bidder. InterActual Player tried to get tricky on me too. It makes you enter in your ZIP code and age range. There's a couple other tabs with various information. One has their Privacy Statements and checkboxes next to statements declaring the computer user's agreement to share their personal information (both of them set to be checked by default and hidden where most users won't even notice their exsistence). I of course uncheck this and proceed to browse to the other tabs, seeing what else there is (not much of note). I stumble back onto the tab with the checkboxes. Lo and behold, they've magically decided they want to be checked again. That has to be illegal in some way or another.
In the end InterActual Player really didn't offer anything of value. I'll stick to watching DVDs on my OS X parition. The quality is SOOOOOO much better then anything I've seen on the various PC options (VLC, Windows Media Player, other various and often spyware related other players).
Hollywood, I love movies. So why must you make me spite you so. I really do want to get along. You gain very little by forcing people to jump through these hoops. I understand and can even completely support content available only on a computer, and even content that requires some common and non-spyware related plug-ins or programs. But what you're doing is just shameful.
So, what you should start doing is integrating content that will play on any standard DVD playing software. If I can hit button on the menu that says "Play Movie" on the computer and then proceed to watch the movie, I should be able to hit the button that said "DVD-ROM Content" on the same computer using the same program and proceed to watch the DVD-Rom content. I would even support the studios rallying behind or creating a new DVD playing program (but just one, none of this crap having multiple programs that are really all the same thing and even related to each other) that supports this extra content and doesn't invade user privacy. A DVD playback program should do just that. All you're giving me is spyware that happens to also play DVDs.
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