I generally buy DVDs from the rental people. And then I have five minutes of junk — including FBI warnings when I live in New Zealand (Note to the FBI: YOU HAVE NO JURISDICTION OUTSIDE THE USA). Noter Corey Doctorrow’s comment.

This pithy and funny chart does a superb job of explaining how the insertion of a lot of “business model” (FBI warnings, unskippable trailers, THX vanity sequences) makes buying a DVD a lot worse than pirating the same disc online. I rip all my kid’s DVDs (not least because she has a tendency to scratch them to hell), and the difference between firing up a movie on a laptop and it just starting versus trying to explain to a toddler why Daddy has to spend five minutes pressing next-next-next menu-menu-menu is enormous. I think it all comes down to the stuff in the DVD-CCA spec that allows DVD creators to flag sequences as unskippable: that’s such an attractive nuisance, it’s bound to attract every hard-sell marketer and power-tripping fool in any media company, who will eventually colonize it with so much crapola that it comes just short of destroying the possibility that anyone will voluntarily pay for the product.

This is a classic example of how to Piss of f a captive market. It is a modertate faile. Givent that YouTube is taking over — my preteens watch the US shows they want on Hulu or Youtube — it will add to the demise of yet another media format. And unlike LPs, there is no audiophlic or videophilic reason to keep the DVD anyway.