Halfway through a movie tonight at the theater, I thought that I was either having a stroke or that someone had slipped DMT into my coke. It seemed like about every 30 seconds, I was seeing a weird, quickly-flashing pattern of dots in the middle of the screen. It was so intrusive and distracting that I thought that there was something wrong with the print, but when I notified the manager afterward, he explained that it’s some sort of new “anti-piracy” thing. So I came home and looked it up online and checked it out.
“Deluxe’s version has been given the pejorative name of “crap code” by filmgoers, due to its quite intrusive nature when viewing. These dots are usually placed on bright areas of a film frame, so they can be more easily identified, and are a reddish-brown color.”
This is Infuriating. It’s absolutely unforgivable, offensive, and unacceptable. Putting dark, flashing brown-red dots in the brightest areas of a film frame punishes people who have legitimately paid money to go see the film - it was very distracting to me, and my friend agreed that it was noticeable and irritating. Haven’t companies learned that punishing and inconveniencing your legitimate customers in a world where digital piracy is so easy is a guaranteed way to drive those customers away? I stopped buying CD’s when they stopped actually being CD’s due to bullshit “anti-piracy” elements that made it impossible for me to play them in my car or computer player, much less make mp3’s of them for convenient use on my mp3 player. When they started punishing me for paying their bills, I stopped paying their bills and started stealing from them.
This makes me never want to pay to go see a movie again. If it’s going to look like shit anyway, I might as well just illegally download it!
One of the many reasons why I just don’t go to the theater anymore. If it’s not the complete lack of civility from everyone around me, it’s the film quality and presentation itself by the staff of shit-chucking chimps. Besides, it will take about 4 nanoseconds for someone with After Effects to matte out the dots and all the effort will be for nothing, so why bother at this point?
The final straw was when I nearly clobbered the ass rag behind me until a mutual agreement was made that he stop giving his idiot faux Truffaut running commentary throughout a film I paid over twenty dollars for me and my girlfriend to see.
Then you have the spineless shit bag manager who nails me with the three trillion candle power lighthouse lamp for a flashlight, asking me to take my feet from the back of the seat in front of me, yet refused to even cast the beam in the direction of the gang initiation golden shower taking place at the front of the theater.
Open letter to the chimpanzees who think up and greenlight this stuff:
Listen. I have a couple of points for you.
You’ll never eradicate piracy. Ever. You probably won’t even make a dent in it. Nothing you can ever do to stop it will actually make a difference, especially not moronic little measures like this. There is nothing conceivable you could possibly do, that cannot be easily circumvented. Piracy is here, it is not going away. You may not like it, but it’s reality.
Paying customers don’t like being fucked with and don’t like being presented with an inferior product.
If we put 1 and 2 together, what do we get? Think hard about it. That’s right, you’re annoying paying customers while not affecting pirates in any way. What do you think the annoyed paying customers who have so far refrained from piracy are now going to do? Keep paying for shitty products, or get better products for free?
Because that’s what you’re looking at. No, it’s not fair and it’s not legal and boo-fucking-hoo, but what you’re competing with is unlimited free film and music. You’d better start thinking about what you can offer that beats that. The last thing you should do is lessen the quality of your own product. People have to have a reason to go to you. Otherwise they won’t.
And if you think you’d be better off buying DVDs instead - yeah. right. (ASIDE from the playback restrictions and un-skippable trailers accusing you of trying to steal what you just paid for) http://www.filmrot.com/articles/news/005431.php There’s similar crap on many Lord of the Rings DVDs. Probably it’s because I’m used to code fragments flashing over my computer screen, but I’ve actually READ the “21” part, first time I watched it. Not noticeable my ass.
Not for THIS. If you want my money, make me a better offer.
One of the identifying characteristics of pirated movies used to be their poor quality. Apparently, the brains behind this thought it would be a good idea just to ruin movies straight out of the gate.
That’s probably because pirated movies are now exactly what you’d buy or rent at Blockbuster. With the outrageous speeds of home Internet connections these days and cheap double-layer DVD recorders for computers, downloading a 9GB DVD movie and burning it to a disc takes about 2 hours total. That 9GB archive is an exact copy of a retail DVD, oftentimes decompressing into an image of the disc itself. It takes almost no effort and time to get yourself a movie.
They can’t keep up. Blue-Ray/HD-DVD formats call for much larger files (~50GB) and I suspect that the big push for either of these new standards has just as much to do with anti-piracy as it does for improved quality.
Flashing things at us like that is daaaaangerous! (said she, tongue firmly planted in her cheek, but hating Crap-Code and this anti-piracy shit along with the rest of yas… seriously, there’s gotta be a better way to go about this for the studios and the industry…)
Thank god there’s an explanation–I thought I was either having a stroke or the precursor to a detached retina or migraine. I can’t even remember the film I saw this in, but I do rememeber seeing it–and being annoyed.
I Pitted this a few years ago after they first came out, but I can’t find that post. Nothing short of complete disability or utter poverty would make me stop going to the movie theater, but I have asked for my money back, often.
I had hoped back then that if enough people complained, it would stop. Silly me, thinking people would rather take action than just complain on a message board or to their friends/family. In the theater, people are too timid or in a hurry to complain, and eventually they get used to the dots, so no big deal. It’s the way it is. People are sheep. How many people in this and the other threads about crap codes say they’ll quit going to the theater, rather than complain to the manager and/or get their money back? Too fucking many.
I absolutely agree; the movie industry is trying to scrape dogshit off it’s shoes by means of a shotgun blast.
However, I would like to take this moment to pimp (they’re not paying me; I have no interest in it beyond helping other people solve annoyances) some software that at least lets you watch dvds properly on a computer. It gets rid of region locks, lets you skip through the FBI warnings, prevents the disc from trying to install software on your machine, etc.
Alas, at least here in Germany, they’ve already made the manufacture, import, propagation, sale, renting, and advertisement of such tools illegal. A publisher even got sued for a simple link to Slysoft in a news report - not even to a specific download, just to the company homepage. heise online - IT-News, Nachrichten und Hintergründe While private use and possession is not (yet…?) under penalty of law, you (theoretically) still may get sued for compensation if you use them. (who cares anyway…)
The sad thing is, it’s WE who pay the lawyers of the content industry. It’s WE who pay their lobbyists. It’s WE who pay their engineers who develop all these new, pointless, and annoying “piracy protections”. I wonder what percentage of the price for a DVD or a movie ticket goes into this stuff.
Traditionally, “sheep” is used about people to indicate that they go along, sheeplike if you will, with everything without resisting. How is stopping going to the movies like being a sheep?
Which is more likely to engender change in the movie industry, a corporate institution: whining to the pimple-faced boss at AMC 41 West Las Vacas, or doing your part to cut off Hollywood’s money supply?