IT Curmudgeon

A while back I got a beefy AMD-64 computer with 6 gig of ram, an awesome video card and a Blu-Ray player built in. It came with Windows XP Pro. I paid the "downgrade" charge to avoid getting Vista. The people who sold it to me said to avoid 64 bit XP and especially 64 bit Vista.

So my 6 gig machine was sitting there with only 3 gig of memory available, since XP Pro only can see 3 gig. I really wanted to get the full use of the machine, so when Windows 7 trials started, I downloaded it and ran the install. The first release locked up without even getting to the splash screen. About a month later, another release got to the splash screen and then locked up. No worries, it's beta software. What should I do to get full use of the machine, though?

I downloaded 64 bit Ubuntu Linux, and it worked like a charm. I've had experience over the years with Linux, and I found Ubuntu to be a real joy. Linux takes a little bit of curiosity, tweaking and googling, but for me it was worth it to have a full-powered machine able to run lots of apps. Linux is not a "no-brainer." Some people just should not use it, and we all know who they are. Others though, really ought to give it a try. With web access to Google Docs, Firefox browsers, many email options, tons of open source applications, and Open Office, it certainly suits my needs.

So I was content with my beefy machine and its beefy operating system for a few months when I decided to rent a Blu-Ray movie and give it a spin. I rented the movie and tweaked and tried and googled like crazy, but couldn't get the movie to play.

I discovered to my horror that the people who control the digital rights to Blu-Ray decided not to allow any Linux users to play their movies. This is, presumably, to prevent people from finding out what the encryption schemes are and pirating the films.

Now comes the best part. The way to play a Blu-Ray movie on Linux is published on multiple websites, following the decryption techniques first released in January 2007. It involves copying the files onto a hard drive, downloading freely available encryption keys, and decrypting the files on a hard drive.

Now all of this seemed like way too much trouble for me, so I rebooted to the old XP partition on my machine and ran the movie player that came with the Blu-Ray drive. It was frustrating to have to go back to Windows to watch a movie, but it worked.

Isn't it ironic that the movie industry would enforce a policy that prevents honest people from legally renting or purchasing their movies and watching them on their computers with legal equipment?

Some old-timers may recall that the same battle was fought over the "secret" DVD format, which was not available on Linux until the coding scheme was so widely available that it was a joke to try to keep people from viewing DVD movies in Linux.

People are boycotting Blu-Ray because of it's steadfast refusal to allow players to run on Linux, in spite of the encryption keys and copying procedures being publicly available on the Internet, and hacks being freely available. It seems they would rather have people copying their movies than viewing them as intended.

People who I've talked to find it fascinating and foolish, yet perfectly in line with other decisions the recording and movie industries have made for the past 15 years.