Ever since building a media PC for myself to have all my movies & TV shows available at the touch of a button I haven’t had much need to even handle a disc for a while, in fact the media PC experiment has proved so compelling that messing about with discs evokes similar feelings to handling audio cassettes or floppy disks.

Anyway unlike a lot of people I actually do buy things on Bluray that seem like good value for money.  A while ago I bought the metal box version of Band of Brothers - the critically acclaimed mini-series about WW2.  Recently I decided to rewatch it and straight away I was struck by just how long I had to wait before I could even choose which episode I wanted to watch from the menu.

The PS3 - whilst still apparently one of the better Bluray players available - still seemingly has to go through some sort of routine when playing Bluray movies where it changes resolution several times, “loads” something (fuck knows what, dynamic content?) before finally getting on with the job of actually playing the disc proper.

What this all means in practice is that from the moment you put the disc in the PS3 and choose to play it you’re sat there for several minutes whilst unskippable copyright & anti-piracy notices appear on screen, in several different languages.  I swear on this particular BoB boxset I have to wait at least 5 elapsed minutes before I get to the menu.

Now someone who has in their possession a genuine Bluray disk that the PS3 presumably verifies (somehow) as genuine (I can only presume that PS3s wont play copied Blurays) it is fairly safe then to assume that the person who put the disc in the drive either bought it or is renting it.  Either way they’ve paid money for the experience, money which the MPAA/RIAA etc are constantly moaning that they’re not getting the right amount of from consumers.

Since piracy is so easy and convenient nowadays if I go out of my way - because someone who is au fait with the internet & has high speed broadband, that’s exactly what it is - to purchase a genuine authorised copy of something I don’t want an experience that is worse than the people that have pirated it!

With the Band of Brothers bluray boxset if you choose to buy it - as I did - then you have to suffer through 5+ minutes of unskippable content on every disc, when someone who downloads each episode of it from Usenet or torrents has as-near-as-dammit the same picture and sound quality experience but instead they are watching the episode mere seconds after choosing to watch it.  In every way that matters they are receiving a better experience in spite of having not paid for it.  The honest buyer has quite literally lost 5 minutes of their life every time they put the disc in the drive.

Also the PS3 has this great feature whereby if you start watching Sky or anything else (I guess it relates to it detecting when it is no longer the HDMI connector that is in use) it automatically pauses playback, even on the copyright notices/adverts (which you can’t incidentally pause manually - none of the controls work, you just get an “Operation not permitted here” error).  So not only can you not skip the notices but they have to be visible on screen otherwise they’ll be sat waiting for you when you switch back to the PS3.  Your only options are either to “sit there and watch!” or physically walk away, fortunately TVs aren’t at the stage where they can tell when you’re not watching.

Yet.