Details of Initial "Disc to Digital" Program Emerge 201
MojoKid writes with an excerpt from an article at Hot Hardware: "Walmart's burgeoning partnership with the Ultraviolet DRM system backed by major Hollywood studios and their plans to 'assist' customers in registering DVDs with the Ultraviolet system, made headlines not long ago. Walmart has also since announced additional details to the program and it's a clever attempt to drive more users to Vudu, Walmart's subsidiary movie streaming service. Here's how the service works. 'Starting April 16th, 2012 in more than 3,500 stores, Walmart customers will be able to bring their DVD and Blu-ray collections to Walmart and receive digital access to their favorite titles from the partnering studios. An equal conversion for standard DVDs and Blu-ray discs will be $2. Standard DVDs can be upgraded to High-Def (HD) for $5.' Anyone who doesn't have a Vudu account will have one created for them as part of this process. That's part of the genius to the plan. If customers embrace the offer, Walmart signs up hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people for Vudu. Even better, from Walmart's perspective, is that first-time users who pony up $2 for a digital version of their DVDs are effectively paying to create Vudu accounts."
Re:Possible High "Parental Factor" (Score:5, Informative)
You must be using windows to try to rip the movie.
I set up a FreeNAS server to share the drive. I then set up a second system to do the conversion.
Both my desktop and the conversion server (Linux) use dvdbackup to backup the dvd to the NAS. I can share it as is, but it takes a lot of space to store the whole backup (4 to 8 gb) So I queue the backup for conversion to xvid/avi on the conversion server. The xvid conversion is done with omgrip http://ogmrip.sourceforge.net/en/index.html [sourceforge.net]
It processes about 10 dvd's a day with no cropping and no down scaling of the movie and the file size fixed at 1024m. I can fill the drive holding the dvd backups in an afternoon and have it rip the whole week with out adding to it. I have no sound sync issues and only a small number of really new DVD's will not read and backup. I have reported the errors to dvdbackup so I assume they will get it fixed.
I have 169 of my dvd's ripped and still have 580 to go.
All in all, I spend my spare time on Saturday doing dvdbackups (About 7 hours total for the day) and then spend about an hour a day moving the completed movies to the Movie directory and removing the dvd backup once it is done.
With those two pieces of software I have almost no messing around to do, simple set up a profile to set the xvid size, audio settings (Dolby 5.1), and turn off cropping.
All of my streaming is done to a Boxee Box.
Simple, easy, works almost every time (Total failure is about 10 dvd's so far.), no 2$ and no need for the internet connection to watch a movie.
Re:So you pay for what you already own (Score:3, Informative)
This is nonsense. You won't go to jail for making private use rips. Stop spreading FUD.
Re:Possible High "Parental Factor" (Score:4, Informative)
I've always just used handbrake...
Re:Copyright Laundering (Score:5, Informative)
From what I have read, they are planning on stamping the disks when you bring them in so they can only be brought in once. With what or how hard it will be to remove I don't know.