Digital Copy

Well, the Christmas season has started to leave even faster than it came...but in its wake is a trail of new gifts and gadgets that will keep guys like me busy well into the New Year. I was lucky enough to get a Blu-Ray player for Xmas, and let me tell you - once you get Blu-Ray hooked up to a Plasma TV with HDMI....you are never going to watch a standard DVD again. In the last couple of days i've watched 'The Dark Knight', 'Invincible', part of 'A Christmas Story' and 'Wanted' all in Blu-Ray - all great movies.

One fairly new thing that these companies are doing when they ship their DVD's and Blu-Rays is really a great idea - Digital Copy. In case you haven't heard of it, most DVD's and Blu-Rays are now shipping with an extra DVD in the case - this DVD is your 'digital copy' of the movie. Basically, for buying the movie, they are giving you a copy for your iPod - and a quick and easy way to get it there. If you buy a Blu-Ray movie, the digital copy is still a DVD.

I personally think this is an amazing idea. There have always been ways to get your DVD's on your iPods, but they are much more time consuming. With the new digital copy, it only takes a few minutes. I want to mention two specific things about digital copy.

1. Getting Digital Copy to the customer
All digital copies are sent the same way - on their own separate DVD included in the case. There is also a little card with a 'registration key' of sorts that you must enter in order to put the digital copy in your iTunes. Hence, you must have an internet connection.

Now while this works great for everyone, I think the idea is a bit flawed. Here's why - if you must have an internet connection to use this digital copy anyway, even though it is included on a disk, would it not be cheaper and easier for studios to provide a digital copy somewhere on the internet for download? Then they wouldn't have to send out a separate DVD with each and every movie, which may not even get used by the majority of customers (I would like to see statistics on usage of digital copy actually, if they exist...). There are obvious drawbacks to this. File sizes are huge (Wanted was about 1.2 GB I believe), so there is going to be long download times......but really, how many people buy or rent movies off iTunes as it is? Obviously there are people out there who are willing to download these large files.

I'm good with any way they want to provide a digital copy.......I just think it would make more sense financially for the studios to provide the digital copy as a download on the internet instead of as a supplied extra DVD.

2. Using Digital Copy on your Mac
I ran into (and solved) this problem tonight, so thought this might help some people who are trying to use Digital Copy with their Mac.

According to the instructions that come with your movie, it says to simply insert the digital copy dvd in your dvd drive and a screen will pop up. When this pops up, double click it to put the movie into your iTunes - it's that simple. Or is it?

When I tried doing this exact method on my MacBook Pro, I kept getting the same error saying 'you must be connected to the internet to use digital copy'. I was connected to the internet, so couldn't see what the problem was. A quick Google search didn't help me. After some digging, I finally found a different set of instructions right on Apple's Support Website. There, they say you must open your iTunes BEFORE putting the digital copy dvd into your dvd drive. When you then go ahead and insert the dvd, it will show up in your iTunes, and you just have to enter the registration key to begin the transfer.

Method number 2 worked flawlessly and I transferred the movie within a couple of minutes.

While I'm on the topic, I do have one more helpful piece of advice that may help anyone with a Sony BDP-S350 Blu-Ray player. There is a firmware update (v10) that is available on the Sony website. There are three ways to get the update

1. Via the internet if your Blu-Ray player is connected to the internet.
2. Sony will mail you an update disc.
3. Burn a bootable update disc yourself.

I chose option number 3 - I downloaded the ISO file from the Sony website and followed all the instructions - however I couldn't get the damn ISO to burn to a CD. I tried NERO on my Windows PC and the default CD Burner on my Mac - no luck.

Finally, I downloaded a nice little FREE program called ImgBurn. However, my first run with this program yielded an error message as well.

If you are running into this problem, I was able to make ImgBurn work, and here is how - go into TOOLS and then SETTINGS. Click on the WRITE tab. On the left hand side, you will see some options. The second from the top is WRITE TYPE and it has a drop down menu beside it. Change the setting from DAO/SAO to TAO and give that a go. I don't have the technical knowledge to know the exact difference between these Write Types, but I do know that older CD burners do not support DAO/SAO.

If you do have this Blu-Ray player and want to do the update, and would like a walkthrough, feel free to reply to this post and I would be happy to help you out.

Knowledge Is Power
CM