Comments on: ‘Sony movies won’t play …’

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Sun, 13 May 2007 00:23:53 +0000

Sony stopped caring about the customer experience a long time ago. Unfortunately, boycotting (in the short term) will not have much effect…. they are too large, too fat, and too lazy (which is why these cluster f***s are a regular occurance there). What might help is publicity and if you are one of the victims here I would recommend you come back on the retailer who sold you the unit. They are almost as guilty as Sony for selling players without the required firmware releases. According to Sony, all retailers were notified that this was a problem….. but, of course they’re not the most trustworthy sources as we’ve all found out.

I stopped buying Sony PCs and Car Audio long ago because of these same types of issues. If this keeps up I won’t be buying ANYTHING from them.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Sun, 06 May 2007 02:04:12 +0000

Write to the movie studios telling them you will not buy their movies as long as they are recording them on Sony DVD’s. Get a lot of people to sign it, thats what I’m doing.
One drop of water added to another, then another, soon makes a bucket.
J.R.-one fed-up customer who will never buy Sony again!

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:38:19 +0000

You know the saying “the buck stops here?” Well with Sony, whenever something goes wrong with their drm, they blame it on somebody else and that bothers me more than their idea that drm will reduce piracy.

Remember when people were complaining that they couldn’t stick their cds onto the ipods due to the rootkit? and Sony costumer support told them to blame Apple for the compatibility issue. Yes, I understood that they were upset that Apple wasn’t letting other companies use fairplay, but that didn’t give them an excuse to prevent ipod users, who probably make up the majority of their cd sales, from putting the music on ipods. If they cared at least a little about music fans, they could have sold the songs in an uncopy protected, high quality, at a lower cost that itunes. Instead we got screwed.

Now with the DVD drm, they are blaming the playability problem on DVD makers, even their own electronics division! This is crazy.

The CEO should have on his desk, “the buck doesn’t stop here..,.it stops elsewhere.”

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:10:23 +0000

Its what I’ve been doing since that Rootkit CD thing. I’m not ever going to let another original Sony product in my home.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:30:45 +0000

Low quality over compressed blurry cam shots of movies. They boarder on headache inducing, but that’s better than supporting an industry determined to punish anyone obeying the law. Maybe the quality is improved now.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:50:41 +0000

“Piracy, the better choice ™”

you are right, thats why Sony’s media devision came up with this new copyprotection they payed big money for and will therefor not abandon

Sony: It’s not a feature, it’s a bug(tm)

relatively famous german hacker person once said:
“Es gibt keinen Kopierschutz … bestenfalls Kapierschutz” (Andy MÃ¼ller-Maguhn in c’t 06/01, S. 157)

“there is no such thing as a copyprotection … at best a protection from understanding something” (kapieren = to figure, to catch into the mind)

Seems Sony did not figure after the rootkit incident.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:46:09 +0000

You are making me choke on my food because of laughing so hard.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:41:10 +0000

“can skip ads/logos/trailers”

Can save traffic as they are not part of the download.

Piracy, the better choice ™

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:13:20 +0000

Yes. Yes they will.

Why not just download?

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:57:43 +0000

Looks like they are bound and determined to run themselves out of a market. Anytime your products are more of a pain to use than to get elsewhere, guess what will happen?

I quit buying Sony media when they joined sue’em all. I quit buying Sony Electronics when the Rootkit came out. I can’t trust them to respect my privacy so I’m not going to pay for them to do the dubious ‘privilege’ of that spying.

When I came to the decision I couldn’t trust them, that means the electronics as well. How many can say they can look at all the programming within a stand-alone unit? All it would take is a modified thumb drive to record metadata of what you play. Then some reason to return the unit for upgrading would allow that to be read. No thank you Sony. I don’t want your products after having seen the last time you showed you had no ‘conscience’ about privacy. What would make them think I would trust them now?

Of course this is the consumers problem by their reckoning, just like when M$ has a problem, it is always a users problem till it won’t go away. Just because they got some new great copy protection scheme is no justification for me to plop down my hard earned cash to support it.

My equipment works just fine as it is. I don’t need to buy yet another replacement because Sony thinks this DRM flavor of the week is so worthy. I’ll get what I want without the hassles of dealing with this sort of mentality.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:01:34 +0000

This reminds me of when Macrovision first came out on video tapes back in the early 90s. Some equipment, especially high-end equipment would just video mute (blue screen of death) or loose sync and show garbage, or fade in and out even though you’re NOT copying the movie and have only ONE VCR involved. My $500 Sony VCR blue screened during Hotshots and we had to finish it on a $200 VCR. We always took videos back and COMPLAINED and a few years later the Macro-garbage was gone.

Didn’t even stop copying. I accidentally found out certain very cheap VCRs and certain VCR brands got around this trash and I bought those brands exclusively (They were Matsushita, FCC ID starts out ACJ if you’re curious).

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:42:46 +0000

All the pirating in the past by end users (not talking about elaborate rings turning massive profit) is what I would consider mere skirmishes… nothing more.

This move though by Sony, they should tread carefully, they don’t want to start a war they can’t win.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:34:14 +0000

sony version = problems with playback on some sony dvd players , cant skip opening logos and ads trailers, big problems attempting to playback on other branded dvd players.

pirate version = same quality, can skip ads/logos/trailers , playable on all dvd players.

i don’t know how sony expect people to pay money for extra problems.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:55:43 +0000

What I meant was will the police arrest me for buying them.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:54:57 +0000

Is it illegal to buy bootlegs from some steet vendor? That’s where I’ll be getting all my prerecorded movies from now on.