p2pnet - rss feed: ‘Sony movies won’t play …’
p2pnet.net news:- It doesn’t seem believable. But the terrible publicity Sony is still getting following its efforts to foist dangerous (to PCs) rootkit spyware onto customers via music CDs doesn’t seem to have dissuaded the company from trying it on again, this time DRM-ing movies. And it’s apparently been going on since March at the least.
“In their zeal to make their DVD movies copyproof (yeah right) they have in fact made their latest releases unplayable on some DVD players, including my Sony DVP-CX995V DVD player,” says Mick B on Just another WordPress.com weblog, quoted on slashdot.
He goes on that he recently rented Sony’s Stranger than Fiction and The Holiday. both by Sony Pictures. Both load up to the splash title screen and then load no further, then after about 60 secs the player turns itself off!
He says he called Sony Pictures 1-800-860-2878 and:
Sony Tech: We know about this problem. Its our new copy protection that’s making these discs unplayable in some players including our own, we do not intend to change the copy protection. The only correction to this problem is a firmware update to your player. The electronics division know about this and should have given you this information.
Me: OK send me the firmware update.
Sony Tech: We do not have one as yet.
Me: OK (a bit frustrated) when will it be available?
Sony Tech: It could be 2 weeks it could be a month, we don’t know.
He then took my phone number and said â€they†would let me know when the firmware update is available, but declined to take my address saying that they would get that when the update was available.
I will say that I got a live person on both support lines within 30 secs.
Now Mick has a few questions for Sony, namely:
After spending $350 on a Sony DVD player 3 months ago am I now supposed to avoid Sony Pictures products?
You are still advertising the Sony DVP-CX995V prominently on the Sony USA website but I notice there is no disclaimer that it may not play some new Sony Pictures DVD’s.
Would it not be a good idea to test changes you intend to make on your DVD’s at least on your own equipment so that if you find a problem you could have the firmware update available instead of not only inconveniencing, but alienating your own customers.
I believe this problem is happening on other manufacturers devices, are they working feverishly on firmware updates to accommodate you?
But that ain’t all.
There’s a whole raft of complaints on Amazon.com on the same subject.
BookWorm says, “I have had this player for almost 3 months now and this is the first time something like this has occurred I was playing Stranger than fiction and the Disc jacket picture stays on the screen for a while while the player reads the disc or tries to and then the unit powers off automatically i have tried it on two different slots same thing .. i then put the dvd into my JVC and it played fine. any suggestion on why this is happening is it because of the unit or is it just a fluke and i shouldn’t worry ? please help I am under warranty now would rather deal with problems now rather than later.”
“I got a response from Sony - its a known problem with the new sony pictures copy protection scheme,” says Doug Morrison. “The unit can be mailed in to Texas for service to make it compatible. Ill pass on that for now and wait and see if other movies become an issue (or stop watching sony movies)…”
Cory A. Badley states, “I have the same problem with ‘The Holiday’ and ‘Casino Royale’ as well. Three movies I have paid for that will not play on my DVD player. All Sony. Pathetic.
“I have had this player for over 2 years and this is the first disc that gave me problems I called sony and sony pictures they recorded my email and said that it is a known problem and will get back with me,” says Gwedo25 says. “It has been a week and I have not got a responce.”
Definitely stay tuned.
(Thanks, Frank)
Also See:
Just another WordPress.com weblog - Sony Pictures DVD’s have a new a copy protection that makes the movies unplayable on some Sony (& other makes) DVD players!, March 19, 2007
slashdot - New Sony DVDs Not Working In Some Players , April 15, 2007
Amazon.com - stranger than fiction won’t play?, March 3, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the endSurvey: How Did Copyright Infringement Become Equated with Robbery? (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
April 16th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Is it illegal to buy bootlegs from some steet vendor? That’s where I’ll be getting all my prerecorded movies from now on.
April 16th, 2007 at 9:55 am
What I meant was will the police arrest me for buying them.
April 16th, 2007 at 10:34 am
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.
April 16th, 2007 at 11:42 am
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.
April 16th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
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 $200 VCR. We always took videos back and COMPLAINED and a few years later the Macro-garbage was gone.
Didn’t even stop copying. I accidentally found out certain very cheap VCRs and certain VCR brands got around this trash and I bought those brands exclusively (They were Matsushita, FCC ID starts out ACJ if you’re curious).
April 16th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Looks like they are bound and determined to run themselves out of a market. Anytime your products are more of a pain to use than to get elsewhere, guess what will happen?
I quit buying Sony media when they joined sue’em all. I quit buying Sony Electronics when the Rootkit came out. I can’t trust them to respect my privacy so I’m not going to pay for them to do the dubious ‘privilege’ of that spying.
When I came to the decision I couldn’t trust them, that means the electronics as well. How many can say they can look at all the programming within a stand-alone unit? All it would take is a modified thumb drive to record metadata of what you play. Then some reason to return the unit for upgrading would allow that to be read. No thank you Sony. I don’t want your products after having seen the last time you showed you had no ‘conscience’ about privacy. What would make them think I would trust them now?
Of course this is the consumers problem by their reckoning, just like when M$ 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.
April 16th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Yes. Yes they will.
Why not just download?
April 16th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
“can skip ads/logos/trailers”
Can save traffic as they are not part of the download.
Piracy, the better choice ™
April 16th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
You are making me choke on my food because of laughing so hard.
April 16th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
“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 Müller-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.
April 17th, 2007 at 6:30 am
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.
April 17th, 2007 at 7:10 am
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.
April 18th, 2007 at 9:38 am
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.”
May 5th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
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!
May 12th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
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.