Saturday 11 October 2008

Do you want a digital copy with that? How about an iPod?

No, no I don't. I've no idea where this craze kicked off from, but it's a waste of time and effort - and is occasionally a flat-out nuisance.

The two disc DVD of Rambo appeared to only differ from the single disc in terms of having a digital copy, so I bought the single disc (this was a while back now) and what d'ya know - I got royally fucked over on ALL extra features. Not a single extra feature - because they were all on the two disc edition, with the "digital copy" - which, as I don't have an iPod, is next to completely useless.

For one reason or another I couldn't return my single disc, so yeah - nuisance.

As for the "digital copy" idea in itself - silly. Is this supposed to make piracy harder for the cyber-peg-legged sorts out there? Surely it makes it easier, but then again, who wants to watch a movie - especially one in 2.35:1 widescreen - on their piddly little iPod screen?

So they can sit on a bus annoying people, thinking they're really stylish and 'with it', when in actuality they're just targets for crime. It's like UMDs - again, I see no point - a slightly bigger screen comparatively of course, but it's still a pokey little screen with pokey little speakers - WHY?!

When do you get the time and opportunity to watch an entire movie on an iPod? For the majority of people it's probably not that frequent, and if certain people really had to have a dinky little copy of a movie - why not just download it from iTunes if they're so desperate to be so bleedin' hip?

Meanwhile - us normal folks who buy DVDs don't have to pay extra to have the 'extra feature' that is the same movie, only encoded for tiny bloody screens. Also - as I've bought the DVD, surely I have no intention of slapping a peg leg and an eye patch on it so I can flaunt it online to a bunch of random downloaders (half of whom, seemingly don't understand how to download in the first place anyway).

Simply put - it's annoying, just stop it.

Why bring this up? Because all I ever seen now is "includes digital copy of the movie!" emblazoned across the artwork, and I just spotted it yet again on the 3-disc X-Phile Edition of the second X-Files flick.

Maybe it's just me, who knows, but I reckon digital copies should piss off. Have you seen the size of an iPod Video? Have you seen the size of a cinema screen, or indeed the average person's telly? Exactly.

...

Speaking of iPod related stuff, I was recently using iTunes to move some tracks onto someone's iPod, and I still hate the software. Once I finally blundered my way into figuring out how to put music onto the device it was fairly straight forward - but finding out how to do that was a total accident, ergo - shit software, or at least I think so, maybe newer versions are more straight forward and have less fiddly track lists and recently added this, and recently played that and so on - keep it bloody simple - just give me a massive button saying "click here to take music from your computer and plonk it on that iPod thing in your hand!"

Seriously, why do I have to either pick one track at a time, or one entire folder (seemingly there's no such thing as an in-between), then stick it in some mid-way, half-way-house, middle-man, pain-in-the-arse track list thing, then copy all that stuff, select some other playlist that's actually on the iPod itself, then paste ... why the fiddling?

This is why I stick to MP3s on my computer, or making my own mix CD's (which are now about as 'old school' as making a mix tape - something I used to do many-a-time back in the day, even in my Sixth Form years) - I open the disc burning software, I pick a bunch of tracks, drag them into the order I want, click burn and in five minutes I've got a new CD to listen to in the car - sorted.

Maybe it's me, but all this iPod, iTunes, i-Whatever bombardment gives me a headache, ha!

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