Nice. I hope they can get around my firewall's "deny all out from 10.10.32.xyz, log all" rule. If so, I wonder if the patent covered how the player expects to phone home once I've filled the network port with epoxy and soldered a metal plate over it.

Computers get Internet access in my house. Not DVD players. Not TVs. Not game machines. It was only after a week of extensive research that I even allowed wireless access to the Wii after I was satisfied that Nintendo wasn't going to spy on anything or do anything nefarious because frankly, I trust them about as much as any other tech company, which is hardly at all. And no Xbox or Playstation (i.e. product from companies with histories of remotely disabling hardware/software or, in Sony's case, infecting customer PCs with rootkits) will ever have network access beyond my firewall. Internal LAN IPs only.

I'm sick of this trend toward assuming everyone can plug everything into the Internet, or assuming everyone even has Internet access in the first place. And I'm sick of marketeering, profiteering corporations trying to determine how I use what I bought and paid for. These DVDs, assuming they ever hit the market, are getting ripped and re-encoded as soon as they come out of the box, and the original disc is unlikely to ever actually see the inside of a DVD player. Burned, stripped-down custom copies only.

So put that in your corporate crack pipe, IBM, and take a good, long, deep drag. Either I use your product the way I want, or you get no sale at all. Take it or leave it.

That's where the ripping and re-authoring comes in. Snippity-doo-da, the ads wind up on the cutting room floor and only the custom, re-authored, no-ads copy goes in the player. Failing that, I run it through FFmpeg and stitch the legitimate VOBs together into a single, linear video stream, encoded losslessly as possible, and then burn it to a DVD for playback.

Ads mean war, and I have no qualms about fighting as dirty as I have to. This includes biting the bullet and watching the ads...with a pad of paper to write down the companies and products being advertised so I can make sure to avoid them at all costs (and maybe even write them a few choice words explaining why).

I will not tolerate advertising being shoved in the middle of what I'm doing. Marketers do NOT have a right to my attention and I will respond increasingly aggressively until they get the picture. I'll probably stop short of driving up to the ad firm's office with a HERF gun attached to a large parabolic dish to fry their servers, but almost anything else is fair game to stop the deluge of marketing the world is being subjected to.

That would suck. I can predict that people will increasingly turn to piracy...
sigh.

I agree with everything you just said. Except about you mentioning the game consoles.

What could they be able to track from a game console anyway? What you should be most worried about with the game consoles and online play is the advertising the publishers are agreeing to infuse into the games. Every time you go online, the console downloads new trash from the Advertising server.

The FBI warning you have to sit through everytime you pop in a DVD already makes you feel like a criminal for buying it into the first place. I think they're trying to one-up themselves and make the content even less worth purchasing.