ClearPlay
Earlier this week I went to Target and watched a (rather lame) demo for ClearPlay, a DVD player that can skip certain frames of DVDs or mute the volume during certain frames according to 14 criteria that you select. It comes programmed with the appropriate files that tell the player when to do such things for over 2000 movies and you can subscribe to the Website to receive the codes for additional movies as they are released, which can be transfered to the DVD player through a USB drive. Unlike services that sell edited DVDs, which were ruled as illegal in 2006, ClearPlay's service was ruled legal in 2005 since it doesn't actually modify the DVDs in any way.
I'm curious if anyone else has seen this or heard of it and what they think about it. Frankly, I'm just impressed that they've come up with such a workable system, although the audio muting is quite primitive compared to the illegal edited movies which simply remove the word without altering the music. I would like to watch one of the movies that I know well and see what it's like, whether it's as high quality as it presents itself.
As for the idea itself, I'm not sure what I think. If I were a parent, I think that I would rather just choose DVDs that are appropriate to begin with. Still, the concept is intriguing. One could show edited versions of really great movies earlier and then let them watch the unedited version later. It seems, though, that a number of movies would be rather harmed by the process, Schindler's List, for instance, and would not be worth presenting in an edited form at all.
I'm curious if anyone else has seen this or heard of it and what they think about it. Frankly, I'm just impressed that they've come up with such a workable system, although the audio muting is quite primitive compared to the illegal edited movies which simply remove the word without altering the music. I would like to watch one of the movies that I know well and see what it's like, whether it's as high quality as it presents itself.
As for the idea itself, I'm not sure what I think. If I were a parent, I think that I would rather just choose DVDs that are appropriate to begin with. Still, the concept is intriguing. One could show edited versions of really great movies earlier and then let them watch the unedited version later. It seems, though, that a number of movies would be rather harmed by the process, Schindler's List, for instance, and would not be worth presenting in an edited form at all.