The War Of DVD Movies

A DVD, also known as Digital Video Discs or Digital Versatile Discs (the dispute has never been solved and there is no mandate by the DVD Official Forum on what DVD should stand for!) is an optical storage device that can be used for high quality data storage like movies that need to have excellent video and sound quality.

One of the advantages of watching a DVD movie over a CD movie is that one does not need to change the CD over and over again after an hour since almost all the movies will fit into the high-density format of a DVD. DVD movies also provide excellent video and sound quality and enhance the pleasure of watching a movie at home.

Though many movies have been released on DVDs since then, the first DVD movie to be released was Twister in 1996. Also as the years have passed, the prices of the DVD movie players have dropped from staggering 300USD to almost 25USD spreading the delight of watching a DVD movie across pop stratas. The popularity of the DVD movie format has increased so rapidly that many US retailers and even Wal-Mart have phased out the VHS formats for movies and opted for the more convenient DVD movie formats.

Given the content scrambling system (CSS) that was used in all the DVD movies that were manufactured, initially the DVD movies were expected to be a boon for the movie industry enabling them to prevent piracy and illegal copying. Due to the fact that some of these DVD movies refused to play on PCs with Linux operating systems, people were forced to explore the possible ways of decrypting or decoding the encryption on a DVD movie. Appropriate descrambling algorithms were written which have over time been compressed to six lines.

The ready availability of the deCSS programs irked the movie industry to no end since the initial benefits of releasing a DVD movie were being eroded. Given that the blank DVD prices are likely to fall to abysmal levels, copying a DVD movie will become cakewalk for anyone who has access to the deCSS code. And given that this code is nothing more than six lines of programming, it is being advertised by avenging customers in emails, t-shirts, pamphlets and various other forms of mass media.

The movie industry decided that they would allow consumer to watch DVD movies on the computer and not only on television sets in an effort to popularize the use. Little did they realize that they were beckoning a catastrophe on their own business profits! Today anyone who wants to watch a DVD movie on a computer can do so by simply descrambling it. And the movie industry needs to realize that in the technological world that we live in hiding information is not going to be easy.