Unintended consequences: How Sony and Universal will force you to make bootleg DVD movies
Like most of you, we have a lot of CDs, many of which replace the vinyl disks that preceded them. And we have a lot of DVDs, many of which were replacements for the VHS tapes that replaced our Betamax tapes. Storing and playing these has been made much easier with the advent of high- capacity CD/DVD players such as the Sony DVP-CX985V and Sony DVP- CX995V, each of which hold 400 disks. These devices are incredibly convenient. Once they are loaded you can put the player in some convenient yet inaccessible place, and still access every disk using the remote control, never having to touch the disks again. Until, however, you buy a DVD such as Schindler’s List or the CITA DVDs (tango DVDs available for those who love Argentine tango at, which come not as two DVDs, but as a single double-sided DVD.
If you have your DVD carousel, as we do, conveniently located under a cabinet where it can be seen by the remote control, but not easily accessed, you are in for some annoyance. When you have finished playing the first side, you have to crawl under the cabinet, push the open button, eject the disk, put it back in, albeit now with side B facing left, push the close button, crawl out from under the cabinet, press the play button on the remote control, and watch the rest of the picture.
Of course, you could avoid this annoyance and buy two copies of the Schindler’s List, and use one disk for side A and the second for side B.
Or you could buy some other movie that didn’t use double-sided disks: There are lots of movies, and your life won’t be ruined by not having one that is only available on double-sided DVDs.
Or you could make a copy of the second side, and take up two slots, as you would with any other double disk movie. The bad news, is that the movie folk have been cracking down on the people who published decryption software, and have forced them to remove their software from the Internet (though DVD Cloner II, at http://www.dvd-cloner.com/, appears to be still available). The good news is that your kids most likely already have copies of banned software, or have friends who do, so you can probably have them bootleg a side for you, and avoid crawling under cabinets or doing without.
