I just got a Blu-ray player for Christmas and some movies from family. As regular readers know, I swore off buying HD media because I couldn"t get the movies onto a video jukebox . While the movie industry won"t go DRM free completely, they"ve taken some steps to simplify getting a movie onto your iPod or computer.

They call their solution the Digital Copy. It"s a solution that comes down to including a copy of the film for your computer along with the version playable in your DVD/Blu-ray players. I was able to test with Dark Knight, Wall-E, and Speed Racer. On the Mac, the Digital Copy is basically the version sold on iTunes. This is done by using a code enclosed in the Blu-ray packaging to "redeem" the video through the iTunes app. I believe the PC experience is essentially the same.

On the Windows, the Digital Copy can be easily remove by Daniusoft PS3 DVD Video Converter which can convert DVD movie to PS3 with high speed output and played as HD video file.

For the two newer titles, the process integrated with iTunes automatically, resulting in a digital copy that seemed to come from the DVD itself. Both titles launched an app as soon as I inserted the DVD that walked me through entering the code, redeeming it, and copying and authorizing the files via iTunes. Speed Racer, on the other hand, only came with Windows Media support, making it useless for everyone"s favorite music player. I had to go to the Warner Bros. Blu-ray site and download a new code for iTunes. Then, I started up iTunes and used the Redeem link in the store. With the original packaging, it wasn"t obvious that there was Mac support. It doesn"t hurt to check the support site for the distributor of your Blu-ray disc when you can"t play it where you want. Odds are they answer the question on their site. Warner Bros, for example, has a nice support site for all of their titles at wbdigitalcopy.com.

Ultimately, I still don"t like the end result here because the Digital Copy is still wrapped in Apple"s Fairplay DRM, limiting playback to iTunes and Apple products (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV). It is currently a satisfactory solution for me, since I have all of those products, but it"s hardly the buy once, play anywhere solution we now enjoy with DRM-free music from places like Amazon"s MP3 store. On top of that, the iTunes store enforces their download-only-once restriction, which means you can"t use the included DVD of the digital copy as a backup. If your hard drive fails, goodbye Digital Copy. Make sure you have a solution in place to back up the collection on another hard drive, at least. I"m currently looking at a Drobo or a NetGear ReadyNAS to improve the quality of my home backup solution. I currently use two USB drives set up with OS X"s built in software RAID to hold my iTunes library, but it"s too slow/unreliable.

Because of these cons, I"m still going to avoid buying HD media except for the top collectables. If I do buy HD media, I"m only going to do so if it has a digital copy option. Otherwise, the BD player will be for rentals. I"ll probably be restarting Netflix once I start my new job, as well.

If you aren"t bothered by these issues, the Digital Copy solution works well. They"ve done a good job integrating with iTunes and seem to be providing good support for the Mac. The iPod seems to be enough to get the studios to support iTunes. Funny how that"s worked out.(By sujal 12/30/2008)