Cripes, stay on topic.
Jeff posts about how (hardware/software) he plays hi-def video.
Most comments are about whether he’s being fair to Neftlix.
Many more comments about linux alternatives.
Geesh.
If you’re a Vista user and you’re having choppy playback, try this before spending any money on hardware or software:
Glad to see you found MPC-HC. It has been my favourite movie player for years because the interface is based off of the old (classic, hence the name) Windows Media Player from Win95. Simple, elegant, and useful - I can’t stand VLC because none of the keyboard shortcuts make sense to me 
Interesting side note: MPC-HC is actually a fork of the original MPC, which came about after development ceased in March 2006. Yay open source!
original project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/
Jeff, I’m sure you got the idea from most of the commenters. Time-shifting rented material is really not cool. It doesn’t fall under fair use because you don’t own it. It doesn’t fall under broadcast rules (VCR recording) because Netflix didn’t pay for a public broadcast license and I doubt the studios would have granted one even if they wanted it. And whether or not you read the TOS you did agree to abide to the terms by paying the monthly charge.
As for the morality of it, this is pretty low even for you. The $15/month or whatever the charge is barely covers the cost of postage with heavy rotation. Their business model is lot like the ISPs, they can absorb the cost of mailing DVDs because most customers are not watching and mailing them constantly, but the heavy users make it expensive for everyone.
Jeff, I know you’re a Windows dude, but any idea what the equivalent setup is under Linux?
@JPLemme, You’ve missed (and proven) my point wonderfully. First of all, it seems like all the Linux fanboys can’t read through a whole page of blog comments about Windows without having to throw in a look at me, look at me! comment bait about how Linux is somehow superior to Windows. My point was that I don’t care if Linux is better, I’ll stick to Windows. I like getting updates pushed and not having to help troubleshoot the product as I use it.
@Echostorm, thank you! I’m relatively certain that no LE is trolling this blog looking for people to arrest. Even so, RIAA and MPAA seem more interested in suing broke college students and teenagers, Jeff is practically bulletproof! (Btw, copying movies to a HDD isn’t a felony, it’s a civil issue.)
Try mplayer for windows(!). I use it on a daily basis.
People should chill out…
If you rent a movie from Netflix, copy it, and keep it on your local machine until you put the Netflix disk back in the mail and immediately delete the local file - you’ve hurt nobody at all.
Heck, even if you rent a movie from Netflix, copy it, and only watch it while you have the physical disk and then, once every month or two you delete all of the local files, without viewing them - you’ve hurt nobody at all.
People are ‘assuming’ that Jeff is getting a movie, burning it, and sending it back faster than he would have done if he didn’t burn it. There is NOTHING in his post to suggest that he is doing that.
Also, there are Netflix subscriptions that include a cap to the # of rentals you can have per month. In that case, if Jeff is paying to rent two movies each month and he uses his burning to ‘speed up’ the time it takes for him to send back the movies - whether he has the disk for two hours or two weeks before mailing it back, there is zero impact on Netflix’s business model or bottom line.
To all the Linux fanboys:
Getting MythTV working on Linux on my media centre was hardly a positive experience. Bug this, quirk that, crash there.
Hell, after 3 months of fiddling my HTPC still has issues: e.g. sound will go all garbled randomly while playing, or the video will mysteriously pause sometimes, as if it were a buffer underrun. And all the keys on my remote don’t work properly.
Like it or not, Windows just works: and that’s what most people are looking for. If it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t want to walk away from the emotional investment I’ve now made, I’d probably just install Vista.
And also, why someone would mind renting the movies to just make a collection of movies on hd when it seems to be as illegally as torrenting those and costing a bit more…
As a life-long Terminator fan, I can’t help but agree with you about T3. I saw it in the theatres the day it opened, and the scene that just destructed the street literally left rugburn on my chin. That is one of the most intense (and likely expensive) scenes of all time, in my opinion.
Overall the film was not as good as the first two, but it’s still a great flick. I will be watching the fourth, for sure.
This reminds me of when we first got DVD playback on PCs. You had to install a special MPEG decoder card to get it to work since our CPUs weren’t powerfuly enough to do full software decoding.
No doubt we’re seeing the same with high-def/Blu-ray playback now. Need to rely on specialized (er… video card) for hardware decoding, only to be replaced in the future with software decoding once CPUs get faster.
What a waste of electricity, copy, play, delete, copy, play, delete. You may want to look at your energy consumption during this process. not Eco friendly.
Many people here probably use 64bit Vista in which case they have to use 64bit codecs in Vista Media Center. I did a blog post about how to get this working, especially if there are conflicts between x64 and x86 codecs. See http://jvance.com/blog/2008/12/15/DirectShowFiltersForWindowsVistaX64And64bitCodecs.xhtml
There’s a larger issue here than 1 person ripping a DVD/BD they don’t own and watching later. Jeff authors a blog with readership in the thousands (10s of thousands?). Moreover, he has historically been a vocal proponent of consumer rights (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001044.html) and against consumer unfriendly DRM schemes (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001113.html). For him now to flippantly dismiss any legal (or moral) issues with copying Netflix media, then go on to detail, step by step, how to build a machine to do just that is hypocritical and, frankly, irresponsible.
Look, when you don’t like harsh or unfair content protection schemes you can do 2 things:
or 2) Disregard the protection mechanism altogether, subvert it and add to the problem.
Netflix is a service that provides a real value to customers and it’s not unreasonable to follow the simple rules. If you think it is then don’t subscribe, but breaking the rules puts the service at risk for all of us that happily follow the rules.
As far as I know there is no cap on the number of movies you can receive a month (a quick look at the Netflix rules seems to reinforce this). You’re limited simply by how fast you can watch, return and receive another movie. If Jeff (or anyone) is immediately ripping the movies, then sending them back he is certainly able to receive many more movies than if he were watching them from the discs. One could conceivable rent, rip and return dozens of movies in a single month, which breaks the model Netflix (and the studios who sell to Netflix) operate on.
Does Jeff explicitly say he’s doing this? No, but his vague rationalization gives me no reason to believe he isn’t. Again, what is the advantage to ripping the disc if it isn’t so he can watch it when he doesn’t have the disc? It simply doesn’t make sense. It’s not his prerogative to interpret the Netflix ToS as he seems fit.
Beyond what Jeff is or isn’t doing, it’s at least his responsibility to mention the legal and moral implication of ripping a rented disc. As a member of some clout in the HTPC community he is looked to by many for direction.
to Peter,
When you say that Windows just works, are you aware that the article was explaining how and why the Microsoft solution DOES NOT just work and the solution required software, hardware configuration changes away from the out of the box ones.
moral issues with media ripping? Really? Morality? LOL . Ethics … Not morality, I doubt any major religion has anything to say about media rights.
Commandment 34: copy not thy neighbor’s intelectual property
OK, good point brian… ‘moral’ is the incorrect term. This is clearly an ethical issue. Semantics aside the point is still stands.
On CoreAVC, i’ve got a media center pc, core2duo processor, integrated graphics.
Using hardware acceleration is simply not an option, without coreavc’s codecs HD content was unplayable. So, for all those people who cant do hardware acceleration, coreavc’s codecs really do rock!
THIS is simplicity and ease of use?
+1 to Frank…
The mess of codecs, players, and other whatnot make playing video on PCs a nightmare.