Speaking of end of year giving (give via Kiva.org!), another organization I give to every year is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I mention this because the entertainment setup I describe below is one that the movie industry would like to outlaw directly and have, with current laws and lobbying, managed to indirectly make very difficult. The EFF fights these laws that are both anti-free-market and anti-consumer (a more common combination than you might think).

In fact, the setup I describe below is really only possible with a little bit of labor and using DVDs as opposed to HD-DVDs or BluRay sources. The movie industry tries to “protect” their movies and music with a technology broadly called DRM, which makes it impossible to view the movies you buy in the ways you want to. New DRM technology is why I’ve sworn off buying HD media. To make this clearer, let’s walk through my new setup.

Here’s what my goal is with the new setup. I want to be able to use my computer as a digital video jukebox with my TV. Basically, I’d like to end up with my movies on my computer so that I don’t need to keep the DVDs in the same room as the TV. This way, I can also copy the movies to my laptop when I travel (again, no discs to break or carry), or put them on my iPhone just in case I’m stuck somewhere.

The first part of getting this working is to get the movies onto my computer. Because of the DRM the studios use, this is more difficult than it ought to be. I’ve written up how I do this on the Mac in an older post, so if you need help, check that out. Please note that I’ve since changed my process a bit, though it involves some commercial software. Specifically, I’ve switched to using a great piece of software called VisualHub. It has presets for every device, including Apple TV, iPhone, PSPs, etc. So, everything from Step 6 onward has been replaced with the simple, “fire up VisualHub, select your device and quality and hit GO.” I typically use the Apple TV settings, with H.264 checked and High quality. I let iTunes cut an iPhone specific version as well when I need one.

Now that I have a version on my computer, I need to get it on the TV. Since I own an Xbox 360, this turned out to be pretty easy. The XBox can connect to a Windows PC and stream videos, photos, and music to the XBox and out to the TV and receiver you have it connected to. It’s not just for playing video games, after all. I assume that the PS3 allows similar functionality, but I don’t own one to try it out.

Now, I don’t own a Windows PC, since I’m a Mac/Unix person and only have Macs in the house. That would be a problem except for a nice little program called Connect 360 made by the fine folks at nullriver. They have a free demo so I downloaded it and fired it up. Within seconds, I was able to fire up the XBox, navigate over to the Media tab in the Dashboard, select Movies and I was thumbing through the films on my laptop on the big screen. These movies are at DVD quality, which is roughly 480p for the HD enthusiasts here. Sure, it’s not as pretty as an HD source, but the XBox does a good job upconverting to 1080p.

I wanted to see if the software and network could keep up with a 1080p video without trouble so I borrowed a 1080p rip of Transformers from a friend because I don’t know how to convert an HD-DVD yet. I’ve streamed that using the above setup with great results. The video is gorgeous and I could still surf the Internet off the same computer. Not a bad setup.

Of course, if the movie industry had their way, I wouldn’t be able to do what I did. Technically, the DRM on the DVDs should prevent me from doing what I did. Because, however, it has been broken by numerous hackers over the years, it merely represents an inconvenience in this process. You could argue that I could easily just buy my movies off of a service like iTunes or Amazon Unbox but that still presents the DRM dilemma.

For example, in my setup, I have devices from 3 different manufacturers and several different movie studios. Microsoft makes the XBox 360 and Apple makes my Mac and OS X and Sony makes my PSP (which I’ve stopped using for video in favor of the iPhone). If I chose iTunes, I would need to buy an Apple TV in order to watch the video on my big TV. In fact, the movies I’ve bought from iTunes don’t work in the setup I’ve described because the XBox doesn’t understand Apple’s DRM. Amazon doesn’t support Macs or my iPhone (yet), so that’s a non-starter as well. The only way to do this is with a DRM-free copy of the movies.

Which brings me to the title of this post. There are two ways to get DRM free copies of your favorite movies. The first is to do what I’ve done, buy DVDs and go through the trouble of stripping the DRM off and encoding them for your computer. It’s a lot of work (takes about 4 hours per DVD on a MacBook Pro).

The other option is to download these movies via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network or BitTorrent or whatever. This is technically both against the law (for the person making the video available) and opens one up to civil lawsuits from the movie studios.

Think about that for a second: To use the devices I own in a way that they all enable, the convenient choice is to download the movies for free. All I want to do is use the hardware I already own with movies I’ve paid for and my choices are to circumvent the DRM on the DVDs or to download them from the Internet.

It’s ridiculous, and really shows the idiocy of the current copyright fight between the studios and their customers. There’s a future here for a nice little video jukebox device with a couple of USB ports for devices like the iPhone or iPod that serves as a nice hub for all your media. My Mac is almost perfect, in fact, but imagine a little $200 device. Believe it or not, they exist already, and the only reason they’re not more popular is because of stupid DRM battles from the studios that do nothing to stop piracy anyway.

Anyway, I’m considering moving my old iMac downstairs so that it’s attached via the wired network to the XBox 360. Leave all the videos on an attached terabyte external drive and I’ll have my video collection available whenever I want.

Also, consider this an thumbs up for Connect 360. The software has made all the videos and music available on my XBox and offers some nice other features that I’ve yet to take advantage of. The software retails for $20 and is worth it if you plan on making use of a setup like this. Enjoy!

Update: PS. HD Podcasts that I download via iTunes look GREAT. No DRM on those, and they look great on the TV. I can recommend the Political Lunch as one to start with. It’s a good rundown of the day’s political news. Good stuff.