The Changing World of Media

It is not really news when I mention the Media Revolution that has been happening for years now. The digital takeover as I am now calling it - its everywhere, and its been everywhere for some time. Unless you still have shelves of CDs and a portable CD player, I think you know what I am talking about.

Its been on my mind lately though, because I never thought about it in terms of Movies. I have been a Netflix user for awhile, and really what clinched my Netflix subscription over things like Blockbuster, etc, was the "Play Now" feature that Netflix introduced right before I joined. Granted the library is still lacking compared to the actually DVD library, but I make due when I just can't wait for that next DVD.

My point is I never really thought about digitizing my movie collection. Just last week I actually looked into doing it for the first time. Quite frankly I am baffled as to why it is so difficult. Why was it so easy for me to take my existing CD collection, place them into my computer's CD drive, and VIOLA! - instance digital music collection. Why is it that iTunes, and other Media Player software don't allow this with DVDs? I know there are all sorts of ways of doing it, but in my research, it seems like much more work.

I know there are always exceptions to the rule, but if I was able to burn my DVDs into my digital media collection much easier, would it stop me from going to the Movies? Never. Seeing a good movie in the theatre could be the movie equivalent of listening to a good record on Vinyl (I suppose its different in a sense of digital movies get crisper/more high def/ over time where as music gets more compressed with lower sampling rates over time...) in a sense that I get to eat candy doing both.

Of course if I could rip DVDs I would take full advantage of my Netflix account and rip everything I even remotely enjoyed...but if there was a service that sent me three new albums at a time for a small monthly fee, Id take full advantage of that system too.

I don't really know what the point of my post was here. I started out with the mindset of the differences between the digitizing of movies when compared to the digitizing of music. The high-def movie, compressed music world versus the vhs, vinyl world.

But apparently I must have gotten sidetracked. All I really wanted to do was rip "The Monster Squad" to my computer so I could have something to watch at work (without having to lug that huge DVD around with me).