R.I.P., Dear DVD

There's nothing like having a new housemate (in this case, my sister, who's attending graduate school in New York) to motivate a proper apartment cleaning. My CDs will be sent off to iPodmeister.com, where you can exchange CDs for a new iPod (the site even converts your old discs to MP3 as a free bonus). As for my 600 or so DVDs, I've taken them out of their cases and stored them in a set of Case Logic binders. But I'd like to find an easy way to store them digitally, much like I'll be doing with the CDs.

As it turns out, help is on the way, courtesy of RealNetworks. At last week's DEMO conference in San Diego, the company announced the rollout of RealDVD this month ($30 introductory price; real.com), a painless way of ripping entire DVDs to your computer. And when they say entire, they mean entire: trailers, deleted scenes, director's commentary. In other words, the end result is as if you still had the actual DVD in your machine. This brings with it nice benefits: laptops can squeeze out some extra battery life by not spinning the DVD drive; the software remembers where you left off; there's no risk of kids scratching the disc. Not to mention that Real-DVD has a nice, clean user interface that's a snap for anyone to navigate.

DVD-copying software isn't new, of course, but it has been highly controversial and the subject of much litigation, for the obvious reason that there's no guarantee that you actually own the DVD that you're storing. One of the best-known cases involved 321 Studios' DVD X Copy "backup software," which was driven out of business in 2004 when Hollywood won a ruling that the program violated copyright law. It's clear that the studios have seen how CD ripping and file sharing decimated the record industry, and will do anything to avoid a similar fate. So you can imagine my concern that RealDVD might be DOA before I get a chance to digitize and dispose of my DVD collection once and for all.

The folks at RealNetworks are relying in part on a 2007 California superior court ruling that determined a DVD-ripping jukebox was legal if it made just one copy and also preserved the CSS encryption embedded on nearly all commercial DVDs. Nevertheless, company officials have been meeting with the studios to allay any fears they may have. "We described the great lengths we go to to ensure that the copy is an exact copy, with an extra layer of encryption," says RealNetworks vice president Jeff Chasen. He hastens to point out that RealDVD also binds the movie file to the specific hard drive it was ripped to, so that it can't be recopied, moved or shared. For its part, the Motion Picture Association of America will only say, "We're studying this." I have no idea how this will play out, but I'm rooting for the good guys: us consumers.

© 2008