::A Geek in Korea::

Mike Nelson’s Rifftrax finally got around to making fun of a movie I actually own, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Even better, the track co-stars Kevin Murphy (otherwise better recognized as the voice of Tom Servo). Considering the whole "I’m a huge geek" factor, combined with the "I was a rabid MST3k fan" (Thus Torgo) This was a no brainer sort of purchase for me. Besides, I don’t very many DVDs, so the chance that they’d do another film in my collection is pitifully small.

I paid via Paypal and after some password and confusion about the browsers (I had to use IE. Eeew),  I got the Rifftrax files onto my machine with no problems whatsoever. That was relatively painless. They aren’t locked down to any player or service, just plain .mp3 files. This gets a huge thumbs up of support from me. Now that I own these tracks in an open format, I’ll always be able to listen to them at any time with anything under the sun. If they had gone with a protected file, I wouldn’t even consider the service. For around four dollars I got a modern "MST3k" like alternative track for a long movie. That’s pretty sweet, since MST3k DVDs themselves are really expensive. This is probably the next best thing to watching an old MST3k video, which is nigh impossible for me these days.

The problem, and there always is a problem, is the DVD region protection scheme. I’ve bought my movies, but I now live in another region of the world. My DVD drive is "Region 3" while my DVDs are "Region 1". When I would go to play the DVDs on my computer, it warned me that the region was wrong, and that if I played my DVD in this drive more than 5 times, I would be locked into Region 1. Now, If I just ran Linux on my machine like a good geek should, I wouldn’t be complaining, but at the moment I’m too busy to format a hard drive and install just to watch a movie I should be able to watch in Windows anyway. I’m trying to watch a movie I bought and yet I have more problems than I would if I would have simply downloaded the movie.

Instead of pirating the film, I decided to simply back up a copy onto my hard drive. Freeware DVD Shrink to the rescue! It was really easy, and now the movie sitting on my machine, wasting space while I have the DVD in my hand, just so I can watch this movie. The DVD backup software ate up one of my "Region 1" viewings before my hardware sets it’s region automatically against my will, but now that I have the movie on my hard drive I won’t need worry anymore.

I’m sure there are ways around hardware limitations in viewing movies in other regions, but I just wanted to watch what I paid the easiest way possible without locking myself into future problems. Sometimes the whole "pushed to piracy" excuse of people downloading things they legally own just to get around Digital Rights Management protection makes a lot of sense. I was tempted to do it myself.