Last month, the 5th Circuit court ruled that it is not illegal to rip DVDs as long as you aren’t sharing or selling copyrighted content. That’s great, because I believe if you own the content, you should have it available to you in any format you need. Why should the consumer be forced to purchase the same content more than once if they want to watch it on on more than one device?

For example, I would never purchase or rent a movie or tv show from Apple’s iTunes. Why? I can only watch it on my iPod or on my home PC. If I wanted to watch it on my HDTV, I’d have to first purchase an Apple TV device, which you can only watch content purchased from iTunes. DVDs and Blu-rays are great, but I can’t watch it on my iPod when I’m sitting on the train? It’s abysmal.

For a limited time only until August 9th 2010, iSkysoft is offering a free DVD-to-iPhone converter. I’m going to try it this weekend. I hope this is good.

Hilarious.

I don’t have an iPhone, but I know AT&T’s service can be pretty wonky. Gizmodo reported that one of their readers was getting around 22% of his calls dropped in the NYC area, and took it to Apple. The Geniuses said this was pretty good.  Apparently, a 30 percent dropped call rate is the average in NYC for AT&T.

What?

The new Apple iTunes 9

The new Apple iTunes 9 is out today. I downloaded it and installed it tonight.  A couple of thoughts about iTunes 9, and why I’m supremely annoyed at the application in general.

• The file was just under 100 Mb.  Although I can’t imagine who still uses dial-up vs. broadband.  However, Apple must think that dial-up users should drop dead, because there is no way that a user is going to reasonably dial-up using a modem, and download the newest iTunes application over 2-3 days. 
• Most of iTunes is the same, but the store is pretty different. Not sure if I think it’s better, but it’s different, so let’s see if it grows on me.
• I have no real use for the iPod Touch / iPhone 3.1 update, and no plans to pay for it.  I have generation 1, and it’s not an iPhone, so all the new features to purchase and install will do jack squat for me.
• I’m annoyed at the iTunes application as a whole.  I thought that every time I added album artwork (the cover) to a file, I was added it to the actual MP3 or AAC file. After I rebuilt my PC with Windows 7, I downloaded iTunes 8, and started to configure it.  Imagine my surprise to find most of my music artwork (that I had painstakingly searched for online) was not embedded in the files, but kept in some separate iTunes library that is inaccessible to the regular desktop user. I’ve tried the “Get Album Artwork” option, and it retrieved some, but there’s a whole mess that are missing it, and iTunes can’t find it.  I gotta do this all over again.

This makes me want to Hulk out.

iTunes has me "Hulking out" over here.

I just read that Hulu is developing an iPhone app that’ll stream over 3G and Wi-Fi.  What’s more, it’s supposed to be better than good.  Actually, the comment was the app was “badass”, but that remains to be seen.  Still, good news.  I hope it doesn’t get killed like the South Park app.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park (can you believe it’s been 12 years now?), created a great looking app for the iPhone, where you could watch free streaming clips, and download other stuff like wallpapers.  However, Apple has deemed the content “potentially offensive”, and put a kibosh on the app.

Apple, if people don’t want to watch, they won’t download the application.  Don’t be lame.

IPhone: Apple’s Puritanical Review System Kills South Park iPhone App