Juno Digital Copy is Blogtastic!

April 19, 2008 | Justin

One of the things announced at MacWorld that excited me was Fox’s digital copy. Applications like Handbrake and Mac the Ripper have enabled people to copy DVDs to their hard drives for years. The argument for this process has always been fair use. However RIAA and the MPAA would beg to differ and have you spend money on a DVD and a digital version from a vendor like iTunes. With Fox’s announcement it became very easy and unquestionably legal to copy Fox’s movies to your hard drive. I’ve been itching to try it out since January and finally there was a Fox release that interested me enough to give it a whirl.

Once I put the disc into my computer I was greeted with a simple menu with one icon reading “Double-click to transfer movie to iTunes.” So, I double-clicked. (Note there is a little more involved process for Windows. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll call it the Windows Penalty.) After double-clicking iTunes opened and read the dick and pulled up the code entry page. I typed in the code, as found in the DVD case, and iTunes communicated with some distant server and agreed that it was OK for me to have the digital copy. After that it was on like donkey kong.

I was presented with this “Thank You” screen. It’s a very similar screen to the one shown when you purchase a movie from iTunes. I thought it odd it said my movie was now downloading considering it was really just being copied from the DVD. Note the recommendations in the image. Their all great movies, except for Kissing Jessica Stein which I’ve never heard of.

It took about four minutes to transfer the roughly 1 GB file from the DVD. Again, interestingly enough, while it was transferring the movie was considered a ‘download’ by iTunes. Once fully transfered, Juno appeared in the ‘Movies’ tab of iTunes, as well as the ‘New Stuff’ playlist.

At native size the quality of the picture is quite impressive. It was solid at full screen on the 24″ iMac, though the DVD version would be preferable if watching on a screen that large. On both the iPhone and a 5.5 gen iPod the picture is clear. Pictures of all the different versions are included below for your viewing pleasure.

Overall the process was extremely easy and produced some pretty quality results. The Digital Copy version of Juno was $2 more than the Standard Edition, but it also came with swanky Dancing Elk High School t-shirt. It’d be nice if more studios got on board with the Digital Copy and finally put the fair use debate to rest.

Native Resolution

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Apple, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Juno, movies, RIAA, software