Ok, for the second time in my life I’m strongly motivated to learn to be (instead of a hacker) a cracker. That is, I’m motivated to do things that “the government” would describe as being “illegal”.

You see, last night, and for the past three days, I’ve been trying to watch movies from my computer on my TV. I am trying out the feature on Netflix that allows the instant download of movies for you to watch on your computer. For some reason, each time I tried to watch a movie through the online player, it gave me a DRM error. I tried the “DRM Reset” utility that they gave me, and it still didn’t work. I uninstalled iTunes and renamed my DRM folder in windows, and even ran a tool that warned it would break every program on my computer by de-registering them or something, and still no go. I completely uninstalled and reinstalled windows media player and IE. Still nothing. I called Netflix, but there was an estimated 30 minute hold time, and I didn’t feel like waiting that long.

I finally (frustrated and defeated) threw a DVD into the computer and popped open windows media center to watch it (my dvd player doesn’t have component out, it just has the red, yellow, white ones, so my computer has better video quality, which is why I wanted to watch from it). The DVD had some sort of double vision thing going on so you couldn’t watch it. It was then that I realized that simply because of the fact that I was watching the video output feed on my TV instead of a computer monitor, it was preventing me from viewing the movies.

This has gotten ridiculous. Why in the world would it not let me view a DVD that I own from my computer onto my tv? That doesn’t even make sense. I plugged my computer monitor in instead and Netflix worked just fine, as did the DVD.

This is Microsoft violating my freedom. This is the sort of thing that makes me extremely sympathetic to crackers. This is the sort of thing that creates crackers. I will next be installing Linux on an old box and popping in a nice video card to see if I can watch DVDs from it on my TV.

I have already been making use of anyDVD from SlySoft (a cracker tool I paid $50 for) to burn DVDs to my iPhone (because of the stupid DRM on the DVDs). I’ve never been a supporter of people stealing music and movies, but I’m seriously considering investigating IP cloaking software, and bit-torrent tools that will allow me to illegally download movies that I legally have every right to watch (because I have purchased them), but that some moron decided I “wasn’t allowed” to watch from my computer to my TV.

I feel like Hollywood or Microsoft should pay me $500 for the time they took away from me for their foolishness. I also feel like whatever programmer designed and wrote this DRM should be banned from ever touching a computer again. Shouldn’t programmers have to take some sort of hippocratic oath that keeps them from writing ill-conceived software like this?

I hereby swear that I will never produce software that:

1. Sends spam e-mail

2. Keeps people from doing whatever they want with whatever they legally purchase

I know, I know, DRM keeps people from “pirating” movies/software/whatever. But DRM is like designing a restaurant that makes it so that you can’t sample food from other people’s plates (or share plates). Trying to hand-cuff people and take away their freedom will only inspire them to fight (and hate) you more. Appealing to their moral goodness and endearing them to you will go much further than DRM ever would. Right now, I feel like I don’t care if people steal movies, because I can see scenarios (like mine) where you just have no choice. But if everything were DRM free, then society as a whole would be free to shun thieves since there would be absolutely no reason for any good moral person to steal.

I know this isn’t the best argument, but basically this whole post is just to express my disgust with Microsoft/Hollywood/DRM and to put it out there that you can not watch Netflix movies from your computer on your TV because of DRM and to say how much I hate that. I’d make this post much better, but it doesn’t deserve any more time than it has already sucked out of my life. Oh, and good job Netflix, I’ll be canceling. You just lost a customer because of your stupid DRM…

If anyone knows a solution to my problems, please feel free to comment. Thanks.