Fox Accepts DVD Ripping With iTunes
Fox to allow DVD copying on Apple’s iTunes
Also in Apple’s movie rental deal yesterday with Fox: Apple will license its FairPlay copy-protection technology to the studio for DVD movie releases. This will allow DVD purchasers to easily — and legally — copy movies to their computers for playback on iPods and iPhones.
The copy protection on DVDs was cracked long ago, but it’s still not easy for the average consumer to copy a disc and transfer it to iTunes. Having one-click DVD copying, like iTunes has done for CDs for years, could well be the killer app for Apple’s video products, including the Apple TV. (Update: According to Gizmodo, the files won’t be ripped from the DVD; instead, Fox will include iTunes-formatted versions of the movie on the disc.)
Up until now, the only way to legally get a movie on your Apple TV was to buy it from the iTunes store. If this trial is successful, we could see other movie studios sign on quickly. Odds are good that Disney, the media company in which Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the largest individual shareholder, will get the same deal when the movie-rental store launches in January.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (spelled from 1935 to 1985 as Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation), also known as 20th Century Fox, is one of the six major American film studios. Located in the Century City area of Los Angeles, California, USA, just west of Beverly Hills, the studio is a subsidiary of News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch. The company was founded in 1935, as the result of a merger of two entities, Fox Film Corporation founded by William Fox in 1915, and Twentieth Century Pictures, begun in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck, Joseph Schenck, Raymond Griffith and William Goetz.
iTunes is a digital media player application, introduced by Apple on January 10, 2001 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The program is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple’s popular iPod digital media players as well as the iPhone. Additionally, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store (provided an internet connection is present) in order to purchase and download digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, various podcasts, feature length films, and ringtones.
iTunes is available as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Windows XP from Apple’s website. It is also bundled with all Macs, and some HP and Dell computers. Older versions are available for Mac OS 9, OS X 10.0-10.2, and Windows 2000. iTunes is not available for other operating systems, such as Linux, although there are iTunes substitutes created for Linux such as Amarok.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
