"Done the Impossible" DVD creators abandonded me to DRM by Liminal

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"Done the Impossible" DVD creators abandonded me to DRM

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POSTED BY: LIMINAL
UPDATED: Friday, April 15, 2011 09:15
SHORT URL: http://bit.ly/ig6RxH
VIEWED: 5489
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Thursday, April 14, 2011 2:15 AM

As we all are, I'm a huge fan of Firefly and Serenity. So much so that, even after watching the Creative Commons release of the fan documentary "Done the Impossible", I decided to pony up my $15.93 USD to buy the DVD so that I could watch the piles of interviews on it. So I went to donetheimpossible.com, placed my order, and a few days later I got my new prize.

That's where things started going wrong.

It turns out the interviews are only on the DVD-ROM portion of the disc, which means you have to play them on a computer, not on a DVD player. Well, I'm not keen on sitting in front of my computer for six+ hours instead of reclining comfortably on my couch, but I guess they couldn't fit it all on one disc in the standard format, so I can live with it. I pop the DVD in my PC and prepare for the awesomeness. And I get an error. For some reason my computer can't read the DVD-ROM. My drive doesn't have problems with any other DVD-ROMs, so I figure maybe there's an error with the disc and I email Jeremy Neish (one of the creators) for some help. And I wait. And I wait. After a week and a half, I give up and email Tony Hadlock instead (another one of the creators). This becomes a pattern of long response times as I continue to exchange emails with the two of them. Several weeks later, I develop my own solution of trying the disc on another computer, which works, and copying the Quicktime mov files that contain the interviews to a flash drive and bringing them back to my computer.

Problem solved, right? Wrong.

Now that I at long last have the interviews I'm so eager to see, I load them up in my media player. And get no video. I try the latest version of Quicktime to make sure it isn't a quirk with my player, but get the same thing. Perfect audio, but no video at all. Just a black screen. So I begin another round of very, very slow email with Jeremy and Tony to figure out what's wrong. Now knowing that this could take another month, I also start doing my own research. Which is when I find this thread:

http://fireflydvd.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2703#22128

In short, it doesn't play on purpose. They've encrypted the videos with a "protection" scheme. And, of course, the DRM software they used hasn't gotten around to making a Windows 7 version of the player. (Which is a very typical example of how DRM only hurts legitimate consumers and barely slows down pirates.) And since every PC I own runs Windows 7, I'm screwed.

I emailed Jeremy and Tony again, asking them to please help me use the product that I paid them for. It's been almost two weeks. I've heard nothing at all.

I'm very disappointed. While $16 isn't a huge loss, I'm more saddened that such obvious passion for Firefly and Serenity could be completely derailed by such disregard for the fans that are the supposed beneficiaries of all their hard work.

Given how long their average response times are, I suppose I may yet still hear back from them eventually. But at this point I have little hope that they're going to do much to help me.

So, let the buyer beware. The "Done the Impossible" DVD that they're selling is not Windows 7 compatible. And they know it. Yet they don't even mention it on the website to give a warning. And they keep selling them anyway. And if you should have problems with that or anything else, don't expect much help.

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Thursday, April 14, 2011 4:47 AM

TWO

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

“The fact that the QuickTime movies won't play on their own is intentional. We encrypted the video so the only way the video can be played is through the IVEX feature. We wanted people to get the whole experience. It's just that so much effort went into the IVEX we didn't want people missing out on that . . . I understand that many of you are frustrated that the IVEX is not working properly on some PCs (by our estimate about 25%). We are endeavoring to fix it and hope to have a patch up next week. Thanks for your patience.” - Jeremy, Site Admin, Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2006, 9:30 am

“I'm guessing the patch will be released right after Duke Nukem Forever ships.” - KernelM, Mon Apr 09, 2007 9:20 am

The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity," where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, April 14, 2011 8:06 AM

SIMONWHO

Pah, Duke Nukem Forever is released in a couple of months.

Mind you, when they started developing Duke Nukem Forever, there could be no Firefly interviews because it hadn't been aired. Then again, nor had Angel. Nor had Buffy. So that's pretty much the same as Forever.

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Thursday, April 14, 2011 9:37 AM

TWO

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SimonWho:
Pah, Duke Nukem Forever is released in a couple of months.

Mind you, when they started developing Duke Nukem Forever, there could be no Firefly interviews because it hadn't been aired. Then again, nor had Angel. Nor had Buffy. So that's pretty much the same as Forever.

Duke Nukem Forever delayed again: June 10, 2011 (international) and June 14 (North America) - www.computerandvideogames.com/295133/news/duke-nukem-forever-delayed-a
gain-really/

Once Duke Nukem Forever is out, I'll be looking for the dti_ivex_update_1.3.exe patch to IVEX for Done The Impossible. My fortune cookie today read: “Your everlasting patience will be rewarded sooner or later.” That makes me feel very optimistic.

The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity," where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 15, 2011 5:23 AM

JAYSEDAI

Hi Liminal,

Jeremy from Done The Impossible here... Thank you for the heads up on your issues with Done The Impossible. For the record, I never received a single email from you but as it turns out that is my fault. After reading your post I went back to my email and discovered I haven't received a single email to my done the Impossible account since 2009, I had just assumed nobody was emailing me (as emails to that account had slowed to a crawl by then anyway). So later today I'll go figure out what went wrong with my account, but I wanted to get back to you immediately. And I apologize for not getting back to you via email, I pride myself on my quick email replies, so I feel awful you never got one from me.

Let me start by saying you have a right to be frustrated. We really pushed the cutting edge with the DVD-ROM features on Done The Impossible. Our Interactive Viewing Experience (IVEX) on that disc is probably the most complex DVD-ROM ever created. It's a complex hybrid of Macromedia Director (with a slew of Xtras), Macromedia Flash, DVD-Video Playback and QuickTime playback, along with a thousands of lines of custom code. In fact we won the "Interactivist" award of 2007 for our work on that title. There are over 8,000 synchronized content events on the DVD-ROM. Not only that, but the content is completely updatable on the fly via the internet. And that's no small feat for a read-only disc :).

The side effect of pushing the edge on the feature was that compatibility issues (none of them DRM related), have cropped up over the years since the disc was released. Not the least of which is the fact that the DVD-ROM doesn't work on my own platform of choice Mac OS X (intel). It still runs great on a G5 Mac, and once in a great while it'll work on an intel based Mac under Rosetta, but in most cases not. It also rarely runs under Vista, though surprisingly it usually runs great under Windows 7.

Needless to say we were pretty proud of what we had done on the DVD-ROM, and we wanted folks to see it. And as I mentioned in 2006, the reason we put some (mild) DRM on the ROM side was for mostly selfish reasons, we really wanted folks to experience all the coolness we had done on IVEX. It was also at the request of some of the BDH's that they preferred the whole interviews not get out onto the internet.

I personally HATE DRM, and so I feel rather guilty for putting it on our title. And I understand why you are frustrated, had the tables been turned, I'd have written a message exactly like the one you wrote.

First I'd like to find out what error you are getting on the DVD-ROM. As I mentioned, it usually works under Windows 7, though I believe you do have to have a third party DVD decoder installed (WinDVD, PowerDVD etc), the built in Windows Media Player decoder has issues.

So feel free to drop me an email at my main email account jeremy [at ] neish.com and I can help. Also, anybody else having issues can contact me directly there (though I should have my main Done The Impossible account back online later today).

Also, if we can't get the ROM working for you I'm happy to give you the media key that unlocks the QuickTime movies directly, I just ask that you respect the request of the Firefly actors and crew that the full length videos not get published in the wild on the internet.

Also, just wanted to let everyone know that we have new versions of Done The Impossible in the works, we are hoping to get a big compatibility patch out there this year (I'll try to beat Duke Nukem's release). The final wall finally fell (there was one last Xtra that hadn't been ported to intel) and believe we can patch the DVD-ROM to work with nearly all modern machines. Also, we are working on an iOS version of the DVD & DVD-ROM, look for that later this year. And we might do a Blu-ray version, though, Blu-ray authoring is considerably more complex and memory limited (and expensive), so some of the stuff we pulled off on the DVD may not be possible on Blu-ray, we'll see.

Thanks,
Jeremy Neish
DoneTheImpossible.com

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Friday, April 15, 2011 6:23 AM

TWO

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by jaysedai:
. . . we really wanted folks to experience all the coolness we had done on IVEX. It was also at the request of some of the BDH's that they preferred the whole interviews not get out onto the internet.

Without IVEX, I would have never known Jewel and Morena quit work early to get drunk at Nathan's the day Firefly was canceled. Before Xmas holidays. "Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah!" from friendly FOX.

The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity," where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, April 15, 2011 9:15 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Somebody buy Jeremy a drink.

After dealing with a whole lot of "customer service" (and oh, believe me, most of em are "servicing" the customer all right..) it always warms my heart that us browncoats are the way we are, no matter who and where we are.

-Frem

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