Consumer Friendly (or Disney Hostile) DVD Players? [Slashdot]

OK, the writer is looking for a DVD player that will let him skip trailers as well as the FBI notice on DVDs. Someone suggests VideoLAN as an option. So what is VideoLAN?

VideoLAN is a project of French students from the École Centrale Paris and developers from all over the world. Its main goals is MPEG streaming on a network, but it also features a standalone multimedia player. The VideoLAN Server can stream video read from a hard disk, a DVD player, a satellite card or an MPEG 2 compression card, and unicast or multicast it on a network. The VideoLAN Client can read the stream from the network and display it. It can also be used to display video read locally on the computer : DVDs, VCDs, MPEG and DivX files and from a satellite card. It is multi-plaform : Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Solaris, QNX, iPaq... The VideoLAN Client and Server now have a full IPv6 support.

VideoLAN is free software, and is released under the GNU General Public License.

Pretty sweet. Now, if you have the scratch, imagine setting this up with a server that has some large, fast hard drives. The server watches the folders of your machines that you ahve set up with PVR cards, and grabs the show once it's taped. You also set up the server to snag a stream of a DVD as it's played, so that you have an archived copy in your system. Since you own the DVD and would never, ever tell anyone about this, you don't have to worry about getting busted for it.

Now, the cool thing is, you can have the server multicast, so you can effectively program your own TV channels. I know that for me, alte nights when I can't sleep, the best thing I can do is sit down with a quart of milk, a box of cookies, and watch some horror films, preferably Hammer Studios Dracula series. Puts me right out (and explains a lot, really.) Now, if you could tie this in with your personal assitant/Major Domo, Higgins, you'd be onto something.

Higgins: "Sir, you have insomnia?" (Higgins has noticed that you are stirring, and have just gone from the kitchen to the living room, and are now aimlessly channel surfing.)
User: "Yes Higgins. Anything good on?"
Higgins: "Mostly infomercials on broadcast. HBO 12 is showing ''My life in Bhutan'', which is one of your favorites..."
User: "No thank you Higgins, Que up some drive in horror, bugs and vampires please." (User has just used some keywords to describe what he's in the mood for. Higgins will now search through his archives for what the User likes, hasn't seen recently, and that matches the search terms used)
Higgins: "How about, The Giant Mantis, Them, and Dracula's Brides, sir?"
User: "Perfect. On the headphones, and theatre lighting."
Higgins: "Done and done." (Higgins switches the audio channel to the user's wireless headphones, and the changes the lighting to the theatre preset for the room.)
User: >belches
Higgins: "Excuse me sir?" (Higgins is in the headphones how)
User: "Nothing Higgins, I'm all set, goodnight." (This is a voice cue to put Higgins into standby unless he is addressed by name)
Higgins: "Goodnight sir."
User: (Kicks back and drifts off watching the film.)

Obviously, Higgins could be configured differently, to either respond with tones and text displays, differing genders and colloquialisms depending on region and user preference, etc, etc.

10:51:28 PM