I have a complaint. The media companies and broadband internet companies have consipired to make me break the law and contribute to global warming. They are also wasting my time. And all for no good reason.

I can buy a high quality encoding of the latest films on blu-ray. I like it that they usually include a DVD version and a “digital copy”. When the media companies first started doing this, I was thrilled. Finally, I thought, the dinosaurs have caught up with the fact that increasingly people want to watch their media “on the go”, on laptops and iPads. Or set up a media server at home, streaming content around the house over WIFI. But to my dismay, I then discovered how low the quality of the digital copy is. Let me use the example of a recent acquisition, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (an excellent film by the way).

These are the output resolutions on the screen, excluding the black bars. This flatters both the DVD and the digital copy through the use of non-square pixels. The actual number of horizontal pixels in the DVD and digital copy files are really 720 and 640 pixels respectively.

The digital copy maches the quality offered as a purchased download from iTunes, which is worse than DVD. Why? With the latest iPad and Macbook Pro having screen resolutions higher than even the blu-ray file, it certainly isn’t because the quality is “good enough”.

Presumably, one reason is to limit the download sizes. But why make you download the “digital copy”, rather than include it on the disk? Forcing the customer to download the file unnecessarily uses up often scarce bandwidth.

The answer given to these questions by the media companies of course is “anti piracy” and “digital rights management” or DRM. But does all this inconvenience being inflicted on the honest consumer actually prevent piracy? Of course not. It is straightforward for the knowledgable (which certainly includes the professional pirates) to rip the high resolution blu-ray files from the disk. There’s a great guide here for example. It is even easier to rip the DVD.

In my own case, the distance of my house to the telephone exchange forces me to use satellite broadband, which comes with an impossibly constraining bandwidth cap, even with the most expensive plan. So even if I was prepared to put up with the lower quality, downloading movies from iTunes is simply not an option for me. To watch the content I have purchased at good quality on my high resolution iPad requires me to waste time and energy ripping the blu-ray files and re-encoding.

I suppose that the approach of the movie companies does reduce “casual piracy”. Making it hard for most people to make a high quality copy for their friends may result in a few more blu-ray disks being sold. But somehow, I can’t see how taking such a customer unfriendly and backward looking approach can be in the long run interests of the movie industry.

It certainly annoys the hell out of me!