A new technology called Clear Play for DVD Players will enable people to play any movie they desire without any worries about censoring any undesired scenes involving sex or violence, drugs, drinking or even bad language.
It costs 70 US Dollars and skips all undesired scenes and mutes undesired savage language.
How nice…
This is an indirect way of turning new hollywood movies into old style silent short films.
Come on, I mean with all the sex, violence and bad language in today’s movies, basically nothing would be left if all that were cut out?!
But what’s interesting is how this will work from a technological point of view.
How will these players recognize these scenes and the language in them?
I don’t believe a player can actually do it efficiently on it’s own. Children will still get a few lifetime shocks every now and then.
I think that for something like this to truly work, DVDs should provide help by using some way of marking the scenes that should be cut out or the language that should be silenced.
This can be as easy as throwing an xml file on the DVD with the scene start and end time marked, and whether it should be skipped or silenced.
Anyway, I’m interested in knowing how they’re doing it.
If anyone has any idea, please share.
[Via AquaCool]
Actually the ClearPlay Technique is based on “control files”. Each DVD has its own control file and according to what filter you buy (as there are 4 filters: for violence,or sex, or savage language, or alcohol & drug addictions. You can buy them all or what you choose)and these filters mark the inappropriate scenes by signals, so there is a coordination between the control file of a DVD (which has all the signals of all inappropriate scenes on it) and the Filter types of the DVD Player with the ClearPlay technique which recognizes those signals of the control files and either skips or mutes the scene. And you can still enjoy the original movie without filteringwhile your kids are asleep, how! through a password. So before the playing of each movie, if you enter the password, then you watch the original, if you don’t have the password then you get to watch the filtered version only 🙂
Isn’t this perfect?!
Just a further note on the ClearPlay filters. There are several players with the ClearPlay technology on the market. They have built the technology into the player to read what they call a ClearPlay Filter File. This contains data about each movie in their library that tells the player when to skip or mute. I understand that the players will be capable of doing more than that soon.
They also have settings there are like 12 of them that you can set the level of them (4 levels) from no filtering to most. They include Violence, Language, Sex, Nudity, Biogotry and others. I think even one of them is disrespect to the American Flag.
They like to deliver the Filter File via USB Flash drive or via modem. Its pretty cool how they do it, but this is what I got from customer support from ClearPlay. I have one of their players for my family TV and one for our bedroom. Its great.
The idea is completely insane. I mean, if a movie has some explicit scenes or language why would you play it when children are around? On the other hand I know a lot of children capable to recompose all the missing bag language. There are other things which must concern us, like domestic violence and school violence. ~~ Canadian Drug
Clear Play is a good system, but I’m currently enjoying ClearView. It’s a much easier product to use and much cheaper than Clear Play. All I have to do is press the scissors button. Here is their infomercial.
http://www.americanfilms.com/play.cfm?clipid=2446
You have to purchase a ClearPlay subscription which allows you to download “filters” for the movies. The ClearPlay folks review each movie and create a filter which is applied as the movie is playing to skip over the objectionable parts.