Re: TV thingy
Actually it's for DVD movies, RCA's new DRC232N, a DVD player that automatically skips cinematic violence, sex, swearing and drug use. <br />Its scene-cutting technology, called ClearPlay, comes from a Utah company of the same name. Its executives maintain that by sanitizing movies, they're actually doing Hollywood a favor by building a broader audience.<br /><br />Hollywood begs to differ. Actually, it sues to differ; eight movie studios and the Directors Guild of America have taken ClearPlay and a group of similar companies to court. ''ClearPlay software edits movies to conform to ClearPlay's vision of a movie instead of letting audiences see, and judge for themselves, what writers wrote, what actors said and what directors envisioned,'' the Directors Guild says. <br /><br />Meanwhile, the RCA player is available for $70 at Wal-Mart and at a few online stores. It's a sleek black super-thin machine with progressive-scan outputs (connections to high-end TV sets for superior color). The only misfire is the remote, whose buttons don't light up and are mostly the same size and shape. <br /><br />The machine plays regular, unmodified commercial DVD's. It skips objectionable scenes based on software filters created by human editors and stored in its memory. (It does not filter DVD bonus materials, homemade DVD's or copies of DVD's.) <br /><br />The filters for 100 recent movies come installed. You have to pay for access to the other 500 filters the company has released so far: $1.50 for a single movie, $50 a year for the entire library, and so on.
