My friend has a PC running XP -- old, but not so old that he can't watch DVDs on it, something he does pretty regularly. He uses the FOSS application VLC to watch DVDs and typically has no trouble with it. That is, until he tried to play Shoot 'Em Up. No dice.

So I did what I usually do when I see a friend in dire straits: I played unpaid tech support. I did a little research and found that Shoot 'Em Up was one of a small batch of recent movies that uses one of the many, many crazy little DVD copy-protection schemes that drives me batty. Most of them revolve around making the disc report errors on a PC, but play okay on a DVD player. They almost inevitably result in a disc that plays in some players but not others -- yet another reason why attempting to retrofit copy protection where it doesn't belong is an inherently stupid idea. (Like XCP.)

We tried removing the existing version of VLC and upgrading to a newer one. Still no dice -- and now VLC was crashing on load no matter what else happened, typically a sign that VLC's own internal settings have been børked and need to be manually erased. Things more or less went downhill from there, and eventually my friend broke down into a rant: He didn't want to have to learn how to repair his ××××ing computer, he just wanted to watch a ××××ing movie.

He also didn't have $50 to throw at a commercial DVD playback solution, so it was VLC or nothing -- and by that time, he was too fed up to even think about another program anyway, free or not. There was, as it turned out, a patch for one of VLC's component libraries that addressed this specific problem, but he was in no mood to be walked through yet another bit of hackery. (This to me is, in its own oblique way, an argument for for-pay versions of Linux. The less people have to deal with such nonsense on any platform, the better.)

I felt bad for him, since the very thing that was supposed to help him was more of a hassle than simply shelling out bucks. More than that, I felt tremendously annoyed at the capriciousness of content publishers whose idea of "protecting their investment" is to make it all but useless for some portion of their prospective audience. I thought we were long past this stage. I guess not.