Just kidding about replacing unRAID, but it might be an interesting way to access your movies and augment your home server.

 

http://www.vudu.com/disc_to_digital_press_release.html

 

I'm not sure how this is going to work, or if it's going to be cost effective for Walmart/VUDU, but it appears you take your DVD/BD to Walmart and for $2 have access to it thru VUDU (all of its various apps and players) for no additional fee for your "lifetime" (or the lifetime of the service).

 

You can have access to the VUDU SD version for your DVD and $2, or the HD/HDX version for your BD and $2, or upgrade your DVD to HD for $5.

 

As an example - the movie Blade hasn't been released on Blu-ray, so you could take a DVD of Blade and pay $5 and get HD access as often as you want.  Blade rents for $3.99 for HD, $4.99 for HDX for a one time viewing.

 

It seems like there wouldn't be anything preventing someone from buying a used disc, borrowing from family/friend or renting from the video store and taking it to Walmart to get "ownership" of their "cloud" access to the movie, since you get to keep your disc.  It would be a lot cheaper then the $15 to $20 they want to "own".

Still could be an expensive change. Before I ripped my movie collection and gave the discs to my sister, I was well over 1000 dvd's, if I wanted access to those through vudu, it would have cost me $2000, or $5000 for the HD upgrade. Granted, I culled down my collection by not ripping movies I didn't forsee ever wanting to watch again, got it down to about 600 movies. Still would cost $1200 or $3000, a steep bill to put my movies on the cloud. They should definitely offer a bulk package with a discount, say, 100 movies for $100 for sd, $250 for HD "upgrade".

 

Still would be interesting, just have a family vudu account, whenever someone buys a movie they get it unlocked on vudu, the whole family can watch it,

The other concern, and this is not to be taken lightly, is how many false starts will we have in cloud based video playing services with DRM. Seems the big corporations like to start new things, promise a "lifetime" of service, take your money, then decide a few years later that, "nope, not profitable enough"and kill the service off. As for the customers well... what's that saying: "you pays yo money, you take yo chances, too bad."

 

So no thanks Hollywood, even though it's expensive in time and resources, at least I know my little personal cloud will still be around in 10 years.

and still be stuck with the crappy ads/menus.