It has been a long time since we've heard anything truly interesting out of Real, the content purveyor that seemed to float away long ago with the ATRAC3 format and Windows 98. To our surprise, however, Real recently pinged us with some news that turned our heads: it has a new app that can rip a DVD, download the relevant metadata, organize it all, and play it back from the comforts of a notebook on your couch or 30,000 feet in the air. Naturally, we wanted to chat with Real about this, so we sat down with Eric Fox, Senior Product Manger for Media Software & Services.

Do not adjust that dial



Fox told Ars Technica that Real's new app is simply called Real DVD, and it's designed to be a one-stop DMCA-skirting shop for copying a DVD in its entirety to a hard drive and playing it back, CSS encryption and all. Real DVD should work with any commercial DVD, though a beta testing period that launched Monday will help test the extent of that claim. After creating a file (not named "VIDEO_TS") that includes the feature film, DVD menu, extras, and anything else, Real DVD will dial up metadata servers to pull down things like album artwork, director, actors, a description of the film—all the usual stuff that most illegitimate apps have never done very well, if at all.

Quality purists should be pleased, as Fox told Ars, that "we don't modify or change the files in any way. We basically make a 'carbon copy' from the disc to disk. We never modify, compress, or change the content." Unfortunately, this also means that each movie Real DVD copies should gobble up around 4GB on a hard drive. Real isn't worried about taking up too much space, however, as Fox explained that "drives are expanding, and gigabytes are getting cheaper than ever."

Since users will need Real DVD to play back the movies it creates, Real built in some handy features to organize libraries across local and external storage space. "Users can can keep files on external drives," Fox said, "and they'll seamlessly appear and disappear from the app library as the drive is mounted." Fortunately, each movie can also be customized depending on what you actually want to do with it. Real DVD has options for skipping straight to the feature film when opening a particular movie, and it can even condense multi-disc sets like TV series when browsing the library.

Laughing in the face of danger

Naturally, one of our first questions for Fox was: "how?" That pesky DMCA has proven quite stringent in the past when it comes to ripping DVDs, so what makes Real so special? "We licensed the DVD technology for a legal right to play back DVD content," Fox explained, "and our second layer of DRM doesn't hurt, either." Indeed, Real DVD adds a new layer of DRM to each file—on top of the DVD's native CSS, which is preserved within each file—to lock the file to the user and PC that created it. While the company is allowing these files to be played on up to five computers, this limit may still scare away movie enthusiasts who own more PCs than John McCain owns houses.

A second layer of DRM isn't the only problem with Real DVD, however. Fox explained that, unfortunately, files won't be playable on any portable devices other than a notebook. Plus, while the files Real DVD creates aren't time-bombed in any way, Real DVD is required for watching them. More on how much that's going to cost you in a minute.

Could Real be... too late?

Real is opening up Real DVD with a beta Monday, so we'll get our hands on it and let you know what we think. We've had some time to kick around what Real DVD brings to the table, though, and we have to admit, we were initially perplexed. On the one hand, Real DVD feels about three years too late, since online video distribution has been maturing for a while now, and a number of new outlets ranging from the iTunes Store to Hulu offer great options for getting one's video fix.

On the other hand, Fox had a point: "We're going for the everyday consumer and business/casual travelers who want to watch a DVD they already own in a hotel room or on the couch, but don't want to lug around lots of equipment." And therein lies the rub: DVDs have been selling really, really well for years, which means that there are millions of customers out there with bountiful DVD libraries that are ripe for ripping. Until Real DVD, though, there hasn't been a simple, legitimate, one-stop option for copying those DVDs to a computer, grabbing all the relevant box art and metadata, and then watching the films (with output to a TV or HDTV, to boot). So for all its faults and any features it may lack as a 1.0 product, Real DVD is the first legitimate option for consumers who want to put the DVDs they already own onto their PCs.

That said, Real DVD certainly isn't perfect, and we'll have to see how warm a welcome consumers give it. For now, Real is going to sell Real DVD at an introductory price of $29.99, though that will rise to $49.99 somewhere down the road. You can take Real DVD for a fully functional, anonymous demo for 30 days, and we'll report back soon with our impressions once we can actually put it through its paces.