ClearPlay
I just saw a commercial for ClearPlay, a DVD player that will automatically skip over “sex, violence, and profanity” in pre-existing DVDs.
The evidence is overwhelming that content in entertainment—particularly violence—can have a damaging impact on children. It is easy enough for the studios to suggest kids not see any of these movies. Unfortunately, two thirds of MPAA fare is rated R. Most of the rest is PG-13, where the standards have slipped over time, and where studios routinely spend $30 million or more on marketing that is often aimed at children. ClearPlay is simply a tool that parents can use to help reduce content they might find objectionable. Finally, ClearPlay is an ideal solution that is used by families in the home, and doesn’t require limits on content the studios develop.
At the time of writing, 2,530 supported movies are censored for
- Violence
- Strong Action Violence
- Gory / Brutal Violence
- Disturbing Images
- Sex and Nudity
- Sensual Content
- Crude Sexual Content
- Nudity
- Explicit Sexual Situations
- Language
- Vain Reference to Deity
- Crude Language and Humor
- Ethnic and Social Slurs
- Cursing
- Strong Profanity
- Graphic Vulgarity
- Other
- Explicit Drug Use
On the website, they also provide extra “Parental Advisories,” warning parents about content that might be objectionable but doesn’t fit in the above categories. Advisories cover taboos such as “revealing clothing,” “implied premarital sex,” “bar environment,” “intense life or death situations,” and “dysfunctional relationships,” among dozens if not hundreds of others.
Censorship on a Thumbdrive
The service works by having you download “Filters” to a CD or thumbdrive, which is read by a ClearPlay-compatible DVD player. A Filter contains the start time and duration of censorable scenes, along with which categories the scene falls into. A single-movie Filter takes up about 136 KB, while a twenty-movie one takes about 260 KB, leaving about 7 KB per movie.
I downloaded a few Filters and tried my hand at figuring out how they tick. I don’t think they’re encrypted (or at least, with anything too strong), but they’re certainly not easy to read. They come in two flavors, CP2 and CPF. According to the License Agreement (which I violated by “attempt[ing] to … reverse engineer”), the CPF files are read by “RCA DVD players with model numbers DRC232N and DRC232NS and/or MaxPlay DVD Modem players” exclusively.
If I cracked how the files worked, I’d rewrite all of the Filters to skip to the censored content, playing only a montage of violence and nudity. Think how much better most movies would be.