Met HD broadcasts at movie theaters actually quite good

Saturday morning we went to the local movie theater to watch a Metropolitan Opera's high-definition live broadcast of Puccini's Manon Lescaut.

I was curious about how much I would enjoy watching an opera in a movie theater, but it turned out to be quite good in several respects:
  • I had heard that these broadcasts had been quite successful last year, but somehow I could not really believe it. We joked before entering the theater that maybe we would be the only two people there. But in fact the place was almost packed (mostly with gray or white heads), which was heart-warming.
  • Half of each of the two intermissions was spent taking the viewer behind the scene. Renée Fleming interviewed the two protagonists (Karita Mattila and Marcello Giordani), conductor James Levine, the stage manager, and the couple in charge of animals on stage (horses and dog). You also got to see the cast behind the curtain, and all the work needed to change the sets. This is material which you simply don't get at the opera.
  • You get to see a lot of the action much better than if you are sitting hundreds of feet away from a stage. You also get to see what was happening in the orchestra pit during orchestral moments.
  • It costs only $22, it's close from home, there is plenty of parking and and you don't have to dress up.
  • Picture and sound quality are good, although sitting quite in front of the theater, you can see the pixels. I wonder what's the resolution? 720?1080?
Other than that the performance was quite good. I had never seen Puccini's Manon Lescaut, performed less often than Massenet's version of l'Abbé Prévost's story. This is not an opera as perfect dramatically as La Bohème, but you can understand why this was Puccini's first real success on stage.

The sets were gorgeous. Karita Mattila, at 47 (as she tells herself during her interview), is old for the role of the youthful Manon, and this appears too well during the close-ups, but she sang and acted wonderfully. Unusually maybe for a modern tenor, Marcello Giordani has a warm and pleasing voice and did quite well in the several quite demanding arias. Conducting was as you could expect from Levine.

I think we will be tempted by the experience again. Next up are Britten's Peter Grimes, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Puccini's La Bohème, and Donzetti's La Fille du Régiment.

I can't believe we still have DVD region coding

Today I put in my computer a DVD from a Blackadder set, bought legally for me as a gift a few of years ago.

I happen to have plugged a European DVD into my US Mac, and you can guess what message I got from the Mac OS X Leopard DVD player. You got it: "The disc region does not match the drive region". Yeah, I can change it 4 times. Thanks, that's so generous.

This is simply insane. I had forgotten that this even existed as I don't play DVDs very often. Furthermore, in Switzerland where I am at the moment, standalone players are routinely sold region-free (although that may change with the upcoming and particularly crazy Swiss DMCA).

What is the sense of this region coding? This is the 21st century. People travel. They use the internet. The world is working hard on removing existing boundaries and I don't think it is permissible to build new, artificial barriers. Governments and industries that attempt to do that should be fought.

I understand that I am partly at fault because I am using an actual, physical DVD, a quite old media, and I should have ripped my DVDs a long time ago and be free of these issues. But I think it is still important to talk about region coding, because:
  • Most content sold today is still in region-coded DVD format, while it could be region-free.
  • Recent formats like Blu-ray support region coding as well.
  • DRM in general is pervasive for video content online (if you except P2P networks), and kind or region-coded through stores like the iTunes Store which require credit cards registered in a certain country.
DRM is going away for music now, which is a good first step. There is hope that, as broadband and video-enabled devices become even more widespread, DRM on video will vanish on its own as that will be the only option left to the industry in the face of underground P2P filesharing. Unfortunately, in the meanwhile, as has been the case with music, a lot of harm will be done. I am not sure what we can do about it, except raise the awareness of the issue by talking about it.

PS: In my particular case, there are workarounds, like using VLC to play the DVD (although VLC seems to crash quite often). My previous laptop, bought 4 years ago, was made region-free right away. However on the Mac, making the drive region-free is not as mainstream a process. I wonder what non-technical users do in this kind of situation? Change the player's zone until it is finally locked in the wrong zone?