Warner Bros. announces new kind of DVD extras

This week, at the DVD Forum conference in Universal City, California, Warner Home Video announced that its going to include some interesting new extras on the HARRY POTTER & THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX DVD. Namely, two additional versions of the movie. One for viewing on a PC and another made for digital media players. Since Warner Home Video is still hush-hush about this, it’s not yet understood how this will work exactly. It’s assumed that the PC users will simply have special files on the DVD to access/play. Since it’s being speculated that WHV will most likely be using DRM’d Windows Media formats, there’s a good chance these files won’t play on Linux or Mac OS X. Going along the same line of thought, the digital media player version will probably be unplayable on an iPod. The cool thing is that Warner is actually taking a positive step to prevent piracy, rather than starting off with the assumption that the customer is a pirate. This is definitely something we at MediaGeeks are gonna keep an eye on.