Just bought a ClearPlay DVD player

[JorgenMan]

I just ordered a ClearPlay DVD player, so I'll give some comments when it arrives. For those who aren't familiar with ClearPlay, it basically has a bunch of filters so you can choose how much sex/violence/swearing/etc you want to allow, and it has built-in filters to automatically skip over the stuff you don't want. I am hopeful, as there are many movies we like that are family-friendly, except for one scene that's thrown in to make it "grown-up".

Power to the people...or, whatever.

[Sonnie]

This will hopefully be a great way to allow your kids to have a DVD player and not be worried about what they might accidentally get a hold of. Please do keep us updated... thanks!

[JorgenMan]

Okay, so we've had the ClearPlay DVD player for a while now, and have had a chance to try a few movies out on it.

First of all, for those who are wondering, here's how the filters work. The DVD player comes pre-loaded with a bunch of filters. You can pay a monthly subscription ($8/month) and have access to download all their filters, so you can get filters for the newest movies. The nice thing is that to load filters to your player, you download the filters to your computer and burn them to a disc. This means you can just pay for a one-month subscription every once in a while to keep your filters current.

So, the first movie I tried out was The Matrix. There are several filter categories, in each of which are several filters. I assumed that the filters went in order of content level, since the sex filters started with sensuality and progressed to explicit sexual content. There were three violence filters, I think we turned two of them on. Then, while watching the movie, I noticed that some not-so-bad "violence" had been filtered out, namely, the bug crawling into Neo's stomach, and Agent Smith's skin having the lumps going through it at the end. Well, it turned out that although "Disturbing Images" was the last filter in the violence section, it wasn't the worst. I turned that one off, and everything was good.

One thing about the ClearPlay - you can definitely tell your movie is being edited. Language is usually just muted, but, of course, it can only mute all or nothing, so that's a pretty obvious edit. Other scenes, where the video has to be cut out, are just skipped, so some action scenes, for example, can get pretty choppy. Of course, they could have done a TV-style edit and just cut out the entire fight scene. Admittedly, it would have looked smoother this way, but I'd rather have a little choppiness and keep as much of the original movie footage as possible.

FWIW, I'm very happy with our purchase. I would have expected something like this to cost a lot more; I think I paid $80 for ours.

I think I've about covered it all, but I realize this post may be a little scatterbrained. Let me know if you have any questions.

[Sonnie]

This sounds like an excellent product, despite the few minor bugs, especially for younger children. Chances are they won't be able to notice the edits as much as we would notice them.