[Sancho]

While browsing the forums I have noticed TONs of posts about various digital media. Mainly dealing with MP3s and Divx's. Most of the posts are in the 'other software' forum. I was just thinking it might be benificial to give all these questions their own forum.

Troubleshooting movie playback, and learning to encode movies is somewhat more complicated than answering a simple somewhat obvious question about any certain piece of software. Encoding MP3s and converting and such is also more of a 'how-to' type activity rather than just a simple answer. Maybe having their own forum would keep things more organized, and with a couple walkthrough forum posts would help lots of people instead of having to answer the same questions over and over again.

Just a thought. What do yall think?

[Aaron.W]

Couldn't hurt. I see a lot of that at the BearShare Forums too so we have two forums, one for music and one for movies. After a few years it has become a valuable resource to our members when they have a codec problem.

I propose you call it "Multimedia and CODECs" to make it as unambiguous as possible. At BearShare ours are named "Music" and "Movies", so discussions tend to wander from tech issues. ;]

[Sancho]

Good idea. If we didn't specify it would prolly turn into childish arguments about whos better 50 Cent or Jay Z....or whoever is popular now.

[TechGuy]

My main concern is that such a forum would probably increase the number of threads we have to close due to illegal activities... Also, I don't know if it's really needed now... kind of fits in with a few other forums. I'm open to comments, though.

[McTimson]

Heh...you should just make one forum called 'movies and music' and just have every topic instantly closed as soon as it's entered...because that's pretty much what would happen if people had a seperate forum for music and divX's...

[TechGuy]

LMAO... Exactly, McTimson. Exactly.

[Aaron.W]

I'll change my suggested name to "Multimedia Software and CODECs" then. ;]

You should check out how we mod the BearShare forums. We have boilerplate plaques for each of our rules which we add to posts as needed. For example, when something illegal is "expressed or linked" to, we [edit] it out and put this plaque at the bottom of the message:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Edited to comply with the House Rules, which says:
Warez, copyright violation, or any other illegal activity may NOT be linked or
expressed in any form.

This notice, though not required, is placed here as a courtesy to the poster.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Naturally, this saves us a lot of time and effort.

[Sancho]

as long as people ask their questions in the right way it doesn't directly correspond with illegal activity or warez.

for instance:
Why do i get error xxxx when i try to play a divx of the matrix?
should be fine.

but something like :
how do i download this movie i don't own?
would be bad.

There is a fine line between helping ppl with legit problems and helping support pirating. I realize this and understand the hesitance of opening a forum.

however, If being correct and moderating for piracy is such a concern, i think a lot more threads should be closed than is being done. Lots of questions deal directly with Kaazzaa and bear share and k-lite, and everybody helps the people without even thinking about it. If we know all these ppl are gonna steal music, why help them ?

[McTimson]

Because you can't be absolutely positive that they're getting illegal files. There are (believe it or not) a lot of non-copyrighted, personal files on the filesharing networks. Sometimes people want to see them, but you can't just ban every post unless you're positive. The program itself isn't illegal, it's how you use it. Unless they say "I can't get [insert movie here] to play correctly", then there's nothing you can do about it. Of course, they're probably going to just get illegal files, but you can never be too sure.

This kind of thing happens a lot in the games forum as well...a lot of times, you can be pretty sure that they downloaded the game, but unless they admit it, you can't do anything. However, the people who you would be trying to catch would just come right out and say that they downloaded it, not even realizing it's illegal...but hey, I don't really care, if they're smart enough to not admit it, then they're smart enough to realize that they should eventually buy the game.

[gotrootdude]

My matrix won't run....