Rip the System and not

So I watched Stealth last night. You may have not heard about it. I think it was meant to be a summer blockbuster this year and it came and went without much hooplah. In fact, I don't even remember when it hit theatres. Anyway, it came out on DVD a week or so ago.

Did I buy it? No.
Did I rent it? No.

Actually, Starfish rented it last week and made me a copy. Barebones - he stripped it down to reduce the compression of re-encoding it to a 4.7Gb disc. And bless him for choosing the DTS soundtrack over the Dolby Digital option.

And you know what's funny? I still intend to eventually pick up a legit copy of the film.

No, it's not that it was that good. Well, okay, it was quite a fan-boy movie. In a lot of ways it was Macross brought to life (minus the transforming jets and invading aliens). But I mean the CGI ariel combat sequences were dizzyingly spectacular.
No, actually I saw a UMD version available in stores... And for once the studio saw fit to tie-in the film with a cool little bonus. The UMD (a PSP format disc) also contains an exclusive "Stealth" vehicle add-on for the popular Wipe-Out Pure racing game. How cool is that?
Now that's the sort of cross-promotional marketting that'll make the UMD a viable alternative format. For almost a year I've been asking, "why would anybody pay 25 bucks for a UMD movie when they could get a full-blown feature-packed DVD for their home theatre?" Now I know.