Customer Reviews

Night of the Living Homeless

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This episode had been recommended to me long ago, but I did not rent it because I did not want to commit to watching a whole DVD's worth of Southpark. $1.99 bought the unbox episode (cheaper than the cost of gas): Kyle gives a homeless guy $20 and soon afterward South Park is overrun with homeless. Cartman is as charming as ever, striving to vault his skateboard over the most homeless. The town council proposes the standard, mindless responses typical of city bureaucracy (designer sleeping bags, and such), and the homeless continue their undaunted chanting, "Spare Change? God Bless." So it's up to the boys to travel to a nearby town to seek the solution. Unbox has been flawless for me.

South Park never ceases to amaze me at what they come up with. Don't get me wrong I find a lot of the shows funny. Where else can you find talking poo, a character that is killed every episode, kids that seem to run the town they live in, clueless parents and so much more? This particular episode however was not a favorite of mine, in fact I really didn't care for it.

I have just downloaded a free South Park episode on Amazon's newly launched "Unbox Videos Download." I am not reviewing South Park show by any means because I own all the previous episodes on DVDs (and on my iPod through iTunes). This episode is offered by Amazon Unbox free of charge. I am sure they wanted people to test out their player, software, and the whole online download session, and what a better way of having people test it then to offer a few free episodes?

I am OK with their player that came with the software that is required to download videos from Amazon site. You will be given this option if you are buying an episode or a movie from the Unbox for the first time. You have to log on to Amazon with your username and password at this point. Also, I tested; I can play the downloaded video on my RealOne player (not a big fan). But I found out that it would not work with my VLC Media Player.

But, where does this leave me? Do I really want to pay money to buy these Unbox episodes and movies, just to deal with this DRM business? What if I want to take the movie I downloaded to watch it in my TV room instead of watching it on my PC? Say, I don't have a TiVo and stuff like that. Do I have that option? And the .amzn file that is downloaded together with the episode for what Amazon considers "for portable media devices" is totally useless. I think I will be OK to buy them unboxed if they get rid of the DRM. In that case, I can just convert them to MP4 format using media converters so that the purchased unboxed movies can be added to my iPod (yes, I do use the 5.5 generation). What's up with that, .amzn file for portable media players? It doesn't make sense! Why don't companies give their consumers a choice? Why shouldn't we, the customers, be able to choose what format we want (WMV, RM, AVI, MP4, etc) as supposed to the companies making the decisions for us? I'll not be buying these Unboxed videos unless Amazon drops the DRM (we are paying for it after all), or at least let people choose the format base on their portable media players (in this case, DRM is OK with me as long as it is a right format). Dropping the DRM will also allow people to convert them (the .amzn files) into compatible format base on the type of portable media players they own.

Having said that, I think this Amazon Unbox Videos Downloads is quite a good idea. After all, Amazon is the leader when it comes to online shopping. So why not sell the digital media digitally to digital savvy people? Without too much restriction, that is.

This was at one time a free download. I downloaded it, but never had the chance to watch it. On the 31st, some weird power failure completely disrupted my computer. The unbox player had to be re-downloaded. None of my films or downloads was marked as downloaded, but they began to come back - over 90% of them. The rest I simply re-purchased on unbox - though I had to buy Borat on DVD. When I tried to either re-buy or re-download this episode, I discovered it listed but not for sale. Why? Can anyone at Amazon answer that question - several other episodes are also unavailable. ???? I cannot even seem to delete the useless episode. Que pasa? I give it 1 star because you can't give something no stars - a rating deserved by lots of stuff.