The answer is still unknown, but if you’ve got a big collection of DVDs or Blu-ray discs, you won’t be enjoying them on the Wii U. Speaking to investors, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata confirmed that the new console won’t support movie playback in either format, Kotaku reports. The Wii U will only accept discs in a 25 GB proprietary format.

Nintendo figures that enough people already have DVD or Blu-ray players, so including the capability — and licensing the associated patents — wasn’t worth the extra cost.

This isn’t terribly surprising. The Wii doesn’t play DVDs, and that didn’t stop Nintendo from selling scads of consoles. And besides, the Wii U could still be a multimedia powerhouse without optical discs.

Except, so far, Nintendo hasn’t shown that it wants to be in the movie and TV business. On both the Wii and the Nintendo 3DS, the company’s relationship with streaming video starts and ends with Netflix, at least in the United States. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Sony are engaged in a streaming media arms race. The Xbox 360 has ESPN3 and Last.fm. The Playstation 3 has Vudu, MLB.tv and NHL GameCenter. Both consoles have Netflix, Hulu Plus and their own stores for pay-per-view video.

The strategy seems to be paying off. Microsoft recently said that 40 percent of activity on the Xbox 360 is not game-related, and Sony said the Playstation 3 accounts for 30 percent of all Netflix streaming.

I see game consoles as yet another single-purpose device jeopardized by multi-purpose hardware. So while the Wii U’s lack of Blu-ray and DVD support isn’t a huge problem, Nintendo will still have a lot of catching up to do on the streaming video front if it wants to stay relevant in the next console generation.

Bingo! Or at least that’s the way it looks at the moment. The site went down, due to technical glitches that the company’s Twitter feed appears to blame at least in part on a mention on the Yahoo home page. (Being reviewed–pretty favorably–by David Pogue in his New York Times column probably didn’t help, either.) Then it came back up, but with a note explaining that the best prospective new members could do was to join a waitlist.

Now, some of my favorite Web sites and services have been crushed by unexpected demand upon launch. It’s practically a rite of passage. (Many come back up swiftly, and work just fine from then on–which always leaves me wondering, why couldn’t their proprietors provide sufficient infrastructure in the first place?) So it’s possible that Zediva will bounce back.

But you gotta wonder. The Twitter feed says that the service received a hundred times the views that the Zediva folks anticipated. If their expectations were so wildly off, how are they going to deal with the demand if the service is a hit? (If they get to be just five percent as popular as Netflix, they’ll have a million customers to deal with.) Isn’t the whole concept ludicrously unscalable? It’s a goofy scheme that strikes me as being only a half-notch or so more serious the one in Be Kind Rewind, the movie in which Jack Black and Mos Def accidentally destroy a store’s worth of VHS tapes and try to recreate all the films as home movies.

When I first heard of Zediva, I wondered how long it would take for the MPAA to sue it into extinction. Now I’m wondering if it might implode before the lawyers have a chance to go to work.

The DOJ is not the only government agency worldwide looking into Sony’s practices: other countries are apparently also requesting information as part of a wider investigation into the industry. It is unknown whether any other companies may have received requests for information.

An educated guess would lead to the investigation centering around price-fixing. While it’s not known, Blu-ray prices have remained high even though the technology has now been commercially available for over three years, and its competitor HD DVD has been gone for nearly two-thirds of that time.

Then again, it could have nothing to do with Blu-ray. Fact is we just don’t know much at this point. More on this as we get it…

(Hat tip: IDG)

As Chris says, Hastings didn’t make clear what he thinks will replace DVD, but the likely scenario presumably involves the format suffering at the hands of both digital downloads and Blu-Ray short-term, and virtually all distribution being digital over the long haul. (At least I’m assuming that we’ll all look back at Blu-Ray as a stopgap.) There’s still lots of work to do–relatively few of us have any way to watch content from the Internet on our TVs, for instance–but an awful lot can happen  in very little time.

I suspect that I’ll still pull out DVDs from time to time for years to come–for one thing, I have hundreds of them and no interest in repurchasing or recreating all of them in purely digital form. (Hey, I even watch VHS from time to time.) But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if I buy my last new DVD in 2011. And I look forward to seeing how Netflix works to reinvent itself as the neat idea the company was founded on becomes obsolete. (Its Watch Instantly feature is a fun start.)

Your forecast, please:

Now Kaleidescape has suffered a court defeat to Hollywood, just a day after RealDVD (which is a sort of poor man’s Kaleidescape in software form) did. Two years ago, Kaleidescape won a rare victory relating to DVD-copying in the digital age, but a California state appellate judge has overturned that decision. As I understand it, the Kaleidescape case doesn’t involve questions of fair use but whether Kaleidescape abused the license it obtained from the DVD Copy Control Association for CSS, the encryption standard used to lock up DVDs. But I’d still rather see products like RealDVD and Kaleidescape win in court than lose. The ruling won’t force Kaleidescape to pull products off the market immediately, and could be overturned.

Greg Sandoval’s piece on Kaleidescape and RealDVD at Cnet has one shred of sort-of-good news: Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who ruled in the RealDVD case, said that she wasn’t saying that consumers definitely don’t have the right to back up their DVDs under certain circumstances. But here’s a bit of big-picture optimism: The Betamax case which established fair-use ground rules for copied movies in the first place got all the way to the Supreme Court before Sony (and, indirectly, consumers) scored definitive victory over the studios. Let’s hope that both Kaleidescape and Real have plenty of fight left in them.

I never noticed Blockbuster or Hollywood Video shrinking their tape sections into nothingness to make room for DVD. But even in my home, VHS ain’t what it used to be. I moved in July; so far, I haven’t bothered to set up my VCR at my new house, though it’s in working condition and ready for duty should I need it. Which I probably will, since I have several hundred VHS tapes–including some good stuff that has never been released on DVD. (I keep telling myself I need to dub them all to DVD before they rot away, and I will…but almost everything is still in surprisingly good shape, or was the last time I checked.)

It doesn’t seem like it’s been all that long since I bought my VCR and had to choose between VHS and Beta, and congratulated myself on my wisdom in investing in VHS instead of the increasingly dicey Beta format. But that was…1985, I think.

The end of VHS is a little different than past media-format deaths in that it’s pretty obvious that media is on its way out. DVD is wonderful in many ways, but Hollywood is already trying to get us to buy everything we already bought on VHS and DVD all over again in Blu-Ray. (I’ve resisted the siren call so far.) And given how fast things are moving with delivery of video programming over the Internet, Blu-Ray itself feels like a stopgap. Ten years from now, a Blu-Ray disc will look almost as archaic as a vinyl LP does now–and I’m not so sure that it won’t be more like four or five years. Maybe even less.

In many ways I’ll miss the comforting notion that content I’ve bought resides on platters or cassettes that I have control over…although copy protection has already removed much of that benefit. But I won’t miss it too much. Especially since I have the sneaking suspicion that I’ll have some tapes and discs around the house for as long as it’s possible to find devices that will play them.

RealNetworks is announcing that its RealDVD software is available for download and purchase today. It is, for the moment at least, unique: It’s the first software for DVD copying that goes about it in a way designed to sidestep problems with U.S. copyright law, and it’s also the easiest application I’ve seen for PC-based DVD copying and playback.

I review the application here, and do so reasonably favorably–it’s fast and simple, and you wind up with a library of saved DVDs that’s a snap to browse through. (Limitations: You can’t move copies to portable devices, and options for sharing them among PCs are limited to external drives.) Folks who are already hardcore users of DVD rippers such as Handbrake probably won’t be drawn to RealDVD, but I think it stands a good chance of becoming popular with the larger group of PC users who have never dealt with the complexities–both technical and legal–of using existing DVD copiers.

You can download a thirty-day trial version of RealDVD before you plunk down your $29.99. But how’d you like to get it for free, period? Real has supplied Technologizer with ten license codes, and we’ll give ‘em away to members of the community. Here’s how to get a chance at snagging one:

1) Make sure you’re a registered member of the Technologizer Community. If you already are, great; if not, it just takes a moment to sign up, which you can do here.

2) Make sure you’re signed into the community, then visit my profile page.

3) Use the “Send a message” link on the left-hand side of the page (under my smiling face) to send me a message saying you’d like a chance at a license code. “Please enter me for a RealDVD code” is all I need to know.

That’s it. Ping me by 12pm noon PT on Thursday, October 2nd–later that day, we’ll choose ten winners at random, and alert them by e-mail with the codes by midnight on Friday. And we’ll report back in a post on who won the free copies, just so the world knows we did indeed give them away.

Good luck! And if you try RealDVD, let us know what you think of it.

In one sense, there’s nothing the least bit new about software that can copy DVDs to a PC’s hard drive. Folks have been using applications such as DVDShrink and Handbrake to do the job for years–and  the same people have moved movies to phones, media players, and other devices…as well as onto BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks, where they’re there for the taking by anyone who can figure out how to download them.

But because such applications decrypt DVDs, their legal status is the U.S., to put it politely, murky. Make that very, very murky, , considering that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the circumvention of copy protection. That’s true even if you’re engaging only in the victimless crime of enjoying movies you’ve paid for on a device that doesn’t happen to have a slot for a DVD.

Enter Real Networks’ RealDVD, a Windows program that’s a breakthrough in one significant respect: It’s a DVD-copying program–a ripper, if you like–that doesn’t violate the DMCA. That’s because it doesn’t strip off the copy protection the DVDs came with. Matter of fact, it adds additional copy protection that prevents users from sharing the DVD copies they’ve made, or watching them on anything other than up to five Windows PCs per license; other types of computers and devices aren’t supported. Only a DVD copier that locks down its copies in this fashion could go on the market without risking Hollywood’s wrath.

But RealDVD, which Real says it’ll start selling by the end of this month, is more than a DVD copier that’s hobbled by the fact that it doesn’t flout U.S. law. It copies not just the raw video files from a DVD but the entire DVD experience–bonus materials and all–and recreates them on the PC. And as you copy movies, it identifies them (using GraceNote, the same service that powers the CD-identification powers of iTunes and other music apps), catalogs them using cover art images, and lets you browse them by title, genre, or star. It’s a little like a $30 software version of the $30,000 media server from Kaledescape, a company whose victory in a court case brought by the DVD Copy Control Association last year confirmed that DVD copying can be legal.

I’ve been spending the last few days copying movies and watching them in RealDVD. In many ways it’s an impressive product that makes the best of a difficult situation, although does have some limitations that don’t stem from having to tiptoe around the DMCA. Ultimately, it’s got lots of potential to appeal to a wide range of folks who will never futz with programs like DVDShrink or Handbrake, which are laden with geek-oriented options. (Once it goes on sale, you’ll be able to use it for 30 days for free in trial mode and render your own verdict.)

The best thing about RealDVD is is that it’s incredibly simple to use: You insert a DVD, wait for Gracenote to identify it and tell you about it, and then click to save it. (You can also simply play a DVD, or play it and save it at the same time.)

In my tests with a 1.8-GHz Core 2 Duo desktop PC with 2GB of RAM and a 16X DVD drive, it usually took between ten minutes and half an hour to copy a disc to the hard drive–comparable to DVDShrink’s speed, and a lot faster than Handbrake. (I did encounter a few instances in which RealDVD stalled, worked very slowly, or simply didn’t provide the saving option; ejecting the disc, reinserting it, and trying again usually resolved things.)

One a movie’s been saved to your PC, it behaves for all the world like a DVD that happens to live on a hard disk rather than a shiny optical one. Menus work as you’d expect; trailers and other extras are there; original audio and video quality is preserved, since RealDVD isn’t compressing or otherwise messing with anything. (In my tests, copies took between 4GB and 8GB of space.)

You can play DVDs in a window or in full-screen mode; jumping around is smoother than with an…er, real DVD. And Real says that playback will sap less of a laptop’s battery life than watching a true DVD.

RealDVD lets you browse either DVD box images or a text list of your movies (note that in the first screen below, Gracenote couldn’t supply images for a couple of my DVDs).

The Gracenote identifications went fairly well in my tests, but not perfectly. The service properly recognized major movies and TV shows as well as obscure stuff like the East Side Kids’ Ghosts on the Loose. It was also smart enough to identify the individual discs in a box set, so RealDVD could collate them into one set in its DVD browser. In other instance, though, its work was rough. For instance, it didn’t distinguish between the widescreen and standard versions of The Freshman, each of which comes on one side of the disc. (RealDVD let me copy both of them, but I had to edit the names to tell them apart.)

Gracenote’s data on genres was also odd or thin in my tests: It catalogued Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as action/adventure and had no genre information at all for any of the other kid-related DVDs I saved. RealDVD doesn’t let you edit its category fields; you’re stuck with Gracenote’s categorization or lack thereof and can only check the service again in case it’s updated its info on a particular DVD. That limited the usefulness of the ability to browse by category, at least with the discs I saved. (Speaking of kids, you can turn on parental controls which let you restrict access to movies by their MPAA rating)

What do the DVDs look like on your hard drive? They’re squirreled away in a folder called My DVDs, and each movie consists of a folder full of files itself. It’s tempting to try to move these folders onto a networked drive or copy them to another PC’s hard drive to spread the goodness. Don’t bother. Network drives aren’t supported, and each DVD copy is permanently tied to the disk it was copied to in the first place and won’t work if moved elsewhere. Both measures were taken by Real to avoid ticking off the movie industry so much that RealDVD would become lawsuit bait.

You can, however, opt to save movies to an external USB hard drive rather than your PC’s internal drive. Do that, and you can move the entire drive full of DVD copies to another PC on which a copy of RealDVD resides. The program will autosense the new drive, show the copies you’ve stored there in its DVD browser, and let you play movies straight off of the drive–assuming that you’ve added the PC to your RealDVD license, which costs $20 for every machine (up to a total of five) beyond the first one.

The New York Times is reporting that Real Networks will announce RealDVD tomorrow at the DEMO conference in San Francisco. (Which is where I am–I’ll be in the audience when it does.) Real is presumably betting that it’s figured out a way to make a DVD copying program that won’t be sued into oblivion in a nanosecond. And even if they bet wrong, it’s going to be fascinating to watch it come to market.

RealDVD doesn’t sound like total DVD-copying nirvana: It won’t produce DRM-free copies of DVDs that you can copy at will, download to your iPod, or upload to BitTorrent, according to the Times. Rather, its copies will retain copy protection; you can play them on only up to five PCs, and only if you’ve paid for the $30 software on each of those machines. That’s a significant set of limitations, but it would still allow you to store a library of movies on your hard drive for playback. (I’m not sure offhand whether you’d be able to keep them on a networked hard drive for playback via multiple computers around the house, but I sure hope so–it would be nifty.)

The Times quotes a technology exec at a studio who sounds skeptical about RealDVD, which isn’t surprising; it’s hard to imagine anyone in Hollywood speaking positively about it, at least for the record. But the real question isn’t whether Hollywood is thrilled with the idea of RealDVD–it’s whether it’s legal. If it is, this is great news, and other companies will presumably jump into the market with similar products once Real has tested the legal waters.

I’m looking forward to learning more at DEMO tomorrow, and even more so to trying RealDVD once I can get my hands on it. Keep your fingers crossed: If it is indeed a real way to put DVDs on your PC easily and legally, it’ll be very good news for consumers with DVD collections that they don’t want to be forced to repuchase as digital downloads…