About DVD Tracks

What is the point?
The point of DVD Tracks was best articulated by film critic Roger Ebert in his You, Too, Can Be a DVD Movie Critic article in Yahoo! Internet Life during Feburary of 2002.

The short version is this…. DVDs often ship today with several alternate audio tracks. These tracks give insight into what the directors or actors or others think about the movie. These tracks are playing along with the video from the movie, so the commentators can talk about very specific aspects of the film. These tracks, however, have one big problem. All of these tracks were chosen by the DVD makers. In Mr. Ebert’s words, “They are all inside jobs.”

It is very easy to create MP3s these days and to distribute them via the World Wide Web. It’s very easy to download those MP3s and to play them back while you happen to be watching the movie. This allows anyone to “add” commentary for a movie. This is a valuable thing.

DVD Tracks is committed to being a central hub for the distribution and discussion of these “home-brew” alternate tracks.

What kinds of things should I post?
DVD Tracks encourages you to create alternate soundtracks for movies. Pick some movie that you really love, really hate, or about whose subject matter you are an expert. Record your thoughts in synch with the movie. And, post a link to your MP3.

Tracks are welcome in any vein from objective critiques, to biased critiques, to full-blown Mystery Science Theater 3000-style mockery.

Think you can make up an entirely better dialogue and music for the movie than the film-makers did? Prove it. Think the film-makers really hacked the historical accuracy? Tell us. Think the film-makers did an excellent job with many important innovations? Say so. Think the film needs some extra sound-effects to really make it whir? Whiz away.

However, the Berne Convention does not allow anyone but the copyright holder to distribute translations of the work into other languages. So, unless you provably have the expressed consent of the copyright holder of the film, you cannot distribute a dub of the film into another language.

Why do you need my email address?
If you ever forget your password, we need to have some way to verify your identity. Additionally, it will keep most people from creating 40 accounts. As the privacy policy states, we won’t display your email address to anyone except you. We also won’t send you any unsolicited email except in the unlikely event that the privacy policy is about to change.

How do tracks score points?
When you are logged into DVD Tracks and you view a track, you have the option of giving it 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 points. Immediately below the title on the track’s summary page, there are radio buttons labelled You Scored This Track. You can select a score and press the Score button to give points to this track.

How do you make money?
The short answer is that we don’t.

We make a small amount of money by referring users who purchase movies at Amazon.com. But, this does not actually cover the cost of our web-hosting.