[mb-users] DVD Video releases of concerts

[Nikki]

This is a bit late because I've been fighting with my email, but you  
asked me to reply, so here it is:

Whether DVDs are allowed or not seems to be a common question these
days. My personal opinion is that if it has a track list and it has
music, there's no reason why it shouldn't be added.

It makes no sense to me to say CD with a concert is fine, but a DVD
with a concert isn't. I don't think that the presence of video takes
away from the fact that there is audio present. This is
*Music*Brainz, so if that audio is music, why shouldn't we document
it? There is a lot more to releases than just the audio, e.g. data
tracks on CDs, pretty pictures on the discs, not to mention all the
packaging. We don't try to capture all of that data, we focus on
documenting the audio. Likewise, I don't see why we can't document
the audio for DVDs as well.

You can completely ignore the video on a DVD if you wish, turn the
monitor off, use a player which lets you disable the video (e.g.
mplayer -vo null) or just don't look at it. Furthermore, some of the
video streams are merely meaningless filler stuff, e.g. static images
or a slideshow of photos (I've seen these quite a few times for
singles).

I can think of a couple of other arguments people might use, e.g. we
can't add disc IDs and where to split tracks isn't always clear, but
that's also a problem for cassettes, vinyl, etc. This is mostly why I
stick to DVDs which have a track listing. :)

Another argument I seem to recall is that if we allowed DVDs, people
would add things like films. However, I think this is confusing
format with content. While we do have a number of non-music CD
entries, I think this is purely because MusicBrainz can lookup CDs
and tag audio files. DVDs don't generate usable disc IDs, so I think
the former isn't a valid reason for adding something and audio rips
aren't a popular way to enjoy films. Most people prefer to watch the
film as well as listen to it. I could see some grey area for things
like musicals, but I don't think we should disallow all DVDs on that
basis.

People want to add DVDs and people do add DVDs. It certainly doesn't
help that we have "DVD" in the list of formats. DVD to most people
means a standard audio-visual DVD, if it were meant to mean "DVD-A"
then it should have said that. It's too late to simply rename it now
though because people have been using it for standard DVDs.

Nikki