Blockbusters mail rental service was amazing since if you returned the movies to the store instead of mailing them they counted as a free in store rental coupon AND would flag the movie as returned and prep the next set to be sent to you. They were slower than Netflix but if you were willing to go into Blockbuster, it was crazy worth it.

I had Netflix and Blockbuster and a huge rotation of DVDs coming and going.

I didn't have time to actually watch anything I was ripping, lol, but it was fantastic to expand the collection.

More technically, the data on the disk is encrypted with that “password”, so there’s not really a password prompt. It’s more like your DVD player will have this encryption key stored on it somewhere (possibly on a separate chip where it’s hard for somebody to extract it and distribute it on the internet lol), and then it will automatically run the decryption algorithm with this key on the disk contents transparently.

Any Blu-ray player has to know the key in order to play a disc. So they’d have to have some way to update every single player. There would be no feasible way to do that.

Can you imagine having to update your Blu-ray player each time a new movie came out?