I’m pretty sure the whole “rental only” versions of discs has at least a little bit to do with the studios wanting to curtail rent/rip/return piracy. Personally, I think the better method is to simply go the 2-disc route with a “feature + commentary” disc and a “special features” disc 2.

Of course, once again, all that the “rental only” disc method does is punish the people who are obtaining content legally and paying a reasonable price in order to do so. The folks who are truly stealing movies using bittorrent are typically downloading the movie only, and no special features, so this stupid “rental version” business does nothing to deter those folks anyway!

I don’t always watch the special features or listen to the director’s commentary, but I like to have the option to do so. And I really do not think I should have to shell out $30 and buy the Blu-ray just to get access to those things. If the studios wanna strip those features off of the rental discs, they should at least offer access to them via BD-Live; maybe make that feature of Blu-ray actually worth something!

On a totally different subject – one additional reason why a balanced connection is good for the subwoofer output is that the distance from the receiver to the subwoofer can often be much longer than the typical distance from a pre/pro to the amps. If some part of your system is going to pick up stray EMI or RFI, it’s bound to be your longest cable. So the balanced cable structure makes a lot of sense when you have to snake the subwoofer connection all the way around the perimeter of your room 😉

I got a little $7 program called Cinch that does the dual-window thing on OS X.

http://irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/

I use it ALL the time and it works great.