ClearPlay's movie filters arrive on DVD players

The future is now. The RCA ClearPlay DVD player is here. Parents can now watch PG-13 and R-rated films with their children, with all the objectionable content eliminated.

You won't see Halle Berry's breasts.

Enjoy the new-and-improved, no-longer-bisexual Frida Kahlo.

Watch Jennifer Garner's turn as a prostitute in "Catch Me if You Can" — but don't blink, because you will miss it.

As for the character Fat Bastard in "Goldmember," well, he makes the cut, sort of, except you no longer hear anyone utter the words "fat bastard." He's become like Harry Potter's Voldemort, the character who must not be named.

"This was part of the original DVD promise — that people would be able to customize the viewing process," says Bill Aho, the CEO of ClearPlay, the Salt Lake-based company that developed the filtering technology installed on the RCA players. "The most common question asked about DVDs are, 'How do I modify the content?' "

ClearPlay's goal is simple: to turn a movie rated R or PG-13 into strictly PG fare, while preserving as much of the integrity of the narrative as possible.

The filtering technology has been available for a number of years, in a number of forms, from a number of companies — but it's only now being installed directly onto a mass-market DVD player. To create a filter for a specific movie, ClearPlay employees review a film, marking all potentially objectionable content, in 14 categories — everything from sexual content, nudity and crude humor to graphic violence, strong language and "vain references to deity." These "filters" are then installed onto the DVD player. When you play a film for which a filter has been created, the DVD player can skip over the objectionable content.

You can mix and match categories in determining what you want to stay and what you want to be cut (say, keeping the strong language, but deleting the nudity). The RCA player comes with 100 free filters, mostly films from the past three years. You can download additional movie filters on the ClearPlay Web site and then install them onto your DVD player yourself. Prices range from $1.50 for an individual filter to $49 for a year-long subscription that allows you to download as many filters as you want.