This idea was inspired by my squeamish wife, who limits the types of movies we can watch together. I would buy one of these just so I could see more movies. I'm sure there's many others like me.

There are already companies that make censored copies of popular movies like CleanFilms.com and Familyflix.com, but that doesn't benefit the producers if they don't make money from them or the consumers if they want control over different levels of censorship.

The DVD player manufacturers should offer a standard for personal censorship data files that can be read and executed during the playback of DVDs.

The data would contain the line-by-line content type (e.g. Graphic Violence, Nudity, Profanity, Disturbing Situations) with stop and start times. Profanity would have blank or beeped audio during those times. Violence and Nudity would blank the video but not the audio. Disturbing Situations would skip the section altogether.

For example:

Line 132 = 1:12:33 - 1:13:02 Graphic violence
Line 136 = 0:56:02 - 0:56:04 Profanity
etc.

These would be just a couple of the dozens or hundreds of lines in the file. The files could be maintained by users with an online database or the movie producers could hire private companies to create recommended censorship data files.

Older DVDs would require a way to load the data, maybe downloaded and written to a re-writable DVD, or with a dial-up phone data line connection to a server. Dial-up could be automatic when the DVD is loaded and mandatory before playing if the parent sets the control. Newer DVDs could have the producer-recommended censorship built into the DVD.

There could be multiple levels of censorship based on the known standard (e.g. G,PG-13,R,X) with the option of allowing visual or audio bypass on specified content type, such as Nudity. There could be additional control like treating all content types as disturbing situations. There could be intensity ranking within the content types like Violence Level 7, Nudity Level 4, ect., allowing more consumer choice in what they want to be exposed to.

So anyone who wants to make money off of this idea, if it's not being pursued already, this is my gift to you.