For fans who want to hear Moby on their TV sets, but not necessarily in the seemingly endless stream of ads that sample his tunes, now there's somewhere to turn.

The eclectic electronicist is preparing Play the DVD for a mid-July release, and he's looking to his peers' Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound offerings to make sure his first digital video release is the best it can be.

"Whether I'm making a record or putting out a DVD, I want to see what other musicians do as well," he said. "A lot of times, I'll go to concerts and sort of take notes in my mind on what are they doing that I think works and what are they doing that I think is terrible. And the same thing [goes] with DVDs. Before we started, I went out and bought other musicians' DVDs just to sort of understand the format and see what was good about them and what was bad about them, what was done well and what was done poorly."

Play the DVD includes eight live tracks recorded during an appearance on Jools Holland's British TV show and 10 videos of songs from Moby's latest album, 1999's Play. Five of the videos have never been released in the United States: "Find My Baby," "Porcelain UK," "Bodyrock UK (Fire)," "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" and "Natural Blues (Animated)."

A 90-minute "megamix," accompanied by psychedelic visuals, provides an amalgam of the Play remixes used for singles, and an interactive function allows users to remix Moby's songs themselves.

What really gives Play the DVD its character, however, is the 20-minute home movie "Give an Idiot a Camcorder," which finds Moby capturing behind-the-scenes footage while touring the world in support of Play.

"I watched [what] other bands [put on their DVDs] — like the backstage footage and little movies that other bands had made — and, not to be offensive, but most of them are really dull. So my goal with my little movie was to make it as quick and fun and stupid as possible. So it's just entertaining. There's none of this, sort of self-involved, 'how difficult life is on the road' stuff. It's just very light-hearted and silly."