The iTunes Store continues to be the only reputable place to buy movies, mainly because they allow downloads (except 4K...but I digress).
In the past, redownloading movies wasn't even permitted. You download it and save it somewhere yourself. You can still do that to avoid any issues in the future, but I suspect the few incidents that have affected the iTunes Store are unlikely to re-occur. Why? For exactly the reason I mentioned at the beginning, originally you couldn't even re-download movies so it stands to reason the initial transition might've had some licensing loopholes.
It's interesting that even storefronts run by the same company don't always have the same reliability. Microsoft fucked over thousands of gamers when they pulled the plug on Games for Windows Live, yet I can still download episodes of Invader Zim I purchased on the Xbox Live Store in 2006.
They have DRM attached and need to be played on a computer that has logged in to your iTunes account and been "blessed". But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that computer offline it will be able to play those videos in eternity.
You can un-bless all your other computers (as you can only have 5 computers blessed at once) but I guess if the other computers are offline they can keep playing old downloads.
4 words that explain why, if I ever wanted to collect movies, they would all be DRM-free torrents.
When the "legal" way to do it is self-evidently a scam perpetuated by corporations and governments working together against our interests, then they only honourable ways are either to watch illegal downloads or not watch movies at all.
Why eschew ripping physical media? You'll likely have a more uniform collection in terms of quality. Also depending where you are in the world, it's either legal or just as legal as torrenting media. In the latter case, it's not really enforced. It's also probably more honourable, if that's something you really care about.
You need a real computer to rip BDs. A netbook or a Raspberry Pi aren't going to cut it because of the CPU requirements. Said Pi will have no trouble running a torrent client though.
> But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that computer offline it will be able to play those videos in eternity.
I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed.
During the early months of the pandemic, we carried a Mac mini around that had a ton of downloaded content, and spent a lot of time in places with no internet service. It needed to "re-bless" itself every so often (I don't remember how often - maybe once a month or twice a month - it wasn't very often).
Our solution was to carry it with us when we were near enough to a tower. Using a phone hotspot with just a single bar of bad service, the process took 10-15 seconds.
So as far as tech/media companies go, Apple is almost certainly the least bad option, by a wide margin. But it's not perfect ;)
> I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed
To be fair, it was a LONG time since stopped buying video from iTunes. Like 5 years at least. I subscribe to a bunch of the streaming services but instead of bothering to figure out exactly where something is streaming I just download it from the Pirate Bay where I know I can find everything right away.
That's still Apple hardware/software. If you can't play it outside of the locked down Apple ecosystem which is checking your license, then you don't own it.
If your movie is from any of the five participating studios you buy the movie once and it works across all of the major video platforms if you use Movies Anywhere
Incorrect, Apple did not build the software for all of the listed devices. Apple licenses the protocols and provides reference implementations through their MFi program.
You couldn't play a downloaded title on a non-Apple Apple TV device or via AirPlay 2 tbf.
In both scenarios the playback support is that the file just gives the credentials for the device with the Apple TV app or Airplay 2 to go and stream it from Apple's servers. No transfer of the video from a local download occurs.
Others have mentioned that the AppleTV app is ubiquitous across every major streaming platform - Roku, Amazon, Samsung Smart TVs, etc.
A little known service in the US is “Movies Anywhere”. Four of the major studios participate in as well as does Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu and other platforms. You link all of your accounts and a movie bought on one, automatically is credited to the other accounts as a purchase.
iTunes is a Movies Anywhere partner and if you connect your Movies Anywhere account you can download iTunes purchased Movies Anywhere films (most but not all studios today) in other Movies Anywhere partnered apps.
I don't think any of the other Movies Anywhere apps support sharing/playing the exact same downloaded file, but cross-app downloads are supported (buy on iTunes and download on Xbox Movies or Vudu or whatever).
Those downloaded movies still have DRM, and can only be played on official Apple devices or apps. Apple can revoke the license whenever they want. No better than what Amazon and others do.
Vudu while it was owned by Wal-Mart was quite reputable for purchasing digital movies and TV for some similar reasons to following iTunes' lead and was at times "the blue collar iTunes Movie Store".
Vudu's current owner, Fandango Media, I have a lot less trust in because they have burnt a few bridges with previous digital movies sites (including one of their same brand; they briefly ran a Fandango branded digital movies app that closed without much notice or refunds, to be rebooted as FandangoNOW months later, in part because they bet on UltraViolet and didn't want to just convert UltraViolet purchases to Movies Anywhere like Vudu and iTunes did during that same time). So far Vudu has still seemed to be doing well under the new ownership, but that distrust in the new owner still sews seeds of doubt.
Speaking of Movies Anywhere, that is still an assurance that I trust when making purchase decisions. Even after UltraViolet died, possibly especially because UltraViolet died (and the way at least iTunes and Vudu handled that transition). Movies Anywhere seems to have won out because it is technologically simpler. Plus the Disney backing seems to work in its favor as Disney has some reason to make sure Movies Anywhere does right by families and doesn't tarnish their brand by association. I'm a little less particular which store I buy from if it supports Movies Anywhere. For movies that still aren't yet Movies Anywhere I'm much more cautious. (This was why I avoided Steam's brief foray into movies, for example. They worked with non-Movies Anywhere studios and it didn't feel all that shocking when the experiment failed and Steam stopped selling movies.)
The biggest deception was convincing the public that knowledge is a thing, so it can be bought, sold and change "owners". Convenient access to movies can be indeed sold, but not the movies themselves.
Perhaps not the movie itself, but the media and its content are things that can be sold.
VHS, DVD, BluRay. If you have the media and a compatible player, you can watch them. You can lend or sell them. That's not very different to a physical book.
Even video-games are a bit like that. It's true that you may lose access to updates the game received after the physical launch but as long as you have the media (BluRays, cartridges, whatever) you can still play them on a compatible console, lend or sell them.
With digital "purchases", you can only do what the platform allows you, for as long as they allow it, for as long as they exist.
I don't much care for this weird equivalency that a motion picture is "knowledge", but regardless should every bit of knowledge be offered and given freely? Given that I know where I was last night and you don't is it within your right to demand it from me? Is it enough you want to have that knowledge that requires you then get it?
I said knowledge can't be owned. I didn't say that everyone is obligated to educate others. It's fine to keep a secret. It only gets murky when the secret becomes public.
What is the threshold for "public"? The movies are still only licensed for viewing by those who paid. Once someone has the knowledge they a free to disseminate it?
qbittorrent + jackett. Click on however many pub trackers you want to search in jackett then set the search plugin on qbit to point to your jackett instance.
Yeah, but that's a real problem for those of us who don't watch a lot of movies. Many people aren't capable of figuring out "where to look" at all anyway. I am, to some degree, but it's just not worth spending that much of my time to hunt them down on the rare occasions I really want to watch something.
Also, I'll just note that we never got the 21st century we were promised, which was this - any movie ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ The fundamental problem is that the people who own movie IP rights are truly evil.
>the people who own movie IP rights are truly evil.
That is wildly overstated. The worst they can do to you is not let you watch their entertaining movie. Possibly even after you've paid for it (the subject of the OP) - and in that case the culprit isn't even the IP owner, it's the distributor! And honestly it sounds like the problem with digital ownership is simple fraud that is a) covered by existing law and b) too expensive for anyone to litigate. Maybe a class action could do it.
Here's the really interesting part - you're railing against artificial scarcity. Someone has a good that they could give away, and they aren't, and you're calling them evil for doing that, but I ask you, in all honesty, how else do you make money from movies? If you can't make money from it, how will you convince investors to fund your next movie? (Now substitute "album book software" for movie and ask the same question.)
That's not to say that IP owners can't be "evil". George Lucas believed it was his right to keep changing Star Wars over time, and it's impossible to find a legit copy of Star Wars that is the original theatrical release. That's some 1984-level memory hole bullshit and although the stakes are low, it's evil. Disney is arguably quite evil for a variety of reasons, e.g. it's unholy influence over Congress, it's unhealthy consolidation of huge chunks of the American movie market. But neither of them are evil for using artificial scarcity to profit from their work, because that's the only way to profit from data goods.
(Professional open source tries to square the circle by giving away the data goods but charging for (actually scarce) knowledge. It's a good model but cannot apply to entertainment goods, since viewers don't need scarce knowledge to enjoy a movie.)
The stakes are not low. Denying access to, or altering, content in this way is equivalent to vandalising the cultural commons (and yes, even if it's not in the public domain - it's still cultural commons). People should be more upset about this.
On the scale of evil things in the world, modifying ~10 minutes of a popular fantasy movie does not rank highly. The implication is scary, but the act itself is profoundly unimportant.
Is it relatively as important as the looming threat of climate change? No.
Is it, in absolute terms, still a very important concern worth addressing at some point? Sure.
We should start addressing it now. We can work on more than one problem as a species, and moreover, we should. The big problems never stop coming, so focusing 100% of our energies on that means that the smaller problems won’t get solved.
It is painful to even just skim this thread, seeing basically every comment brimming with frustration from being stuck in a paradigm that's straightforward to leave behind. So much wasted human potential.
It's a solved problem - torrent your damn entertainment. Movies are just basic files sitting in a directory. Files that can be rewatched whenever you'd like. If you are traveling, copy to your laptop. If you move and haven't quite set up your entertainment center or Internet connection, watch it on a computer. If your friend is interested in something, copy it to their USB drive. No fucking nonsense of some third party capriciously disrupting your life precisely when you're trying to relax.
Any business trying to sell me some productized solution needs to beat torrenting for ease of use. So far none of them have even attempted, because they all end up warping the user experience to appease Hollywood's delusion of control. Just say no.
Then the TV show you love gets cancelled because everyone is pirating it.
I guess it's the fault of the studios for pushing us towards piracy, but it's a shame.
One under-appreciated limitation on digital movies is geographic restrictions. You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due to licensing.
Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes movies. IMO, our competition law should require vendors to allow re-sale of digital goods. Big benefit for consumers.
> Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it.
I get your point but I don't see how this could actually work. As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes? And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? It's not like it would come with a box that would look used/damaged, or a DVD with scratches on it.
> As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes?
Because it is the same thing, but cheaper.
> And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?
Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy it from ITunes.
Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you recoup, say, 90% of what you paid) would be needed to make people go through hassle of not just buying it "new."
True, and if the market economy was working as it should. Then if enough people were selling old digital music at lower prices, Itunes would have to lower their prices. Essentially what their doing is anti-competitive.
You could even imagine an automated system where you buy a song for some two cents and then sell it back after you're done listening to it for a one cent. You could have users make their collections available on a market place and pay them some fraction of the profits you make.
The ability to upgrade was only available for songs purchaseable as DRM-free on iTunes. I still have tracks in my library with the DRM because the distributor went out of business, making it impossible to upgrade.
On Linux nowadays, but last time I was on macOS with iTunes I has an album of Australian folk rock that still had DRM, were still an old bitrate, and not upgradeable to "Plus" (yes, the thing from 2007) or DRM-free.
I think most were but also as I mentioned elsewhere on this page, Japan and possibly other countries didn’t go DRM-free for some time so possibly they had iTunes Plus but with DRM.
I'd be curious to see if a system like that exists already for some kind of digital asset: secondary sales for something that is not limited in quantity, and can still be bought from the source at a higher price.
steam does exactly this. you can sell on steam and pay steam their cut, or sell steam keys elsewhere for the same or more money without steam taking a cut.
The only problem with this is that with physical media, there's an intrinsic amount of "friction" that prevents gaming the system. It's not convenient to, for example, have five people buy and share one set of DVDs. The hassle of moving the disc around (which gets dramatically worse with distance) incentivizes people to buy their own copy. But digital buying and selling would make it rather easy for one person to "sell" their movie to a friend for next-to-nothing and then "buy" it back when they want to use it. And we can be a thousand miles away with no problem.
There are ways to correct this, such as imposing reasonable floors on the sale price, or not permitting the sale of a title for something like 30 days after a transaction.
I'm just saying that these things would need to be factored into any proper solution, ideally via legislation.
If you're talking about loaning a physical copy of a movie to a friend, sure. We have to make arrangements to get the "thing" from one location to another.
Surely you can understand that freely "loaning" digital copies - with none of the friction involved in physical media transport - would de-incentivize purchasing by others.
If you want that, fine. But that will jack up the price of movies, since a lot fewer of them will be sold.
With streamed digital copies, one can limit simultaneous playback. Simply "loaning" it in a service where you select who do you loan it to will add friction, and considering how any little friction (instead of torrenting or getting BR disks) is keeping people on streaming services anyway, it's unlikely it would move the needle too much.
> Simply "loaning" it in a service where you select who do you loan it to will add friction
Interesting observation! Digital-only copies traded in a form not comprising the embodiment in a physical "vessel" allow for a theoretically efficient handshake-and-exchange process, but in practice, there's lots of friction involved.
Grievance: "Hey, you can't do that! It's too easy!"
Response: "Easy? Have you ever used an app with a 10-foot UI that's controlled by a TV remote?"
We already have exactly this system for library e-book lending. There is a queue of people on the waitlist for a book and once loan period for the current reader is expires it is automatically loaned (no scare quotes because it is in every way a loan) to the next person in the queue.
I don’t see why the same couldn’t be done for other forms of media. Movies, albums, maybe even software licenses.
This system will likely result in a fairly minor decline in VOD revenue due to fewer individuals purchasing their own digital copy because they are once again able to loan works to others and take advantage of the same sharing of works that was taken for granted with physical media. If someone borrows a friends license to a movie to watch it once instead of being forced by the studios to buy or rent their own copy then there will be some lost revenue but I think that revenue only existed in the first place because of the walled garden scheme of owning nothing that exists right now. I also think if VOD licenses actually had value and guaranteed longevity they would be more appealing to consumers.
I don't disagree with any of this. The mechanisms that ensure that only one person at a time can consume the content in question provide appropriate friction to mirror most of the limitations of physical media.
I'm not a fan of the walled gardens of streaming and the you-own-nothing credo that goes with it. I'm just saying that we need to be fair to all sides with the solution.
Even with non-streaming media, I invite you to share a 5GB movie with a friend of yours without any "friction". The best you can probably do is upload to your personal "cloud" (20 minutes? what's your uplink speed?) and share a link for them to download (what's their download speed) and then move it to whatever device they want to watch it on.
Sharing credentials on streaming services has happened exactly because it is the most seamless way to do it.
The friction you are overlooking would be, e.g., the platform to sell the media and the likely cost to do so. Not only that, but you are also not aware of the fraudulent price that is charged for the media now precisely because the market is a monopolistic fraud. If movies were priced at what they are really worth, they would be some … and easily significantly … lower lower price, e.g., $.50 rent and $2 to buy.
If you want to evaluate how much the movies/content is really worth, just take the price you pay for a streaming service and divide it by the content you consume.
For example; $5 month, divided by 80 hours of viewing (which seems low for most) and you come to $0.06 per hour, or about $0.12 per movie. Using this conservative estimate, are you going to bother selling a digital movie for less than $0.12? No. But that is precisely why the industry has monopolized the market and added DRM, because they want to keep their fraudulent scheme going to deprive people of their earnings.
But what it’s really about is, as instituting a new form of slavery where you are given everything for “free” just like like slave of all other eras, but you are deprived of far more at a far greater intangible cost for it.
>as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?
A seller would do this to undercut iTunes, making a sale much more likely.
>As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes
Because the seller would likely price it lower than iTunes.
The real question is: how does this affect the digital goods market overall? Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable? Does it make movie production unprofitable?
This I think is one of the places where smaller technical differences make things legitimately different. I'm not coming from the side of "it shouldn't be allowed" or "it must absolutely be allowed like physical goods".
Second hand items are often
* Lower quality, as they've been used
* Lack consumer protections
The first just doesn't apply to digital goods and the second is much more minor (not expecting technical faults to become apparent after a while owning a digital item).
Selling physical goods also has a reasonable time commitment to it, you have to physically move things - there's friction. Digital goods could be sold between regular people near instantaneously. Buying a DVD and selling it after watching is do-able but still some work. Buying a film second hand the moment I press play and selling it on a market straight away after I stop watching seems trivial. I know this is ~rental, but theoretically users only need to buy in total enough copies for the concurrent number of watchers. A big enough market and this could impact how things are released, a "watch anytime" vs a "you really need to be up to date (e.g. sports)" would make a vast difference in total required copies floating around.
The resale value impacts the price you can sell at too. If a customer knows they can easily sell an item for 80% of what they bought it for, they're likely to be willing to pay more for it. However the customer also takes on more risk.
It feels like such a small change, but I can see it making a very large difference.
I'd say this goes both ways. It's vastly easier and frictionless to sell content. It could and should also be easy to re-sell this content - it's only fair that both seller and buyer benefit from the properties of digital content.
It probably does, I think mostly in the sense digital media is relatively new and misunderstood -- even today -- and publishers thought they could get away with an iron grip they simply could not have with physical stuff. So it's probably not that they lose profitability, but more that the extraordinary profit margins of digital get capped back to normality.
Disregarding piracy [1], if I can sell a digital item and lose access in the process (so that I'm not making duplicates out of thin air), then what's the harm? That it's easier and more efficient to do used sales this way? Well, aren't free market proponents all about efficiency? Or is it just when it doesn't affect their profits?
[1] If we don't disregard piracy, then all bets are off and whatever the publisher wants becomes irrelevant.
> if I can sell a digital item and lose access in the process
Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?
On the one hand, the fact that almost all of the music market and parts of the e-book market for example operate without DRM shows that in those cases the publishers/labels have somewhat resigned themselves to trusting the users to remain relatively honest in that regard, but I suspect that a platform explicitly designed for reselling digital content would still draw some additional scrutiny of the unwanted kind.
Somewhat ironically, DRM would solve that particular problem – at the price of introducing additional restrictions during day-to-day usage that I wouldn't be happy about, though, either.
E.g. looking at my personal music library, it would likely restrict the choice of software players and good luck implementing that kind of personalised DRM with hardware media players which might not even have any kind of internet connection. I've also invasively (albeit losslessly reversible) applied replay gain adjustment to my whole media library because some media players and e.g. my car radio don't support the tagging-based adjustment, and in some rare cases I even had to edit some files [1], neither of which would be possible with DRM-protected files.
And of course it would introduce a continuing dependence on the existence of whoever is providing the DRM in order to access those media files you've supposedly "bought".
[1] The version of 3:47 EST on iTunes turned out to be missing the mouse squeak at the end – because of no DRM, I was able to find a complete, but otherwise slightly worse-sounding version (more surface hiss) on Youtube, lift the squeak off of it, de-noise it, and tack it onto my purchased version without having to lossily transcode that the main bulk of that song again.
> Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?
The platform and DRM. The single one use of DRM that would make sense, and it's disregarded.
> it would likely restrict the choice of software players
I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand. For music, we've thankfully moved past DRM. For movies, right now you cannot play a movie you bought in one platform in another platform; that's already the status quo, so this would introduce no additional restrictions.
If you tweak and change your music files, that's a derived work, not the original work. You cannot edit up a physical novel and resell it, either. Regardless, music files have no DRM and they are not the topic of discussion.
> I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand.
Sorry, my fault, but I was looking at things from a more general perspective, as my impression is that there's not much of a second-hand market for non-DRM'd digital media, either.
Plus I was bringing up music in order to make a point that I wouldn't want to give up the lack of DRM just so I could more easily disprove any suspicion of copyright violation if I was to sell my music collection.
You're right though that given the situation we're currently in specifically with regards to movies and TV shows, DRM with transferrable licenses would still be better than the current situation we're in.
It’s rather simple, because you want to sell it. If you want to hold out for selling it at market price while the buyer will prefer buying it directly from the source, then so be it, or if you want to sell it immediately, you price it at bargain prices or even free if you don’t care, i.e. value the item anymore. What we are witnessing here is a total destruction of markets and commerce between free humans.
What you and many are are also missing, including the author, is that the whole system is a fraud because the prices we asked to pay (I refuse) are fraudulent themselves because of it. You are “buying” a movie at a price, precisely because the whole system is rigged in a fraudulent manner where you are not able to actually own it and you are not able to sell it, and you can’t rent it or even lend it; therefore it is not actually a market price, it is a monopoly price based on cartel control and total cornering of the market. It’s essentially no different than the fraudulent price of diamonds or any of the frauds that have been prosecuted where people corner and manipulate the market of, e.g., onions, famously.
Some may have heard the phrase “you will own nothing and be happy” expressed by your global rulers. This topic is precisely manifestation of that and people don’t seem to realize it. You own nothing related to media that you think you own and you think you are happy for it, without yet realizing what a fraud and trap it is, even as the encirclement of slavery progresses all around us.
Especially in America there are many people who, if you were to look at closely, literally own not a single thing they think they have; and in many cases own less than they are even worth. Every single thing can be yanked out from under people like that on a whim … legally. A recent famous example of that is the Tesla that was disabled because Tesla didn’t like something.
Slaves of the past were also “happy and didn’t own anything” since their healthcare was “free” and their groceries were “free” and their housing was “free”, etc.; all provided for “free” by government of and by the feudal lord or plantation owners.
In case people have forgotten the most relevant case of what the author writes about; remember when Amazon simply deleted a book from users’ kindles without even asking, let alone receiving consent? This was about 4 years ago now. That book that Amazon just disappeared off people’s devices with no evidence of their actions other than some coincidental proof of purchase people had retained … 1984.
Unfortunately geolocking isn't new or unique to the pure bits movie format. DVDs were regionally locked as well and even analog media like VHS tapes used color encoding formats that were specific in different regions (NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM).
That said, the situation is quite a bit worse now as the modern DRM is harder to circumvent and geolocking more granular than ever before. But the intent to lock us down was always there from the movie industry, just not the capability until recently.
To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
DVD has an incredibly weak 40-bit encryption scheme due to US regulations on exporting cryptography when it was developed. As a result, it was broken very quickly after launch. It has no real key revocation system (just stop including keys for certain defeated devices in new releases), and nowadays a computer can brute-force every possible decryption key within seconds, rendering revoking stolen drive keys completely pointless. As the region lock is enforced by software only, an unofficial player like VLC does not need to pay the region lock any heed.
Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications... Let's just say Blu-ray is stuck in an odd place where the underlying technology isn't really that defeated, even though hackers have made keeping up with their stolen device keys from hacked players very impractical for the Blu-ray Disc Association. (Revoking a drive key requires a 90-day heads up for manufacturers to roll out new keys for the effected model, which means that if hackers manage to steal 4 device keys per year... from over a decade and a half of different players, many not receiving updates anymore...)
> Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications...
It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer.
Given the current state of things, I wouldn’t count Blurays as media you actually physically own.
You’re permitted to watch them, for now, but there’s no guarantee that will remain true 20+ years in the future.
The same could be said though of DVD. Remember that DVD is completely proprietary - we've just done a fantastic job reverse-engineering it. Blu-ray, ironically, is still proprietary, but the specification on how the DRM is implemented is actually public information and you can just download that online. You won't get the required encryption key for your new device without a contract though for it to work, but if you want to read the details, that's fine.
Ultimately, if all the manufacturers decide to stop sale, there's nothing you can do about that. I'm not too worried about Blu-ray yet, as it is still in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and I don't think gamers will be excited about losing physical media as an option (considering PS5 with Disc has outsold the Disc-free version, like, 4-1).
Which is a good thing, if you think about it. It means that the vast majority of people who have no desire to play Blu-ray movies on their PC don't have to foot the bill for licensing.
You purchased a license to view the media content. I don't agree with this philosophy, I see it as a variant of "right to repair" that we should call "right to own", but that's the way it is for now.
> It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray
format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the
interest of the buyer.
It doesn't seem like that. It is like that.
Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and
tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a
profit margin. We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to
make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with
e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value
continues because we've normalised it.
> We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value continues because we've normalised it.
This is a bad follow-on example because artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable. Making an actually worse model in the processor case has far more fixed costs than re-using the existing pipeline. The business wouldn’t be viable selling all of the processors at lower nor would it be as strong leaving out the lower income segment.
The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all and the 8-core version costs 200% more due to the volume lost.
Finally, this ignores that processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch. So if they had proceeded to treat it as an 8-core it would have had thermal issues and an 80% reduced life.
> artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable
Sometimes wage theft is what it takes to make a business viable, so I don't really buy this as an argument.
> processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch
This is a better argument
> The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all
You probably do, just maybe their performance doesn't double every year. I would say that's probably an interesting tradeoff to make, depending on how catastrophic one thinks the state of the world is today.
If binning of CPUs were disallowed, it would result in even more e-waste because any imperfect chips would have to be tossed out instead of sold with fewer cores enabled. Bad example.
> We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores.
Not "deliberately". We build 8-core CPUs, discover four of them are a bit sub-spec, and blow e-fuses to disable those and sell it as 4-core. It's possible that those four disabled cores would be just fine, but I'm not selling you a chip that gets its sums wrong sometimes.
I guess people complained about how chip manufacturers sold CPUs rated at 25MHz that could be overclocked to 33MHz, but they too were not guaranteed to meet spec even if they worked.
Is it really the case that dies/packages are tested and batched
individually?
I mean, you make a good point on reliability/quality, but there are
surely cases where to create a product differential perfectly good (and
known to be good) devices are crippled.
That seems ever less ethically defensible as we move into scarcity.
Depends on the value. If you test half a dozen off a die and they're all sub-spec, they're all binned the same even if some are okay.
This is why overclocking used to work - if even a small proportion of the chips tested were good to 25MHz, that was a 25MHz batch, guaranteed good to 25MHz. If you got a "lucky penny" that'd go to 33MHz as per the design spec, then good for you! But it wouldn't be guaranteed to do that.
>Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin.
It's almost as if there's a consistent economic process that leads companies to do this kind of thing again and again. We could call it "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall".
Consistency may be running out. It may be time to turn this elegant
observation (not immutable law) into an anti-pattern. As an optimist I
prefer "tendency of systems toward failure of innovation" (AKA sloth
of the entrenched incumbents). This is the last crisis. Because it's
not a crisis of capital, it's a crisis of the very substrate (the
planet) which allows for the possibility of capital. Schumpeter's
creative destruction is now literally environmental destruction. A new
broom is required. Let's hope it's not the communists again. A few
simple bits of regulation could go a long way to correct things.
It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer.
Which is why some of us were rooting for the somewhat-more-consumer-friendly HD-DVD. In retrospect, given the choice, there was no way in hell the industry was going with a "more consumer-friendly" anything.
If the bar for “owning” something is that it is guaranteed to function unchanged 20+ years from now without exception, then I don’t own very much stuff.
I had friends running timing attacks against the Xbox 360 encryption key around that time, they never publicly disclosed their work but I saw them playing games on a hacked firmware around mid 2000s. No reason to think this wouldn't be the same for the CSS encryption key.
And if you ordered a disc from abroad, you could completely legally import a disc player from, say, the UK and play your region-locked Blu-ray Discs and DVDs that way (and still can, eBay.co.uk works fine). It's inconvenient but it does work, and is 100% legal and hack-free.
Except if your player wasn't conpatible with your TV of course.
At the time DVD started prolifering more and more player and TVs had full support for NTSC, PAL and SECAM, but you could still be stuck with some hardware only supporting standard and your DVDs would be black and white or scrambled on the display side.
The impact might differ a lot depending on your region and where your interests are.
Living in the SECAM region and wanting to watch US/british stuff makes it a lot more prominent issue that if you're in the PAL or NTSC area for instance.
Support for multiple analog signal formats did not become common on TVs until people started moving away from CRTs and towards flat panel LCDs and plasmas. This transition lasted a pretty long time, as both LCD and plasma presented numerous drawbacks compared to CRTs (LCDs arguably still do), and CRTs were still very cost-effective even well into the '00s.
Adding support for signals used in other regions to an analog CRT display meant adding more circuitry, so this feature was largely relegated to very high end sets and professional video monitors.
With digital flat panels, those analog signals were now being captured with an analog-to-digital converter. How to translate the sequence of numbers representing a formerly analog signal into something usable by the panel could now be defined in software, or even very compact digital hardware. This makes it more cost-effective to just produce one version of the decoder that works in all regions.
I havea few DVDs I bought in my previous country... I remember first time I tried to play them in a player from the new country, it asked me if I wanted to "move" it to the new region... I think there were 2 "moves" allowed. So, anyway, I was able to play it, no worries.
> Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
DVD region locking didn't need to be hacked away; it operates purely on the honor system. There are 8 regions, and a DVD contains a single byte specifying which regions it should be allowed to be played in. If the bit for your region is clear, you can play the DVD.
Or, of course, you can just ignore that byte, and play the DVD.
Overall I think geo-locking was bad, but I wouldn't go this far:
> Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers.
Depends a little on the consumers, really. Region-locking enabled them to sell cheaper copies in lower-wealth areas, the same way that movie ticket prices were lower. Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more or gotten movies later.
> Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more or gotten movies later.
You are missing the most likely option: they would have "pirated" those movies. So again, the geo-locking is not realy for the good of the consumer but to ensure every last bit of profit can be extracted.
Meanwhile, the main thing selling things cheaper to designated poor reason does is keep those regions from demanding fair payment for their work thus making them no longer poor regions that can be exploited.
People complained, but I can't imagine the user experience of playing an NTSC DVD on a PAL player and TV would have been very good, or vice-versa. There isn't a clean way to convert between 50 and 59.94 fields per second. You would have ended up with either jittery playback or incorrect playback speed. The field sizes are also mismatched, which would have required some pretty gross scaling given late-'90s DVD player technology.
Region-locking on Blu-Ray is 100% unnecessary. Fortunately, it has become increasingly common for discs to ship with no region restrictions.
Of course all of this is moot when you're just slapping that disc in an optical drive and ripping it to a NAS, instead of using an "official" player.
Even for DVDs, the region locking also applied to computer drives (which typically only had a limited number of region changes) where NTSC vs. PAL were not a concern.
Also, a 1.2x playback speed for the video is not even that noticeable - certainly a much better experience than no video. I intentially watch a lot of video contents sped up like that, even movies sometimes. Audio needs processing though to not pitch shift.
Anyone interested in the history of DVD DRM / region locking may be interested in the "illegal number": a hex code which defeated DVD AACS encryption, prompting an attempt by the industry to surpress it across the internet, leading to a streisand effect and the end of effective DVD DRM.
That was a leaked Blu-ray Processing Key that was quickly revoked - but the industry was livid that it was allowed to propagate before they could revoke it (which takes 90 days). This means, ultimately, that if you have a player that hasn't had a Blu-ray Disc made since 2008 inserted into it, and are trying to decrypt a disc made before ~2008, then maybe with the right tools you could. It's a shallow victory meaningless nowadays.
[Even then, a Processing Key isn't nearly as interesting as a Device Key, plenty of which have been leaked since without much attention. Blu-ray has so many keys...]
Stripping Blu-Ray encryption works just fine with MakeMKV (and other tools). Even UHD disks if you have a LibreDrive-compatible reader. Sure, it requires someone to decrypt the individual disks keys and distribute those but in practice it just works for anything that is not a brand new release.
It's easy nowadays to get a DVD/Bluray player that is multi-region, if only because of an aftermarket mod. E.g. I have a Samsung one that happily plays both media from any region.
DVDs were region locked but not to the same degree. Digital content is on a country by country level. An American can easily buy and use a Canadian DVD while on vacation and then use it back home. The same is not true of digital content.
In the UK it was quite common to be able to purchase DVD players that were region free in most of the large electronic stores. The few that were region locked required something like the Konami code to unlock all the region's.
No. Not in the US either, at least. Even if there was a part of the world where it was a big deal, I imagine if you were so big a cinephile for it to matter, you would know how to deal with it.
> geolocking isn't new or unique to the pure bits movie format
when governments ban imports / exports, its a matter of public scrutiny. So is protectionism.
But apparently we allow a private cartel to do the same thing to an enrire industry with no pushback.
This affects smart IoT devices, TVs, cars, etc. My xiaomi light does not pair with the app because its was meant for chinese market, and the guy that sold it to me claims its not hia problem either.
The only way out of this mess is a law to properly define digital ownership.
If you want a weired half renting half ownership, that should have to be explicit contract with a signature and maybe lawyers involved, so you know what you are signing up for.
This is out of context and has nothing to do with what they said. The comment is about how companies were already region locking content using technical means on DVDs, not anything to do with government involvement.
Geolocking kind of made sense back when we had incompatible standards like NTSC and PAL. It makes zero sense (except as rent-seeking behavior by rights holders) for Blu-ray and beyond.
NTSC, PAL and SECAM wasn't a case of intentional geolocking, those were simply different signal standards used in different parts of the world. NTSC had different frequency from PAL/SECAM because the signal was synchronized to the power grid; SECAM was different from PAL because the French being French had to make it their own way (and then communist-affiliated countries adopted it).
>even analog media like VHS tapes used color encoding formats that were specific in different regions (NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM).
I think you're really stretching this one. These were dictated be the equipment of the regions. This was just as much of a pain in the ass to the studios as anyone else. If theStudios wanted to sell VHS in these markets, they HAD to make them in the format that would work in that region.
DVD/Blu-ray region was definitely something added on top of format limitations as DVDs were still PAL/NTSC, but by the time Blu-ray and HD arrived, those format limitations were less of an issue. It was all about the region locking at that point.
To be fair, NTSC/PAL/SECAM were political decisions made by governments at the start of the television era, well before modern copyright maximalism had got its boots on.
They were not political decisions made by governments. They were technical standards developed by standards bodies primarily made up of engineers. Then government institutions like the FCC adopted them for their countries.
That is feature of DRM and has nothing to do with digital movies. If you bought DRM locked product that you are not really an owner. You can play video file anywhere in the world and any time.
Second issue is if you bought it trough a service and keept it there, then you definitely not the owner...
Ok, "digital movies as most consumers know them". People aren't buying DRM-free digital movies. (Technically, DVDs and Blu-rays are digital as well, but we don't call them that)
Doesn't matter if you are talking about downsides. Digital movie has no downsides, DRM on other hands has as we all know. Only valid complaint here is DRM and it always was. We were warned but nobody listened.
>> You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due to licensing.
Maybe this is true from the perspective of the license but it's not something Apple enforces through tech. For example, I have a two iTunes accounts for two countries. I can purchase content through both and use that content anywhere without restriction. They make it a big pain because you can't switch your account to a different geo after it's created but with multiple accounts your content isn't actually restricted.
The original point was that you might loose access to purchased movies because the licensing doesn't allow you so watch it from a different locality.
This is currently untrue for Apple/itunes and that's the only point they made.
There are currently no hoops for anyone to jump through unless you want to sidestep the law or licensing agreements, which is another discussion entirely.
Potential buyers still have to consider the original point however, as even if Apple doesn't enforce it currently, there is no assurance that it won't in the future. And there is no guarantee that it's gonna be the same if theyre buying on another platform.
Didn't Google and Amazon have competing platforms for example?
Maybe iTunes wasn't a good example but it has happened to me with other services. I live in the Netherlands where I bought a subscription for the Formula 1 TV service. Last year I was in the UK visiting family and was unable to watch races there, despite havng already paid for them, as the geo restrictions were different.
>> Last year I was in the UK visiting family and was unable to watch races there, despite havng already paid for them, as the geo restrictions were different.
Yep, thank sucks. You can thank brexit for that. AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU (so if you were in Germany it would have worked). This meant that on holiday (coming from UK to Spain) a few years back I was able to watch F1 live on my phone via the NowTV/Sky app. This year - geo restricted.
> AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU
Streaming services are a bit of a special case: they can have different access in different places, but the location that counts is the users home location. So e.g. a national sports league can license exclusive rights to different streaming services in different countries, and in your home country there is only one choice, but if you sign up with them and then travel, you still can access it, even though the "exclusive" contract for that country is with someone else.
I think they're referring to the official F1TV app, which is region restricted in UK because of an exclusivity agreement between SkyTV and Formula One Group.
F1TV also added DRM this season, so open source clients for it no longer work. You're allowed to view up to 6 simultaneous cameras with your subscription (There's the main feed, the map view, the data view, and 20 onboard cameras). But there's no easy way to do this now aside from having 6 chrome windows with all their chonky borders taking up space, or using 6 different devices.
RaceControl [0] is an amazing open source client that offered split screen and synchronization of the videos (F1's own app has the onboard cameras about 20s ahead of the main feed, which means you either had to manually delay them all yourself or you get spoilers). Now it only works for archivee races.
Which is ridiculous because someone with an HDMI splitter can still strip the DRM and stream it illegally.
I'm probably going to end my subscription after this season and switch to watching pirated streams, because I'm being punished for having the gall to be a paid subscriber.
I am on the same boat but found it more and more a PITA to manage as Apple started to push for 2FA (that damn prompt every fucking login to "upgrade" your account). Switching account is now way more burdensome, and it's also a pain to get the password prompts on updates as apps are still bound to your logged out account.
I find the password prompts an improvement over earlier versions of iOS, where there was no way to get updates to those apps without logging out of the app store entirely and logging in with the other region's account.
Obviously it would be better if we could be properly logged in into multiple accounts at the same time (The play store on android does support switching easily), but at least I can now (I think since iOS 15) get app updates while staying logged in in my main account.
in 2010 I bought an ipod touch at the px in Afghanistan and Apple wouldn't even let me create an account; without an account most of the features were not accessible.
Final space was also interesting. Another show that got the chopping block for tax purposes. They were removed from AMazon, even if you purchased the seasons!
Came here to say this. I thought "Now that it's not streaming, I've at least got a copy on Amazon Prime!" Nope. Not anymore. And definitely can't get Season 3 any longer. Complete bullshit.
That would be one way of handling the technical how, but it isn't technical problems that are stopping companies from doing this. Places like Steam already have digital marketplaces yet games aren't resalable.
Steam has a list of licences I own for the games I have on Steam. They could easily add 2nd hand sales to the Steam store and just transfer that license to another user. No need for a Blockchain when Steam have a perfectly working database.
The issue with resale of digital content is that there is no discernible difference between new and used.
Why would anyone ever pay full price for a "new" game if there were "second hand" copies that were completely identical to a new version available for less?
I don't care about EA or Activision losing out on that 10th private jet, but second hand sales would absolutely hurt small creators doing great work.
One way to be fair to stores is to not require them to host the marketplace for buying and selling the used copies. People looking for "used" copies of movies and games would have to leave the official store and use third-party web sites to buy and sell. This creates a layer of inconvenience which would level the playing field somewhat.
Another way to improve fairness to stores could be to allow them to charge a "transfer fee" of perhaps 5-10% of original MSRP for transferring any used content.
> You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due to licensing.
In the EU we have an interesting law regarding that, if you subscribe to Netflix in Germany and then travel to another EU country you'll still get the same catalog as in your home country.
If you have a US account and travel to the EU you'll get access to the catalog of the country you are in.
> Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it.
Which, as I've recently noticed, in turn has the interesting (and from the consumer point of view somewhat unfortunate) side effect that if a particular online release is pulled from distribution, it becomes completely unavailable (at least through legal channels) from one moment to the next.
Whereas with physical media first of all being pulled from distribution doesn't automatically mean that all existing stock in all stores worldwide is being recalled (it can happen, but the process is not as intrinsically linked as it is with digital distribution), and secondly in any case there's always the second hand market to completely legally fall back to, so the onset of unavailability is a more gradual process, especially for more popular media where there's a sizeable second hand market offering available.
With digital media on the other hand you more or less immediately have to fall back to under-the-table sources if that happens…
Would it kill these platforms to, at the very minimum, give you credits for another movie in the case where the movie you "bought" becomes unavailable?
That being said, I've never chosen the "buy" option on a digital streaming movie.
That's a reasonable solution because it doesn't create a liability on the provider to refund your purchase in whole.
I wonder how it works on the backend. When you "buy" a digital movie, does the publisher get a royalty? Then for the credit the provider could just eat that extra cost since it likely to be very rare. It still kind of sucks that the publisher can reap the royalty payments for all the "sales" and then turn around and pull the license.
> Would it kill these platforms to, at the very minimum, give you credits for another movie in the case where the movie you "bought" becomes unavailable?
In practice this usually happens, but I'm not surprised nobody commits to it in writing.
I know in the two instances of video services I can think of shutting down in the UK, Sainsburys gave customers Ultraviolet/Google Play codes and refunds, and the BBC Store gave Amazon credit rounding up to the nearest £10, so I actually got more than I'd spent back.
There's probably wording in the agreement (linked next to the checkbox we automatically tick before clicking the button) that says you're buying a license to watch the movie as long as the movie is available on the platform.
There are other definitions of buy a movie, e.g. buy the IP so you're allowed to make sequels.
The point of such a lawsuit would be to establish that a reasonable person thought they were “buying” it in the same way as a DVD, and the idea that it was time limited or could be unilaterally revoked was deceptively hidden.
That won't fix the core problem though - the platforms will just use another word for it and you still won't be able to take your content with you on a vacation or give it to your friends and family.
It's a massive degradation of consumer rights you had guaranteed with physical media.
'License' and 'EULA' basically do what you propose in the software world. They were a ploy to get more rights form 'buyers' than copyright allowed.
It works so well that a lot of people think companies can't sell software without giving the right to unlimited copies, even if a book or dvd are trivial counterexamples.
Exactly this. Those of a certain age will remember the days when all media was physical media. People could purchase new, used or trade for a copy of this media. People had some amount of freedom regarding how they handle and/or distribute this media. It could be resold. A corporation could not immediately and arbitrarily decide to revoke your right to use the media or place many restrictions on _how_ you used it.
While streaming media has some notable conveniences in certain cases, the downsides to the consumer seem to outweigh those benefits. It's as if there is a coordinated assault on ownership rights across many industries which is being led by the ubiquity of actually-broadband internet connectivity, the streaming technology that exists across many industries (gaming, movies, music and even general software) paired with corporation's insatiable desire for growth at all legal (even some not) costs. Because they now can, they will.
As one who prefers freedom of use to maximum convenience I think it wise to purchase physical media when possible and back it up in a manner which is suitable to your long-term accessibility needs. Maybe I'm just a crabby old guy...
This sort of thing does have a chilling effect. I've had issues with Sony and google. With a physical store? I'd have simply done a chargeback. With my them? I'm basically guaranteed to be banned from their services. That sort of thing doesn't happen in physical stores. One doesn't get barred from walmart if you have a beef at the return desk.
I don't use any paid streaming services, so forgive me if I'm saying something stupid, but doesn't this:
>Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service
mean that you can download a copy of the content you bought? As far as I'm concerned, that's about as close to "owning" as it gets, when it comes to digital media.
If you buy, say, a pair of pliers from a hardware store, and then instead of taking them home you leave them at the store and come back to use them every time you have something that needs plying, and then eventually the store needs to make room for other products and so throws your pliers away, you have no one to blame but yourself for not taking them home for safekeeping when you had the chance.
This analogy could break down if the content has DRM. I don't know if it does, or if it does when it stops working, but that's a different discussion from "Amazon deleted my movie".
Music is typically DRM-free so in that case you have a point. Movie “downloads” are typically DRM’d and only downloadable within the confines of an app, and you don’t get to take the files with you if e.g. you switch devices.
In this analogy, it is the case that the store won't let you take the pliers home, or only lets you take the pliers home under the supervision of an employee, and also that if you want to take the pliers with you on a road trip to Mexico, that isn't allowed, even if the hardware store has a branch in Mexico.
Oh, and if the hardware store goes out of business you can never access the pliers again because it turns out they were leased from the plier manufacturer.
Frequently when streaming content providers say "download" it is more accurately described as downloading a pre-cached version of the stream that only works on proprietary software which is reliant on a semi-regular internet connection. For example, you can "download" netflix/amazon/youtube content, but it can only be viewed on the app, and the app must be periodically reconnected to the internet.
Serious question: who buys digital movies? I don't really know anyone who even buys movies at all anymore, but if they do it's likely they prefer a physical copy anyway. There's just so much content out there that the number of people that even care to rewatch a movie they've seen feels like it's really low.
I bought "Bullet Train" over the weekend on Amazon for an at-home date night with my wife (rental was not available yet). It costs $20 which we justified as being the cost of 2 movie tickets. Doubt I will watch it again so really I was just paying for access
Good point. Early release access definitely seems like an almost separate use case bundled with the "Buy" feature, but like you mention most people aren't doing this to buy the movie but to watch it earlier.
I buy digital movies all the time. Not often at full price because there are sales and deals on iTunes weekly (daily). To me, "buying" a movie for $4.99 or even $8.99 (which is only a dollar or two more than the rental price) is worth it on the off-chance that I may want to watch it again in the future. My digital iTunes movie library is nearing 900 movies at this point. All backed up and downloaded locally so I reduce the risk of what this article is talking about happening to me.
damn, you're way ahead of me, almost double my number. I haven't looked into local backups. I'll have to see how that is done (and buy a bigger harddrive.) I didn't really realize that Apple made this possible since I only use an AppleTV to purchase and view movies.
Yeah, unfortunately you can't download the 4K versions. But for me that's an OK tradeoff since I've never once had to use the downloaded version to actually watch something on my AppleTV; everything has still been available in my account for streaming. Not to mention that over half of my library is movies from the 1930s to 1960s - way before 4K was even a concept. So except for a handful of recent movies, I've got the highest form downloaded anyway.
I have a Mac mini that exists almost exclusively to be the backup for all my digital content should I ever need it. All the movies are downloaded to a 14TB external drive which is then cloned to another 16TB external drive and also fully backed up to Backblaze.
Use the TV App on macOS. Just go into the list view and right-click on a movie (or multiple) and then you can download it. I let the TV app do all its own folder/library management. I've just configured the library to be on my external drive instead of my internal drive (you can do this from the TV app preferences).
Note that this doesn't remove the DRM or anything like that. This is simply storing a local copy of the iTunes-protected video on your Mac. But if the movie isn't available to stream anymore or your internet is down, you can use Home Sharing on the AppleTV to connect to your Mac and stream the downloaded version.
Yes in the sense that I plug in my external hard drive to the new computer and point the new computer's TV app library to the existing library on the external HD. Then it will prompt for authentication the first time I try to play something. After that the movies will play.
Yep, we've bought every season of Blue's Clues and Daniel Tiger on Amazon because they started out as included / free content on some service and then became "buy or rent" after our kids were hooked. I'm happy that they're not physical DVDs because those would have been destroyed long ago from getting handled too roughly too often. With four kids, we've gotten our money's worth.
If the cost to rent is X and the cost to buy is some multiple of X such that I suspect we'd rent enough to overcome the buy, I will buy, fully knowing I may lose access to it some day.
Same reason that when I go to rent from RedBox and they offer the rental for $1 and let me keep the DVD for $2 or whatever I'll just buy.
It's much more likely that my entire Amazon/Apple/Whatever account gets banned for something than they revoke access to more than a small subset of the movies, so for me the risk is worth the reward.
I currently "own" 493 movies on iTunes. I don't use any streaming servies because my experience with them has been horrible--a couple dozen movies I want to watch with hundreds or thousands of filler movies that I have no interest in. When I started buying, I went into it with my eyes open. Apple seemed to be the safest option for companies that would be around for some time and unlikely to pull the plug on a service that wasn't doing as well as hoped. I've never had content pulled.
I'm the sort of person that like to rewatch things. As a kid I rewatched Star Wars so many times that I knew the lines in the entire movie by heart, these days the Big Lebowski is comfort food that I'll throw on when I'm bored. So the "rent" option on iTunes never made sense to me. And my concern with something like Netflix is--will it be there when I want to rewatch it?
If Apple ever gets out of the game I hope they give an out for people who have bought things, but I'm not optimistic. I'm less worried about them pulling content they lost a license to because I hope that licensing for purchase is a different world than licensing for free streaming.
(Also, remember that this is exactly the same for app stores. I did have an app pulled that I paid for. So it does happen, I'm just hopeful that it doesn't very often.)
EDIT: I just looked and I own two copies of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (a mistake since I already owned it, and later saw it on sale and bought it without checking my list. It had changed hands and was being sold by a different distributor.) I searched for it on a non-logged-in computer and its not available to purchase at all. While this is a guarantee of nothing, it suggests that Apple's licensing with the movie rights owners may retain rights beyond the termination of the license.
Last I checked I was nearing 1,000 movies on iTunes/AppleTV that I "bought"
I also haven't noticed any missing or anything, but my understanding when I click the "buy" is I'm not buying to OWN the content like I'd expect with a DVD/VHS, but buying the right to watch it as long as the content is available as many times and whenever I want.
I personally think people are clinging too much onto the description of "buying" that comes with physical goods, not digital goods.
Is this the new “who watches TV? I haven’t owned a TV in 20 years?” Obviously someone is buying them or do you think six or seven platforms are selling movies just for grins and giggles?
Many new movies don't have a "streaming" license for a while and your only option is "buying" them.
It's also cheaper if you have a family and don't intend to watch it together at once, or even in a single day. It's also more flexible regarding which device can play the movie (iTunes rentals were bound to the device clicking the play button lady time I tried)
It's way more niche than a few decades ago, but there's a bunch of cases where buying is a better choice.
Content is not fungible. When I want to watch Terminator (1984) and nothing else, then no amount of having other killer-robot films on your platform will satisfy this want.
As to why people who buy prefer to buy physical? Because there's actual ownership. I haven't even as much as investigated my options for buying 4K content, because I am 100% sure it doesn't exist in a form that's not hooked into some DRM system (AKA worse than useless). With physical content, at least you retain the control.
If you buy physical content and subsequently rip it, you probably don’t care about legality all that much. Backing up discs or transcoding them is likely a violation of some law or other no matter where you are.
The number of people could indeed be quite low, but I’m glad the use case is supported.
I buy digital films occasionally, only the ones that I know I’ll want to re-watch every year or two. It’s a much nicer experience to call one up on a whim than it is to find out which (if any) streaming service currently has them, sign up, then cancel. That’s worth the $10 or $15 I paid, especially considering that the wine consumed during each viewing matches or exceeds the same cost, depending on how many folks I’m watching them with.
A couple of months ago I pirated "You Won't Be Alone". I finally got around to watching it last night and today I'm going to go buy a digital copy of it. Note that I already have a digital copy, it's what I watched last night! But the film isn't available on any sort of disc, and it was an amazing movie and I want to support the filmmakers any way I can. I honestly have no idea how much of my $20 is going to flow from Amazon to the production company to (hopefully) eventually the director. But what else can I possibly do?
For me it's the convenience. If all movies were available reliably from a single streaming service, I would use it instead (as I did Netflix, in the early days). At my current stage of life, $10 here or there to buy a movie is irrelevant; the hassle of figuring out which streaming service (if any) has the movie I want to watch is not.
I like re-watching movies that I enjoy. I don't need to pay too much attention because I already know the story and often I notice new details while watching.
At the very least, I know it'll be a good movie instead of taking a gamble with an unknown quantity.
Property developer leases a beachfront land for 99 years and builds a resort. You book a vacation at the resort. You enjoy the facilities -- pool, spa, restaurants etc., during your stay. At the end of your stay, you lose the privileges of staying at the resort/using the facilities.
Even if you bought a timeshare in the resort, you still do not own it. Heck, the property developer also doesn't own it (remember, they just hold the 99 yr lease)!
Electronic-sell-through/Download-to-own is pretty much that esp. if the player is controlled by the platform. You may download the artefact (or the player software may do it for you), but playability is dependent on the platform still holding rights. This is implementation dependent and you have to look through the Terms of Service to really be sure.
All streamers who license third-party content do it for a limited period (from a few months to several months or a year). I wouldn't be surprised if many of the platforms have licensed the "Download to own/Electronic-sell-through" titles only for a finite period. Those titles will go away / become unplayable at some point in the future (unless you downloaded them from a DRM-free platform). When the eventual consumer backlash occurs, the platforms will point to their ToS.
And to add to this complexity, copyright rules are quite different across jurisdictions.
Real property like resorts all exist in the real world. There is no copying a resort. You can't just instantly copy a building. You can't just create more physical space on this planet. The limits of physics renders such property inherently scarce.
Data is different, it is infinite. You can copy it infinitely at nearly zero cost. You can transmit it to anyone anywhere in the world at nearly zero cost. Any attempt to own bits fails because of the inherently infinite nature of data. Any notion of property is imaginary, an illusion. Intellectual property degenerates into number ownership, it's that ridiculous.
If you follow this logic to its conclusion:
> the player is controlled by the platform
Then intellectual property will lead to the end of free computing as we know it today. We cannot have computers that do what we want while simultaneously preventing us from copying data some rightsholder "owns". The copyright industry will lobby the government until free computing is illegal and all computers come pwned from the factory so that we can only execute "legal" code. This also goes hand in hand with government desire to control cryptography, paving the way for total surveillance and oppression.
The reason why the long-term property lease analogy is accurate is because in most jurisdictions copyrights lapse after a stipulated period. That is inspite of corporations like Disney that have used copyright law to their benefit to extend the lifetime of their IP.
Taking your point about "free computing", I wonder why we haven't had the equivalent of open source software and the success we have seen over the last few decades hasn't spawned open content movement where we could get great movies, music, books etc., Sure, there are pockets of availability that is an exception, but not the kind of mainstream success that we have seen with open source software.
Leasehold is a scam, and should not be legal in the first place. It benefits no-one except the original freeholder's great-grandchildren or whatever, and vastly complexifies matters for everyone else.
One idea I keep thinking about (which I'm sure interferes with some sort of copyright law) is:
1. User buys a physical copy of a movie/music
2. Instead of sending the disc to their house, it's sent to a storage facility
3. In the storage facility a digital backup is made and uploaded to a cloud storage
4. User is given access to the backup which they can watch/listen to
5. User would be the owner of said physical copy and when they sell it, all digital backups would be erased.
A key problem with zediva was that they were only offering rentals, not ownership. Ownership of a particular copy gives you rights that you don't have when renting.
One thing to note is this would be very expensive from a bandwidth perspective, of course depending on streaming quality. A 2 hour 4k video is about 40GB of data transfer, I'm presuming if someone buys something over rent they're going to watch it at least 3x... A quick google suggests 120GB can cost $6 to move.
happy to hear if my math is off and learn more about the pricing structures
This is what I'm attempting to revive with Murfie/Crossies.
Right now, I'm dealing with unrelated problems with my warehouse so the service is only partly functional. In my opinion the basic model, with true ownership, should be completely legal under copyright law.
Movie Studio offers (what is effectively) a lease of Digital Media to Digital Retailer. Digital Retailer is then allowed to sublease copies of Digital Media to End Consumer. When Digital Retailer's lease ends, so does End Consumer's sublease.
How it seems like it OUGHT to work:
Movie Studio offers resale rights of Digital Media to Digital Retailer. Digital Retailer then sells copies of Digital Media to End Consumer. When Digital Retailer's right to resell ends, End Consumer is allowed to procure/store their copy of Digital Media.
I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. It takes maybe 90 vs 20 seconds to get the movie playing, but in return I get noticeably better quality. 4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s. It really does look and sound noticeably better if you have the TV and surround setup to take advantage of it. Sometimes WAY better.
Also, for most physical movies, they had a "+ digital" code included that lets you redeem a digital copy of the movie too. So I can stream most of them on my laptop anyway if I'm away from home or something.
Physical media for movies is super underrated, at least for the situation in my country. It's often cheaper than "buying" the digital version! I can even go to my local used bookstore/Goodwill and find tons of Blu-Rays for cut rate prices. And then I own it forever, and it's 100% legal.
I don't have much physical media since finally going 4K HDR, but so far my experience hasn't been great. I purchased the Mission:Impossible boxed set, and it came with a download code to use on iTunes.
The discs look like trash. Noisy, grainy, just bad. The iTunes versions look phenomenal.
It would be nice if there was a way to know how good the quality of a particular release is before buying it. Reviews I read don't seem to go into a lot of detail. I realize it's probably somewhat subjective and hard to put into words how an image looks.
AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In this case, you prefer the DNR - but if you read online forums, most collectors hate it and consider it a crime against humanity to have ever been invented.
Or maybe you're getting downvoted because you were denigrating other people's personal preferences when you called the disc version "trash." You're guilty of what you accuse others.
I think you're getting downvoted because the solution to your issue was one "why does my bluray look grainy" search away, yet you chose to stay uninformed on purpose and complained about it in a public forum without understanding the mechanics.
It’s funny if the poster is actually complaining about grain. Digital compression, like the one that Netflix uses, will often clean up the image of grain as a secondary effect of the compression algo.
Essentially grain is a lot of detail that video compression algorithms have been taught to ignore/remove. H.264 was notorious for virtually removing all grain making it impossible to have authentic film grain on YouTube for years. (I work in advertising).
Exactly like you said - grain is a common first victim of video compression.
The other curious thing - modern movies that are shot on film / have grain actually get it removed during VFX stages. You have to do it so you can integrate CGI - grain is usually “sampled” first by the compositing software (The Foundry’s Nuke in 99% of occasions) and removed since the CGI image won’t have any grain from the CG renderer so you have to integrate it onto a denoised image. You then re add it at the end!
Using the same software you then re-add the sampled noise back onto the image, and since you’ve now integrated the CGI, the noise goes on top of everything helping it all get integrated.
Just saying this because you are right - using noise reduction to remove film grain for release is considered a sin (I myself would agree with the sentiment). Yet actually most films today will go through some denoise stage in VFX. Which is an interesting thing to think about - we actually remove the grain for a lot of the work then re add to keep the filmic texture.
I wonder: If film grain never existed, would we invent it? If we had originally developed film technology where everything looked completely clean, would anyone have thought "Hey I've got a great idea, let's figure out how to make this look grainy"?
I doubt we would invent it. But there are artefacts of the analogue age that have more value than people think. My understating is that “grain” on vynil is perceived as increased resolution to the brain (or so I’ve read). Thus giving some scientific reason for the preference of audiophiles. It would be interesting to know if there’s a similar effect to grain in film but I don’t know.
The other interesting thing is how beautiful and different grain is when it’s from silver halvide film. I’d dare say it’s truly gorgeous to watch. Such film was used in the 1900-1930s age and if you watch a great print or restoration of that time the effect is quite stunning. I believe John Ford’s Stagecoach is a good example that should be relatively easy to find.
unfortunately I think the same epoch has lost immense amounts of film due to the flammability of the materials (which is extremely high, as seen in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds). Which is why every once in a while you’ll get a huge fire in some film archive and so much of it is lost.
Yes, but it wouldn't be used across an entire film. Likely just in flashbacks and other dramatic scenes, the way it's applied to digital productions today.
Similar to how in the 2000's, hipster bands added photographic pops and crackle to their tracks as an artistic measure.
They added those things to indicate age my mimicing older formats. They wouldn't add those effects to mimic older formats if older formats never existed.
I don't think we'd recreate film grain, but I think some form of artifacts would exist and people would eventually grow a taste for them.
Modern digital music can be completely clean and flawless. But it can also have some weird artifacts that can only exist digitally, like aliasing, stuttering from a corrupt file or skipping CD player, compression artifacts while streaming or from very low bitrate sources.
And nowadays we're seeing genres like Hyperpop, Glitch Hop, and Future Bass which all play with these artifacts.
Flume even has a song[0] where you can hear the distinctive whine of an improperly grounded USB audio interface. It's inserted into a silent part of the song, so it is 100% intentional and not an accident in the recording. I like to think he's giving a little wink-wink to other music producers.
It's on the "My Name is Flume Mixtape" album, which itself is a great example of intentional digital artifacts in a creative use. There's lots of aliasing on things that shouldn't, and things that "should" alias like square waves sliding into the 10khz range are perfectly alias free.
[0] Amber at 1:51. The ringing sound that comes in after the first bass hit is also some sort of ground noise, but very distorted.
Agree, just thought I'd mention that there are zillions of plugins to add these kinds of distortion/noise (like vinyl noise, ground noise, tape distortion, etc). Eg Devious Machines Texture, U-He Satin, etc, etc.
Also most modern synths have noise oscillators for this purpose (eg Serum, Pigments, etc, etc).
Things just sound too clean and perfect/boring if you don't use some kind of saturation/noise or distortion for ear candy.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure Skrillex puts CamelPhat on his master bus. The music video for one of his songs was his Ableton set and it was shown in there.
Good point, I should have emphasized that it can be perfectly clean, but it often sounds like it's missing something, so it's usually made dirtier afterwards.
I just wonder if the reason it sounds like it's missing something is because subtle noise and saturation sound objectively better to human ears, or if it's just because that's the precedent that's been set and we've grown fond of it. Early music was recorded to tape by necessity, and the digital era tries to bring those subtle distortions back to sound like it. Even a teen who has never listened to older music recorded to tape still listens to modern music that tries to sound like it was recorded to tape or passed through saturating transformers.
I think the uptick of intentional digital artifacts in music shows that we grow fond of what we're used to experiencing, even if it's considered a negative in an objective sense. But we can't ever really prove that without a separate society that somehow skipped the entire analog music (or film) era.
Also yeah Skrillex really breaks all the typical rules but his mixes sound fantastic (or garbage, depending on your opinion. His stuff is really divisive). The hosts of The Mastering Show podcast thought his youtube video was fake because of how much saturation and limiting he uses. I'm pretty certain it's totally real.
> H.264 was notorious for virtually removing all grain making it impossible to have authentic film grain on YouTube for years.
In the YouTube case, the low encoding bitrates make it really difficult to encode fine detail. (Blu-ray discs use H.264 as well, and at those bitrates it reproduces film grain well.)
> Which is an interesting thing to think about - we actually remove the grain for a lot of the work then re add to keep the filmic texture.
This is a great point. Even with older "remastered" movies, analog artifacts like film grain are sometimes removed during cleanup and then recreated during mastering.
They will 100% remove grain for restoration. It’s the same process as VFX really, essentially restoration involves a lot of what’s called “cleanup” work in the industry. In a Marvel movie cleanup will be removing wires from actors, in restoration it’s scratches and other issues.
Aren't films usually shot at higher resolutions (5K to 8K) so DNR or not you are going to throw away information during the editing/mastering process even with 4K output.
I'm not a collector, but I hate vaxy faces. Which is also the reason I could spot CGI for years, until we had the ability to simulate even a pores of skin, but then again it were tuned to 11 and I could spot it again.
I've noticed that too with cwebp (and other libwebp-based tools) encoding for darker images. My guess was that they their difference function is using the wrong colorspace so it does not match the perceptive difference. My quick tests of cjxl fared much better so all hope is not lost.
But essentially, losless compression is all about throwing away impercetible details. Noise is an interesting case here because the presence and fequency of the noise (the texture) is significant to the viewer but having the noise match 1:1 is not. Which is why newer codecs remove the noise and then re-add generated noise during decoding.
On the other (semi-unrelated) hand, film can be much, much better than digital for some applications.
For example, a transmission electron microscope that uses an emulsion film to capture the image compared to a digital capture device - the film can be magnified again with a light microscope later for much more magnification than may be accessible when all of the information is registered to a single pixel.
Just something to remind us that there are pros and cons to everything.
Film grain is a funny topic... if it was the original look then it can be considered highest quality/fidelity to retain it. Filtering it makes for easier video compression.
Wow, that's really surprising and disappointing. Usually the disc is considered the ideal "canonical" way to watch the movie, but I guess not always. I think blu-ray.com has user reviews that are focused on the quality of the disc specifically, but I usually don't look at them. I looked at MI:1 and they talked a lot about the grain, but seemed to see it as a stylistic choice.
Film grain from pre-digital era movies is a divisive issue. All older movies originally had some amount of film grain from the analog film. Some people like it and want it there on purpose. Some people prefer the movie run through a de-noise filter. The pro-grain people claim this removes fine detail. The anti-grain people say why the hell would you want it there on purpose. Some modern movies even add film grain on purpose. See Disney's Luca as an example. I personally don't care for it but it usually doesn't bother me as long as it's not extreme.
This is a totally uninformed question. Are you sure the bad quality from the discs is the fault of the discs rather than your blu-ray reader? I'm assuming you've had good quality from the reader for other discs??
That's oversimplifying things. Players and TVs can and do apply their own processing and then there are sometimes parts (e.g. Dolby Vision) that are just ignored by non-supporting players.
I thought about doing this, but I was worried about codec compatibility issues with Dolby Vision and Atmos, and DTS:whatever. Everything I've read says you need to buy an Nvidia Shield to do it right. This is probably even closer to ideal than my setup, but in the end I decided it's not worth the effort/cost vs just putting the disc in the player.
I’m trying to think if I have any discs with Dolby Vision, I’m only buying 1080p blurays so maybe not. Most recent purchases were Dune and the new Batman movie and those both look and sound fantastic.
Meh, ffmpeg doesn't support Dolby Vision yet either so you just get the non-DV fallback but unless you have a calibrated HDR monitor you're not really losing that much.
This is essentially correct. I've been bouncing between different boxes and HTPCs for almost a couple decades now and the best experience I've had has always been the Nvidia Shield. The only annoyance I have is I want to reliably set Kodi as the main launcher, which is more of Kodi's issue rather than the system.
But seriously, HTPCs of yesteryear are essentially dead due to Windows' terrible handling of Dolby Vision, Atmos, DTS:X, and HDR. Even though there are players that will allow you to get much better quality out of your source file on PC, the hassle of licensing and HDR modes is just absolutely not worth it.
How do you handle the storage for this? One bluray disk is about 60gb. I'm not sure if movies typically take 60gb but if you watch TV shows they do. 15 disks is 1TB. In a short while you're running a data center, especially if you collect a lot of video content.
I've heard that you can get efficient re-encodings, but that typically means torrenting it from somewhere. I'm not aware of a way to make high quality re-encodings locally without lots and lots of tweaking/testing/re-encoding and it takes a particular set of skills.
A Synology is good option here (I say this as someone with 2 UnRaid machines and 1 12-bay Synology). You can even get one that can run Plex for you as well (assuming your transcoding needs are minimal/none, else you might need a seperate box to handle the transcoding and just use the Synology as storage, like I do).
14TB+ hard drives are not too bad (~$235) so that would be 210 movies right there (though you are going to need to "burn" 1 drive for parity). The other option is to more liberally interpret copyright laws and buy the disk then pirate a copy that matches your requirements. Seeing how there are many people out there just doing the pirating step and that you aren't running a pay-for-plex scheme then I can't imagine you running afoul of law enforcement.
I honestly had no idea disks were that cheap now. I felt like I was looking for a new 1-2TB disk last year and it was around $100... camel^3 says I'm just imagining it though.
Even if for some reason you don't re-encode, 18+ TB disks are now available. This means you can fit nearly 300 films' worth on a single drive like this, more if you buy multiple. I don't think it's such a bad idea to run a 4-drive cluster out of a single Raspberry Pi, with all the drives connected over USB.
You don't even need backups for this, really. If you own the discs and lose the digital version, just copy it on the disc again. If you acquired it via other means, then... it should be possible to replace most such data. Even if you do choose to make backups, then that doubles your cost per terabyte at most.
Storage is really cheap, assuming you're fine with something that isn't a fancy ZFS/RAID array.
You can't just throw files on there. You should make sure the clients you're connecting support the codecs and formats natively and at that point the pi is basically acting as a NAS. It should play 4k fine like that if it has the bandwidth necessary.
Also most 4K videos on internet (except your recorded HQ file by camera or latest phone) even below 100Mbps so it's fine. Even in UHD Blu-ray, it's 128Mbps max.
I use a 4 bay NAS with 4TB drives. I guess things would be more problematic if I had hundreds of movies but I’ve got a hair over 100 right now averaging around 40GB per movie which is fine.
The worst part is that the old “stop stop play” trick doesn’t work on any devices I have that can play disks (Xbox and computers). Every time I play a disk and hit the unskippable nonsense, I’m reminded why nobody uses those things anymore.
If you have a stand alone player, however, perhaps that trick still works. Just press stop, then press stop again, then press play. It skips the warnings, pre roll stuff, menus, and just plays the movie.
I've been doing similar (i.e, growing my collection of physical medium entertainment). I also prefer physical medium and my own player because I don't feel comfortable with someone else (unseen) recording my every pause, rewind, login, etc.
I get a better quality experience and no one is probing my psyche.
> I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format.
I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I can't vouch for this at all.
I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me about the experience was how much worse it was from what I remembered.
You get a bunch of prefatory material (copyright infringement warnings, trailers, bizarre PSAs, etc.) that you have to individually figure out how to skip through. (The menu button doesn't always let you jump straight to the menu; you might get a No symbol[1] with a message "operation not permitted".)
Instead of being mostly pure content that gets streamed at you over a dumb pipe, every disc, like many Web sites today that haven't abandoned practices from the age of lame Flash intros, is crafted to be a package that provides an "experience"—a bunch of silly flourishes injected by way of themable menus, etc. that're supposed to be consistent with the look and feel and mood of the movie. In practice, it makes navigation cumbersome at best, and as far as their tastefulness goals go, they tend to have a half-life of, I dunno, a year or two, because they don't age well at all. The same can be argued for movies generally, but the timescale for aging out is somehow much longer (decades rather). Plus movies have, like, plot and stuff to capture your attention.
Several of the Blu-Rays I played from Universal Pictures had an obnoxious tendency to go to screensaver if the movie is paused for more than a minute or so. Apparently it uses some clever trick to abuse the Blu-Ray format to do this. (You can see on the player's hardware LED readout that it has jumped into a 1–2 minute video sequence played on a loop.) Most obnoxiously, it breaks the prime design constraint of a screensaver, which is that when you return to your device, it should get rid of itself. No amount of button pressing is apparently sufficient to get this to happen, and the only way I found to get back to the movie was to stop it entirely, re-enter through the menu that begins playing it from the beginning, and then seeking forward to roughly the spot that I remembered the movie was at when I originally paused it. Fucking ridiculous.
Turning on subtitles can be an exercise in frustration. Are you allowed to use the "Subtitle" button on the remote? Do you have to navigate the themed menu by following your nose[2] to find the relevant setup screen where you can turn them on? Is it perhaps hidden behind the "Audio" button on the remote? This adventure can be yours. With one Criterion disc, I ended up giving up upon realizing that it was actually available on a streaming service that we subscribe to (which wasn't listed when I first picked up the disc).
I think your problem is using a Blu-ray player. If you use what I’d suspect most people use, an Xbox or PlayStation, the experience is much, much better. Even better is just using makemkv and ripping just the movie. Also works for 4k if you have the correct drive (there’s some inexpensive drives you have flash firmware)
My problem is with Blu-Ray. The moment where you're subverting the Blu-Ray format, you're also subverting the argument that Blu-Ray provides the best experience of any format.
I had a whole paragraph in that post (but that I ended up deleting) about how Blu-Ray would be great if "Blu-Ray" were as simple as a single-file filesystem with an open media container format at the root, burned/pressed onto a BD physical disc (or some other high-density optical media). Like the digital equivalent of a reel (or set of reels) of 35mm film. But that's not what it is.
Really depends on the room, your personal taste, and the source material. Do you have room in the room for the side speakers? Do you watch a lot of movies with planes or other things flying over your head?
I don't have gear that can decode Atmos, unfortunately, so I haven't tried ceiling speakers myself - only at movie theaters. Why not 7.1.2? =)
>4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s.
Surely, this is just a current business decision of Netflix. As internet speeds increase, the bit rate is almost inevitably going to catch up (most likely if Netlix et al decide to charge a premium for it!)
I doubt it. All streaming services are around this bitrate or a little higher, like around 30 Mb/s or so. This bitrate is good enough for most people and is likely to remain so. People watch on their 50" bargain TVs with a soundbar, or even just on a laptop/tablet. Most people wouldn't even be able to tell a difference. It's just not worth the cost of the almost 10x bandwidth for Netflix to stream losslessly encoded video and sound that like 95% of customers won't even notice.
You also can't always just 100% directly compare bitrates because Netflix can more easily adopt efficient new codecs while e.g. for 1080p Blu Rays a lot of them are still VC-1.
There needs to be a very large lawsuit or two about this. Claiming you can buy something, and then renting it, even if the rental is 20 years is fraud.
Agreed. Even when you "buy" a DVD or Blu-Ray, you are actually just buying a copy of the media with a limited license to use it for certain purposes.
It's still copyright infringement if, for example, you buy a Blu-Ray disc and then open a movie theatre and start playing that disc publicly. The license you bought with the disc doesn't extend that far.
Whether you "buy" a movie via a disc or a streaming service, you're really just buying a limited license to display the movie along with either physical or digital delivery.
That's a false equivalence though - it's well understood in this case that you bought the ticket not the performance, and that the ticket expires after one use. The same is not true of buying films, as it used to be possible to keep a physical copy (e.g. DVD) that no-one could take away from you, and that was recent enough that I think most people still (reasonably IMO) expect a perpetual license when 'buying' a movie.
We had a word in the olden days for buying a limited license to watch a film - we called it "renting".
Buying a VHS was still a limited license. You weren't allowed to reproduce it and sell the reproductions. You weren't allowed to then operate a movie theater around your off the shelf VHS tapes. You weren't entitled to a new tape once the tape wore out.
That's not a license, that's just buying a copy enshrined in a physical medium. All the restrictions you mentioned derive from copyright law itself, not a license.
When you are sold the concert ticket you know you are buying it to only view at the one specific time and location. It is an event ticket. With a digital movie, ostensibly buying lets you view it whenever you want wherever you want in perpetuity but that's not actually the case. We can use the term "buy" for digital movies if you actually are just buying a ticket that lets you view the movie however wherever and whenever the license specifies. But that information should be highlighted to the buyer otherwise it's deception.
> When you are sold the concert ticket you know you are buying it to only view at the one specific time and location.
Do I know this? Are you assuming I bothered to read the ticket ahead of time? I bought a ticket to the Red Hot Chili Peppers 2022 Tour. I should be able to go to all the tour, right?
Oh wait, you're telling me there's text on the ticket I should have read to understand it was only for one location and one evening? You really expected me to read all that legalese?
> With a digital movie, ostensibly buying lets you view it whenever you want wherever you want in perpetuity but that's not actually the case.
Ugh. I bet I would of had to read something to understand the limitations of what I was buying. I can't believe companies expect people to read about the things people buy these days, totally taking advantage of everyone by putting knowledge behind words.
Arguing that reading anything, even small amounts of information located directly on the ticket or receipt, is "legalese" is very reductive and seems to be coming from an emotional rather than logical argument. Event tickets are an established practice that is very familiar and straightforward to consumers and as another commenter mentioned is a false equivalence for several reasons.
There is an actual legal concept of an undue burden and that is exactly what having to read through many pages of fine print is. If you don't actually own digital content it should be highlighted very clearly, while placing a minimal undue burden on the consumer. Otherwise, it's deceptive.
Hmm, what's relevant to this. Ah, Digital Content, generally.
The Service may allow you to: (i) ignoring subscription talk (ii) ignoring rental talk (iii) purchase Digital Content for on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time ("Purchased Digital Content")
So obviously even "buying" the movie only gives it to me for an indefinite period of time. I wonder when it might not become available then. Let's scan more section headers to see if it talks about that.
i. Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.
I don't get how this is an "undue burden" to read this before forking over $14. It is not fine print, the default styles render it pretty clearly on my screen but you can feel free to resize it to render however you wish. Its not a long document. It has obvious sections. The link to this document was a few pixels away from the Buy button on my screen and was easily visible. It took me less than a minute to understand what I would be buying if I clicked "Buy". They're not hiding this away behind some far away unrelated site or only giving you this after requesting it by mail with legal letterhead. This is pretty out there and open.
To me, suggesting that people can't read this might as well be the same as arguing people shouldn't be required to read what's on the face of a ticket. The information is right there, it is not hidden in the slightest.
> Event tickets are an established practice
Maybe to you, but maybe I've never bought one before.
If you're going by "event tickets have been sold for a while", well, so have digital movies with DRM that can make them unavailable. This isn't something that just came out this year, I bought a movie from Amazon Unbox sixteen years ago which had these limitations. How long does it have to exist before it is an "established practice"?
definition of fine print: inconspicuous details or conditions printed in an agreement or contract, especially ones that may prove unfavorable
definition of inconspicuous: not clearly visible or attracting attention; not conspicuous.
You can note that you had to click on the "Terms" link to get to those...
> I don't get how this is an "undue burden"
If you have to read 20 paragraphs of text for every digital movie purchase, it is considered an undue burden to me. You can calculate the amount of reading time that would take. I'm not going to.
I'm not going to argue with you anymore as I feel I'm wasting my time but in short I don't want to live in a dystopia where companies start foisting time wasting tasks on me until I give in and accept their unfavorable terms on everything.
> definition of inconspicuous: not clearly visible or attracting attention; not conspicuous.
It is a link probably millimeters away from the Buy button on the screen to read before even clicking Buy, and then Buy asks you if you did read it before it charges your card. I don't know how that's "not clearly visible". If there wasn't a link on the page, or was tiny and at the very bottom of the page, sure I might agree but that's not what's going on here.
I guess its "fine print" when you don't want to read it but I'm just overly reductive when I don't want to read it. That must be the distinction.
> If you have to read 20 paragraphs of text for every digital movie purchase
I mean, you don't have to every time. This argument seems to be coming from an emotional rather than logical argument. These terms don't change very often and they're very similar for every digital movie platform. Once you've skimmed it on Amazon there's not really a point to reading it again. I'll look over the ingredients list on a food product once but it's not like every time I eat a Snickers I re-examine the ingredients label.
Do you really not bother reading contracts when you agree to them?
Your main point is essentially that consumers shouldn't have to actually pay attention in the slightest to what it is they're buying. That they have practically no mental capacity to glance over the terms of a service they're agreeing to when they click "agree".
> I don't want to live in a dystopia where companies start foisting time wasting tasks on me until I give in and accept their unfavorable terms on everything.
Cool. Nobody is forcing you to buy these movies. I haven't bought a digital movie in decades precisely for these reasons. But I don't act like it is this massive undue burden for me to read about the thing I'm buying. It took one minute for me to scan that document and understand what buying a movie on Amazon is like.
Many people have already said this, but: buying a ticket to a one-time event is not analogous to buying a license to watch a movie in perpetuity.
A better analogy, that does not involve a one-time event, would be a lifetime pass to concert venue. You buy this pass, only to have the venue refuse to honor it a few years later.
On Amazon, you're literally not buying a license to watch a movie in perpetuity. You're buying a license to access it for "an indefinite period of time". This is pretty clear and easy to see in the agreement they ask if you read before you check out.
> I buy a concert ticket. Does this mean I can go see that artist everywhere they perform forever now?
This is a bad analogy. A better one would be, your bought a car from me, and three years from now, I tow your car away and do not compensate you for taking the car. Because buyer beware, caveat emptor, etc...
What part of a streaming movie is a physical item? It is even further removed and a worse analogy than my concert ticket is like a streaming movie license. With one you physically have a few thousand-pound piece of metal in your garage with a title from the government of ownership, the other you have a limited license on an account maintained by the service provider.
If you "buy" a car, and don't get a title, then yeah sure I guess the title holder can take it away. You didn't own it; you never had the title for it.
> What part of a streaming movie is a physical item?
The issue is telling someone this:
Rent ($2.99) Rent HD ($3.99) Buy ($13.99)
So I pick buy, and it sure looks like I own it because the other two choices were presented as rentals. The buy option really is a "long term rental" and should have a very easy to read disclaimer under it that says: "Buy access until 12/31/2029". That way the consumer does not conclude it is a purchase, like a DVD or VHS that I own until it wears out, or forever, whichever comes first.
> If you "buy" a car, and don't get a title, then yeah sure I guess the title holder can take it away. You didn't own it; you never had the title for it.
I bought my car with a loan. I did get a copy of the title, with the lien-holder listed on the back. The car is mine, but I cannot sell it without the lien-holder releasing the lien. Legally, I do own the car. It is very much mine. If I fail to make payments, the lien holder may go to court, and the court can allow them to reposes (note the "re" in reposes) the vehicle.
Presenting something as "buy" when it is really "rent" is unethical at best, and illegal at worst, and it needs to be litigated now.
It isn't a "long term rental", it is a limited license to use it until the service provider isn't able to provide it. There isn't a pre-defined end date you're agreeing to with this buy button. Depending on the movie, putting an end date of 2029 is actually more limiting than what many of those videos will have. I bought movies on Unbox 16 years ago which are still available today, something you'd ensure wouldn't be possible with forcing them to put an end date only 7 years away.
You're literally arguing I should have had less ownership of access of the media than I currently do have.
I'd like to understand how buying a streaming video license is more akin to buying a car than buying a concert ticket. You brushed it off as a bad analogy and seemingly only offered a seemingly worse one. One is directly a physical object with government backed ownership registrations, one is a limited access token to enjoy some media. Which seems more like buying a concert or theater ticket?
You're obtaining a license for exchange of payment.
You're buying a license.
The car isn't my analogy, it is yours. You're the one suggesting buying a license to stream movies on Amazon is like buying a car. I don't get how its more similar to that than buying a movie or concert ticket. You still haven't explained why you feel a car purchase is a better example other than now suggesting it is a bad analogy now that you presume its mine.
The terms of this license are clearly listed in the link right next to the Buy button. Is the person also deceived if they didn't bother reading the showtime for the ticket they bought?
I wonder how long a used-car dealership that made people sign an unfair agreement similar to streamed movie legalese, and then later came to repossess people's cars, would last.
That doesn't compare. If I go to Amazon, look for a Harry Potter collection, I'm presented a Buy for kindle button. Not a "rent for some time, but read fast because we might take it away whenever" button. If they said rent, lease, license, borrow, peek momentarily into, it wouldn't be misleading.
I have bought around 100 movies on iTunes. I get the argument that I don’t “own” the movies but it’s too convenient. And the best thing about iTunes is that it upgrades the movies when new features come along. I didn’t have to pay extra for 4K or Dolby Atmos when the movie itself got upgraded. That itself is enough for me.
> If you buy a DVD or a Blue-Ray at a retail store, you are able to play that disk for as long as that disk physically works (often over 20 years). There are very few if any countries that would allow a shop to send around bailiffs to seize DVDs already bought years past, because the distributor no-longer has the rights to distribute the content.
If a retailer dared attempt such seizure of people’s Property, there would mass outrage. The media would shout about the retailer being thief’s, questions would be raised in parliament and the business would most likely face legal problems.
On the other hand, if the distributor simply added the Blu-ray you bought to the blacklist of your DRM compliant Blu-ray player, I'm not so sure there would be the same level of outrage, even though the end result were the same.
My suspicion is the level of public outrage is less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights and more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar. Which is a problem, really.
> if the distributor simply added the Blu-ray you bought to the blacklist of your DRM compliant Blu-ray player, I'm not so sure there would be the same level of outrage
I don't see what leads you to that conclusion. I've also never heard about that happening, and I don't suspect this would happen unless something actually illegal was happening (illegal copies and such). The justification for actually blocking you from watching that movie for which you own a digital copy would be pretty hard to find. And the work around is relatively easy - dont connect your blueray player to the internet. With streaming services, you're at the mercy of the service provider to just lose a contract with a studio and stop providing their content.
> less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights
At this stage fairness is proven to be deeply ingrained, even in animals. There is something deeply unfair with losing access to something you were supposed to own, just because they can, and some corporate bean counter decided to not renew some licensing contract on their catalog because the competition offered a percent more.
> more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar
9/11 was a one-off, I didn't get familiar with this type of terrorist event. On the other hand, school shootings happen so often that I'm not surprised by them. Both still trigger outrage.
This is what not really owning content implies about that computer you think you own: If a content publisher can reach into your computer and turn off access to content, you not only do not own and control the content, you do not properly own and control that computer. If you did you could assert that removing access to data on that computer constitutes unauthorized access. It's a security breach.
Last year, I bought a blu-ray player and two blu-rays to see if buying the media was worth it. At the very least, I'd have alternatives in case power goes out for an extended time. One of the blu-rays I bought was It's a Wonderful Life.
At the penultimate scene, with the bell ringing on the tree when George is back home with his family, the blu-ray just stopped, glitched out, and I could not get it to play properly. Something to do with firmware and others were experiencing similar issues.
I tried! It's incredible that even when you follow all the rules, you still get the shaft.
it was the same sh*t when the first kindles with digitals books came out ... you don't "own" the book...
same goes with full-online games... you don't own the game, you just have the right to play on servers... when the server shuts down, you have nothing left
buying physical stuff may be the "old" way, but it's reliable stuff
Buy pricing also acts as an anchor vs the other options.
This happens a lot in pricing; something seems excessively costly just to make the option next to it seem reasonable. Ski resorts do this all the time. The daily lift rate at Whistler in Canada is around 200CAD but a seasons ticket is 1700. It makes the seasons pass seem, almost reasonable.
I am hoarding DVDs and it's because a.) it's cheap, b.) it's reliable c.) it's future-proof and d.) I don't trust tomorrow's political/cultural landscape to not disappear things down the memory hole as well as subtly editing out offensive material or otherwise altering things in hard to detect ways. Case in point, not long ago a family member witnessed "Scrubs" being scrubbed of a particularly offensive joke that ran afoul of today's censors. With streaming, you have absolutely no control over what version of a movie you're seeing. What are you going to do? Store the bits and compare it to your neighbors'? That right there is a crime.
My oldest one is 25 years old and still works with no issues. Technically every physical object breaks down over time, but I expect that with proper storage and handling with care, a pressed DVD could last 50 years. And then you can also rip the bits and store them.
I have a disc from 2004 that had been in its original shrink wrap until this year but it had read errors when I tried to rip it and was showing signs of rot. Some discs are from bad batches, and you don't really have any way of knowing if a disc is bad until it starts rotting.
Agreed. Now if I have a TV show I haven't seen, I check if I've already downloaded it years back and watch the downloaded version rather than stream it. I can't trust streaming services to show me anything as it is, ever since Netflix removed the Community episode with blackface (it was parodying blackface, that was the point).
Well you do you. If you ask me, DVD quality (480p) is not really watchable anymore these days. Looks like what VHS looked like when DVDs were new now that we have full HD and 4K to compare it to.
Just going full on pirate with an HDD full of instantly accessible files seems way more practical, especially living in a country where it's de facto legal.
I think calling DVDs and 480p "unwatchable" is a pretty extreme take. Sure you might not be able to count an actor's eyelashes, but a well-shot film on anamorphic DVD properly upscaled can still look pretty fantastic. If watching on a tablet or phone (as more and more people seem to do nowadays) it would probably be hard for your average consumer to even tell the difference unless you were running them side by side. And that doesn't even take into account that most 4K content is consumed on streaming services that save money by serving content at the lowest bitrate possible, leading to compression artifacts (notably distracting banding and loss of detail in films with a lot of low-lit scenes), where watching an uncompressed DVD could arguably be said to look superior.
Damn, I must've missed the models that come with DVD drives haha.
Honestly imo even on a tiny phone you can still tell the difference between 480p and 720p, not to mention 1080p. Not having high levels of compression definitely helps but only to a degree. I have a decent DVD collection from the pre-fiber era and honestly these days I rather just download a FHD version in a few minutes it takes to complete than take it out of the box and find a machine that still somehow has a drive. It's all just collecting dust.
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[ 8.2 ms ] story [ 410 ms ] threadIn the past, redownloading movies wasn't even permitted. You download it and save it somewhere yourself. You can still do that to avoid any issues in the future, but I suspect the few incidents that have affected the iTunes Store are unlikely to re-occur. Why? For exactly the reason I mentioned at the beginning, originally you couldn't even re-download movies so it stands to reason the initial transition might've had some licensing loopholes.
You can un-bless all your other computers (as you can only have 5 computers blessed at once) but I guess if the other computers are offline they can keep playing old downloads.
:)
When the "legal" way to do it is self-evidently a scam perpetuated by corporations and governments working together against our interests, then they only honourable ways are either to watch illegal downloads or not watch movies at all.
None of my computers has a DVD drive! Though if I was interested in movies, probably one would.
> You'll likely have a more uniform collection in terms of quality.
Also 4K is useless to me as I have a 1080p monitor.
> It's also probably more honourable, if that's something you really care about.
Helping systems of control that are actively hostile towards me is not honourable, IMO.
I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed.
During the early months of the pandemic, we carried a Mac mini around that had a ton of downloaded content, and spent a lot of time in places with no internet service. It needed to "re-bless" itself every so often (I don't remember how often - maybe once a month or twice a month - it wasn't very often).
Our solution was to carry it with us when we were near enough to a tower. Using a phone hotspot with just a single bar of bad service, the process took 10-15 seconds.
So as far as tech/media companies go, Apple is almost certainly the least bad option, by a wide margin. But it's not perfect ;)
To be fair, it was a LONG time since stopped buying video from iTunes. Like 5 years at least. I subscribe to a bunch of the streaming services but instead of bothering to figure out exactly where something is streaming I just download it from the Pirate Bay where I know I can find everything right away.
¹ https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-app/devices/
https://help.moviesanywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150045768...
Blu ray players are also locked down and the embedded keys are subject to revocation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15456800 (2017)
The DRM does not require being online to verify once it's been set up
Incorrect, Apple did not build the software for all of the listed devices. Apple licenses the protocols and provides reference implementations through their MFi program.
In both scenarios the playback support is that the file just gives the credentials for the device with the Apple TV app or Airplay 2 to go and stream it from Apple's servers. No transfer of the video from a local download occurs.
You absolutely can.
A little known service in the US is “Movies Anywhere”. Four of the major studios participate in as well as does Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu and other platforms. You link all of your accounts and a movie bought on one, automatically is credited to the other accounts as a purchase.
https://help.moviesanywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150045768...
I don't think any of the other Movies Anywhere apps support sharing/playing the exact same downloaded file, but cross-app downloads are supported (buy on iTunes and download on Xbox Movies or Vudu or whatever).
Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and Goodwill work pretty well for me.
Vudu's current owner, Fandango Media, I have a lot less trust in because they have burnt a few bridges with previous digital movies sites (including one of their same brand; they briefly ran a Fandango branded digital movies app that closed without much notice or refunds, to be rebooted as FandangoNOW months later, in part because they bet on UltraViolet and didn't want to just convert UltraViolet purchases to Movies Anywhere like Vudu and iTunes did during that same time). So far Vudu has still seemed to be doing well under the new ownership, but that distrust in the new owner still sews seeds of doubt.
Speaking of Movies Anywhere, that is still an assurance that I trust when making purchase decisions. Even after UltraViolet died, possibly especially because UltraViolet died (and the way at least iTunes and Vudu handled that transition). Movies Anywhere seems to have won out because it is technologically simpler. Plus the Disney backing seems to work in its favor as Disney has some reason to make sure Movies Anywhere does right by families and doesn't tarnish their brand by association. I'm a little less particular which store I buy from if it supports Movies Anywhere. For movies that still aren't yet Movies Anywhere I'm much more cautious. (This was why I avoided Steam's brief foray into movies, for example. They worked with non-Movies Anywhere studios and it didn't feel all that shocking when the experiment failed and Steam stopped selling movies.)
VHS, DVD, BluRay. If you have the media and a compatible player, you can watch them. You can lend or sell them. That's not very different to a physical book.
Even video-games are a bit like that. It's true that you may lose access to updates the game received after the physical launch but as long as you have the media (BluRays, cartridges, whatever) you can still play them on a compatible console, lend or sell them.
With digital "purchases", you can only do what the platform allows you, for as long as they allow it, for as long as they exist.
For example, a material thing cannot be duplicated a million times in a second. Or transmitted a million miles in an eyeblink.
And knowledge has no mass.
We could probably draw a bunch of other distinctions too.
For movies that YIFY doesn't have, 1337x is a good site.
Also, I'll just note that we never got the 21st century we were promised, which was this - any movie ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ The fundamental problem is that the people who own movie IP rights are truly evil.
That is wildly overstated. The worst they can do to you is not let you watch their entertaining movie. Possibly even after you've paid for it (the subject of the OP) - and in that case the culprit isn't even the IP owner, it's the distributor! And honestly it sounds like the problem with digital ownership is simple fraud that is a) covered by existing law and b) too expensive for anyone to litigate. Maybe a class action could do it.
Here's the really interesting part - you're railing against artificial scarcity. Someone has a good that they could give away, and they aren't, and you're calling them evil for doing that, but I ask you, in all honesty, how else do you make money from movies? If you can't make money from it, how will you convince investors to fund your next movie? (Now substitute "album book software" for movie and ask the same question.)
That's not to say that IP owners can't be "evil". George Lucas believed it was his right to keep changing Star Wars over time, and it's impossible to find a legit copy of Star Wars that is the original theatrical release. That's some 1984-level memory hole bullshit and although the stakes are low, it's evil. Disney is arguably quite evil for a variety of reasons, e.g. it's unholy influence over Congress, it's unhealthy consolidation of huge chunks of the American movie market. But neither of them are evil for using artificial scarcity to profit from their work, because that's the only way to profit from data goods.
(Professional open source tries to square the circle by giving away the data goods but charging for (actually scarce) knowledge. It's a good model but cannot apply to entertainment goods, since viewers don't need scarce knowledge to enjoy a movie.)
Is it, in absolute terms, still a very important concern worth addressing at some point? Sure.
We should start addressing it now. We can work on more than one problem as a species, and moreover, we should. The big problems never stop coming, so focusing 100% of our energies on that means that the smaller problems won’t get solved.
It's a solved problem - torrent your damn entertainment. Movies are just basic files sitting in a directory. Files that can be rewatched whenever you'd like. If you are traveling, copy to your laptop. If you move and haven't quite set up your entertainment center or Internet connection, watch it on a computer. If your friend is interested in something, copy it to their USB drive. No fucking nonsense of some third party capriciously disrupting your life precisely when you're trying to relax.
Any business trying to sell me some productized solution needs to beat torrenting for ease of use. So far none of them have even attempted, because they all end up warping the user experience to appease Hollywood's delusion of control. Just say no.
Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes movies. IMO, our competition law should require vendors to allow re-sale of digital goods. Big benefit for consumers.
I get your point but I don't see how this could actually work. As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes? And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? It's not like it would come with a box that would look used/damaged, or a DVD with scratches on it.
Because it is the same thing, but cheaper.
> And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?
Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy it from ITunes.
Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you recoup, say, 90% of what you paid) would be needed to make people go through hassle of not just buying it "new."
steam does exactly this. you can sell on steam and pay steam their cut, or sell steam keys elsewhere for the same or more money without steam taking a cut.
There are ways to correct this, such as imposing reasonable floors on the sale price, or not permitting the sale of a title for something like 30 days after a transaction.
I'm just saying that these things would need to be factored into any proper solution, ideally via legislation.
Surely you can understand that freely "loaning" digital copies - with none of the friction involved in physical media transport - would de-incentivize purchasing by others.
If you want that, fine. But that will jack up the price of movies, since a lot fewer of them will be sold.
Interesting observation! Digital-only copies traded in a form not comprising the embodiment in a physical "vessel" allow for a theoretically efficient handshake-and-exchange process, but in practice, there's lots of friction involved.
Grievance: "Hey, you can't do that! It's too easy!"
Response: "Easy? Have you ever used an app with a 10-foot UI that's controlled by a TV remote?"
See also: <https://xkcd.com/949/> ("File Transfer").
I don’t see why the same couldn’t be done for other forms of media. Movies, albums, maybe even software licenses.
This system will likely result in a fairly minor decline in VOD revenue due to fewer individuals purchasing their own digital copy because they are once again able to loan works to others and take advantage of the same sharing of works that was taken for granted with physical media. If someone borrows a friends license to a movie to watch it once instead of being forced by the studios to buy or rent their own copy then there will be some lost revenue but I think that revenue only existed in the first place because of the walled garden scheme of owning nothing that exists right now. I also think if VOD licenses actually had value and guaranteed longevity they would be more appealing to consumers.
I'm not a fan of the walled gardens of streaming and the you-own-nothing credo that goes with it. I'm just saying that we need to be fair to all sides with the solution.
Sharing credentials on streaming services has happened exactly because it is the most seamless way to do it.
If you want to evaluate how much the movies/content is really worth, just take the price you pay for a streaming service and divide it by the content you consume.
For example; $5 month, divided by 80 hours of viewing (which seems low for most) and you come to $0.06 per hour, or about $0.12 per movie. Using this conservative estimate, are you going to bother selling a digital movie for less than $0.12? No. But that is precisely why the industry has monopolized the market and added DRM, because they want to keep their fraudulent scheme going to deprive people of their earnings.
But what it’s really about is, as instituting a new form of slavery where you are given everything for “free” just like like slave of all other eras, but you are deprived of far more at a far greater intangible cost for it.
Those aren't "correcting" anything; the internet came along and stole their lunch. What needs correcting is the business model.
A seller would do this to undercut iTunes, making a sale much more likely.
>As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes
Because the seller would likely price it lower than iTunes.
The real question is: how does this affect the digital goods market overall? Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable? Does it make movie production unprofitable?
Second hand items are often
* Lower quality, as they've been used * Lack consumer protections
The first just doesn't apply to digital goods and the second is much more minor (not expecting technical faults to become apparent after a while owning a digital item).
Selling physical goods also has a reasonable time commitment to it, you have to physically move things - there's friction. Digital goods could be sold between regular people near instantaneously. Buying a DVD and selling it after watching is do-able but still some work. Buying a film second hand the moment I press play and selling it on a market straight away after I stop watching seems trivial. I know this is ~rental, but theoretically users only need to buy in total enough copies for the concurrent number of watchers. A big enough market and this could impact how things are released, a "watch anytime" vs a "you really need to be up to date (e.g. sports)" would make a vast difference in total required copies floating around.
The resale value impacts the price you can sell at too. If a customer knows they can easily sell an item for 80% of what they bought it for, they're likely to be willing to pay more for it. However the customer also takes on more risk.
It feels like such a small change, but I can see it making a very large difference.
I doubt it. Does reselling used physical books make the book publishing business unprofitable?
Disregarding piracy [1], if I can sell a digital item and lose access in the process (so that I'm not making duplicates out of thin air), then what's the harm? That it's easier and more efficient to do used sales this way? Well, aren't free market proponents all about efficiency? Or is it just when it doesn't affect their profits?
[1] If we don't disregard piracy, then all bets are off and whatever the publisher wants becomes irrelevant.
Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?
On the one hand, the fact that almost all of the music market and parts of the e-book market for example operate without DRM shows that in those cases the publishers/labels have somewhat resigned themselves to trusting the users to remain relatively honest in that regard, but I suspect that a platform explicitly designed for reselling digital content would still draw some additional scrutiny of the unwanted kind.
Somewhat ironically, DRM would solve that particular problem – at the price of introducing additional restrictions during day-to-day usage that I wouldn't be happy about, though, either.
E.g. looking at my personal music library, it would likely restrict the choice of software players and good luck implementing that kind of personalised DRM with hardware media players which might not even have any kind of internet connection. I've also invasively (albeit losslessly reversible) applied replay gain adjustment to my whole media library because some media players and e.g. my car radio don't support the tagging-based adjustment, and in some rare cases I even had to edit some files [1], neither of which would be possible with DRM-protected files.
And of course it would introduce a continuing dependence on the existence of whoever is providing the DRM in order to access those media files you've supposedly "bought".
[1] The version of 3:47 EST on iTunes turned out to be missing the mouse squeak at the end – because of no DRM, I was able to find a complete, but otherwise slightly worse-sounding version (more surface hiss) on Youtube, lift the squeak off of it, de-noise it, and tack it onto my purchased version without having to lossily transcode that the main bulk of that song again.
The platform and DRM. The single one use of DRM that would make sense, and it's disregarded.
> it would likely restrict the choice of software players
I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand. For music, we've thankfully moved past DRM. For movies, right now you cannot play a movie you bought in one platform in another platform; that's already the status quo, so this would introduce no additional restrictions.
If you tweak and change your music files, that's a derived work, not the original work. You cannot edit up a physical novel and resell it, either. Regardless, music files have no DRM and they are not the topic of discussion.
Sorry, my fault, but I was looking at things from a more general perspective, as my impression is that there's not much of a second-hand market for non-DRM'd digital media, either.
Plus I was bringing up music in order to make a point that I wouldn't want to give up the lack of DRM just so I could more easily disprove any suspicion of copyright violation if I was to sell my music collection.
You're right though that given the situation we're currently in specifically with regards to movies and TV shows, DRM with transferrable licenses would still be better than the current situation we're in.
What you and many are are also missing, including the author, is that the whole system is a fraud because the prices we asked to pay (I refuse) are fraudulent themselves because of it. You are “buying” a movie at a price, precisely because the whole system is rigged in a fraudulent manner where you are not able to actually own it and you are not able to sell it, and you can’t rent it or even lend it; therefore it is not actually a market price, it is a monopoly price based on cartel control and total cornering of the market. It’s essentially no different than the fraudulent price of diamonds or any of the frauds that have been prosecuted where people corner and manipulate the market of, e.g., onions, famously.
Some may have heard the phrase “you will own nothing and be happy” expressed by your global rulers. This topic is precisely manifestation of that and people don’t seem to realize it. You own nothing related to media that you think you own and you think you are happy for it, without yet realizing what a fraud and trap it is, even as the encirclement of slavery progresses all around us.
Especially in America there are many people who, if you were to look at closely, literally own not a single thing they think they have; and in many cases own less than they are even worth. Every single thing can be yanked out from under people like that on a whim … legally. A recent famous example of that is the Tesla that was disabled because Tesla didn’t like something. Slaves of the past were also “happy and didn’t own anything” since their healthcare was “free” and their groceries were “free” and their housing was “free”, etc.; all provided for “free” by government of and by the feudal lord or plantation owners.
In case people have forgotten the most relevant case of what the author writes about; remember when Amazon simply deleted a book from users’ kindles without even asking, let alone receiving consent? This was about 4 years ago now. That book that Amazon just disappeared off people’s devices with no evidence of their actions other than some coincidental proof of purchase people had retained … 1984.
It's no different to the rest of them. If Stadia hasn't already taught anyone that it is a scam then I don't know what will.
That said, the situation is quite a bit worse now as the modern DRM is harder to circumvent and geolocking more granular than ever before. But the intent to lock us down was always there from the movie industry, just not the capability until recently.
To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications... Let's just say Blu-ray is stuck in an odd place where the underlying technology isn't really that defeated, even though hackers have made keeping up with their stolen device keys from hacked players very impractical for the Blu-ray Disc Association. (Revoking a drive key requires a 90-day heads up for manufacturers to roll out new keys for the effected model, which means that if hackers manage to steal 4 device keys per year... from over a decade and a half of different players, many not receiving updates anymore...)
It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer.
Given the current state of things, I wouldn’t count Blurays as media you actually physically own.
You’re permitted to watch them, for now, but there’s no guarantee that will remain true 20+ years in the future.
https://aacsla.com/aacs-specifications/
Ultimately, if all the manufacturers decide to stop sale, there's nothing you can do about that. I'm not too worried about Blu-ray yet, as it is still in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and I don't think gamers will be excited about losing physical media as an option (considering PS5 with Disc has outsold the Disc-free version, like, 4-1).
Even then, I'm still not 100% confident that I'll be able to access everything in 25 years time.
I have no reason the believe that Sony and Microsoft won't shut them down like they already have done with the PS3 store.
https://www.winehq.org/
https://lutris.net/
https://www.playonlinux.com/en/
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64
It doesn't seem like that. It is like that.
Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin. We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value continues because we've normalised it.
This is a bad follow-on example because artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable. Making an actually worse model in the processor case has far more fixed costs than re-using the existing pipeline. The business wouldn’t be viable selling all of the processors at lower nor would it be as strong leaving out the lower income segment.
The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all and the 8-core version costs 200% more due to the volume lost.
Finally, this ignores that processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch. So if they had proceeded to treat it as an 8-core it would have had thermal issues and an 80% reduced life.
Sometimes wage theft is what it takes to make a business viable, so I don't really buy this as an argument.
> processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch
This is a better argument
> The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all
You probably do, just maybe their performance doesn't double every year. I would say that's probably an interesting tradeoff to make, depending on how catastrophic one thinks the state of the world is today.
No, you are making up a false dichotomy. There are many alternative worlds, including the ones where CPUs have no proprietary "intellectual property".
Not "deliberately". We build 8-core CPUs, discover four of them are a bit sub-spec, and blow e-fuses to disable those and sell it as 4-core. It's possible that those four disabled cores would be just fine, but I'm not selling you a chip that gets its sums wrong sometimes.
I guess people complained about how chip manufacturers sold CPUs rated at 25MHz that could be overclocked to 33MHz, but they too were not guaranteed to meet spec even if they worked.
I mean, you make a good point on reliability/quality, but there are surely cases where to create a product differential perfectly good (and known to be good) devices are crippled.
That seems ever less ethically defensible as we move into scarcity.
This is why overclocking used to work - if even a small proportion of the chips tested were good to 25MHz, that was a 25MHz batch, guaranteed good to 25MHz. If you got a "lucky penny" that'd go to 33MHz as per the design spec, then good for you! But it wouldn't be guaranteed to do that.
It's almost as if there's a consistent economic process that leads companies to do this kind of thing again and again. We could call it "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall".
Which is why some of us were rooting for the somewhat-more-consumer-friendly HD-DVD. In retrospect, given the choice, there was no way in hell the industry was going with a "more consumer-friendly" anything.
The encryption wasn't cracked, it was subverted by poor security practices.
If Xing hadn't screwed up, it may have been another decade before it was possible to rip a DVD, waiting for some other manufacturer to screw up.
At the time DVD started prolifering more and more player and TVs had full support for NTSC, PAL and SECAM, but you could still be stuck with some hardware only supporting standard and your DVDs would be black and white or scrambled on the display side.
Especially as late as when the DVD came.
And the purpose of it wasn't geo-restrictions either.
Living in the SECAM region and wanting to watch US/british stuff makes it a lot more prominent issue that if you're in the PAL or NTSC area for instance.
Adding support for signals used in other regions to an analog CRT display meant adding more circuitry, so this feature was largely relegated to very high end sets and professional video monitors.
With digital flat panels, those analog signals were now being captured with an analog-to-digital converter. How to translate the sequence of numbers representing a formerly analog signal into something usable by the panel could now be defined in software, or even very compact digital hardware. This makes it more cost-effective to just produce one version of the decoder that works in all regions.
DVD region locking didn't need to be hacked away; it operates purely on the honor system. There are 8 regions, and a DVD contains a single byte specifying which regions it should be allowed to be played in. If the bit for your region is clear, you can play the DVD.
Or, of course, you can just ignore that byte, and play the DVD.
> Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers.
Depends a little on the consumers, really. Region-locking enabled them to sell cheaper copies in lower-wealth areas, the same way that movie ticket prices were lower. Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more or gotten movies later.
You are missing the most likely option: they would have "pirated" those movies. So again, the geo-locking is not realy for the good of the consumer but to ensure every last bit of profit can be extracted.
Meanwhile, the main thing selling things cheaper to designated poor reason does is keep those regions from demanding fair payment for their work thus making them no longer poor regions that can be exploited.
Region-locking on Blu-Ray is 100% unnecessary. Fortunately, it has become increasingly common for discs to ship with no region restrictions.
Of course all of this is moot when you're just slapping that disc in an optical drive and ripping it to a NAS, instead of using an "official" player.
Also, a 1.2x playback speed for the video is not even that noticeable - certainly a much better experience than no video. I intentially watch a lot of video contents sped up like that, even movies sometimes. Audio needs processing though to not pitch shift.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controve...
[Even then, a Processing Key isn't nearly as interesting as a Device Key, plenty of which have been leaked since without much attention. Blu-ray has so many keys...]
It's easy nowadays to get a DVD/Bluray player that is multi-region, if only because of an aftermarket mod. E.g. I have a Samsung one that happily plays both media from any region.
Was region locking really that big of a deal?
No. Not in the US either, at least. Even if there was a part of the world where it was a big deal, I imagine if you were so big a cinephile for it to matter, you would know how to deal with it.
when governments ban imports / exports, its a matter of public scrutiny. So is protectionism.
But apparently we allow a private cartel to do the same thing to an enrire industry with no pushback.
This affects smart IoT devices, TVs, cars, etc. My xiaomi light does not pair with the app because its was meant for chinese market, and the guy that sold it to me claims its not hia problem either.
The only way out of this mess is a law to properly define digital ownership.
If you want a weired half renting half ownership, that should have to be explicit contract with a signature and maybe lawyers involved, so you know what you are signing up for.
I think you're really stretching this one. These were dictated be the equipment of the regions. This was just as much of a pain in the ass to the studios as anyone else. If theStudios wanted to sell VHS in these markets, they HAD to make them in the format that would work in that region.
DVD/Blu-ray region was definitely something added on top of format limitations as DVDs were still PAL/NTSC, but by the time Blu-ray and HD arrived, those format limitations were less of an issue. It was all about the region locking at that point.
Second issue is if you bought it trough a service and keept it there, then you definitely not the owner...
Maybe this is true from the perspective of the license but it's not something Apple enforces through tech. For example, I have a two iTunes accounts for two countries. I can purchase content through both and use that content anywhere without restriction. They make it a big pain because you can't switch your account to a different geo after it's created but with multiple accounts your content isn't actually restricted.
This is currently untrue for Apple/itunes and that's the only point they made.
There are currently no hoops for anyone to jump through unless you want to sidestep the law or licensing agreements, which is another discussion entirely.
Potential buyers still have to consider the original point however, as even if Apple doesn't enforce it currently, there is no assurance that it won't in the future. And there is no guarantee that it's gonna be the same if theyre buying on another platform.
Didn't Google and Amazon have competing platforms for example?
Yep, thank sucks. You can thank brexit for that. AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU (so if you were in Germany it would have worked). This meant that on holiday (coming from UK to Spain) a few years back I was able to watch F1 live on my phone via the NowTV/Sky app. This year - geo restricted.
Streaming services are a bit of a special case: they can have different access in different places, but the location that counts is the users home location. So e.g. a national sports league can license exclusive rights to different streaming services in different countries, and in your home country there is only one choice, but if you sign up with them and then travel, you still can access it, even though the "exclusive" contract for that country is with someone else.
F1TV also added DRM this season, so open source clients for it no longer work. You're allowed to view up to 6 simultaneous cameras with your subscription (There's the main feed, the map view, the data view, and 20 onboard cameras). But there's no easy way to do this now aside from having 6 chrome windows with all their chonky borders taking up space, or using 6 different devices.
RaceControl [0] is an amazing open source client that offered split screen and synchronization of the videos (F1's own app has the onboard cameras about 20s ahead of the main feed, which means you either had to manually delay them all yourself or you get spoilers). Now it only works for archivee races.
Which is ridiculous because someone with an HDMI splitter can still strip the DRM and stream it illegally.
I'm probably going to end my subscription after this season and switch to watching pirated streams, because I'm being punished for having the gall to be a paid subscriber.
[0] https://github.com/robvdpol/RaceControl
In case robvdpol is an HN member, thanks for all the work you put into RaceControl. It was the best way to watch the sport.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/cross-border-portability-of-onli...
Obviously it would be better if we could be properly logged in into multiple accounts at the same time (The play store on android does support switching easily), but at least I can now (I think since iOS 15) get app updates while staying logged in in my main account.
Piracy returns?
It never gone. 4Tb USB HD + Good Torrent Tracker = All problems solved.
Sounds a lot like a problem that NFTs could fix
Why would anyone ever pay full price for a "new" game if there were "second hand" copies that were completely identical to a new version available for less?
I don't care about EA or Activision losing out on that 10th private jet, but second hand sales would absolutely hurt small creators doing great work.
Another way to improve fairness to stores could be to allow them to charge a "transfer fee" of perhaps 5-10% of original MSRP for transferring any used content.
In the EU we have an interesting law regarding that, if you subscribe to Netflix in Germany and then travel to another EU country you'll still get the same catalog as in your home country.
If you have a US account and travel to the EU you'll get access to the catalog of the country you are in.
Which, as I've recently noticed, in turn has the interesting (and from the consumer point of view somewhat unfortunate) side effect that if a particular online release is pulled from distribution, it becomes completely unavailable (at least through legal channels) from one moment to the next.
Whereas with physical media first of all being pulled from distribution doesn't automatically mean that all existing stock in all stores worldwide is being recalled (it can happen, but the process is not as intrinsically linked as it is with digital distribution), and secondly in any case there's always the second hand market to completely legally fall back to, so the onset of unavailability is a more gradual process, especially for more popular media where there's a sizeable second hand market offering available.
With digital media on the other hand you more or less immediately have to fall back to under-the-table sources if that happens…
That being said, I've never chosen the "buy" option on a digital streaming movie.
I wonder how it works on the backend. When you "buy" a digital movie, does the publisher get a royalty? Then for the credit the provider could just eat that extra cost since it likely to be very rare. It still kind of sucks that the publisher can reap the royalty payments for all the "sales" and then turn around and pull the license.
In practice this usually happens, but I'm not surprised nobody commits to it in writing.
I know in the two instances of video services I can think of shutting down in the UK, Sainsburys gave customers Ultraviolet/Google Play codes and refunds, and the BBC Store gave Amazon credit rounding up to the nearest £10, so I actually got more than I'd spent back.
There will always at least 2 (N) groups of people who agree/prefer Nth direction
There are other definitions of buy a movie, e.g. buy the IP so you're allowed to make sequels.
It's a massive degradation of consumer rights you had guaranteed with physical media.
Hard to get companies to change when people don't even realize the problem.
It works so well that a lot of people think companies can't sell software without giving the right to unlimited copies, even if a book or dvd are trivial counterexamples.
Basically the button 'buy' changes to license
While streaming media has some notable conveniences in certain cases, the downsides to the consumer seem to outweigh those benefits. It's as if there is a coordinated assault on ownership rights across many industries which is being led by the ubiquity of actually-broadband internet connectivity, the streaming technology that exists across many industries (gaming, movies, music and even general software) paired with corporation's insatiable desire for growth at all legal (even some not) costs. Because they now can, they will.
As one who prefers freedom of use to maximum convenience I think it wise to purchase physical media when possible and back it up in a manner which is suitable to your long-term accessibility needs. Maybe I'm just a crabby old guy...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18607418/andino-v-apple...
>Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service
mean that you can download a copy of the content you bought? As far as I'm concerned, that's about as close to "owning" as it gets, when it comes to digital media.
If you buy, say, a pair of pliers from a hardware store, and then instead of taking them home you leave them at the store and come back to use them every time you have something that needs plying, and then eventually the store needs to make room for other products and so throws your pliers away, you have no one to blame but yourself for not taking them home for safekeeping when you had the chance.
This analogy could break down if the content has DRM. I don't know if it does, or if it does when it stops working, but that's a different discussion from "Amazon deleted my movie".
Oh, and if the hardware store goes out of business you can never access the pliers again because it turns out they were leased from the plier manufacturer.
Frequently when streaming content providers say "download" it is more accurately described as downloading a pre-cached version of the stream that only works on proprietary software which is reliant on a semi-regular internet connection. For example, you can "download" netflix/amazon/youtube content, but it can only be viewed on the app, and the app must be periodically reconnected to the internet.
Serious question: who buys digital movies? I don't really know anyone who even buys movies at all anymore, but if they do it's likely they prefer a physical copy anyway. There's just so much content out there that the number of people that even care to rewatch a movie they've seen feels like it's really low.
I have a Mac mini that exists almost exclusively to be the backup for all my digital content should I ever need it. All the movies are downloaded to a 14TB external drive which is then cloned to another 16TB external drive and also fully backed up to Backblaze.
Thanks
Note that this doesn't remove the DRM or anything like that. This is simply storing a local copy of the iTunes-protected video on your Mac. But if the movie isn't available to stream anymore or your internet is down, you can use Home Sharing on the AppleTV to connect to your Mac and stream the downloaded version.
Same reason that when I go to rent from RedBox and they offer the rental for $1 and let me keep the DVD for $2 or whatever I'll just buy.
It's much more likely that my entire Amazon/Apple/Whatever account gets banned for something than they revoke access to more than a small subset of the movies, so for me the risk is worth the reward.
I'm the sort of person that like to rewatch things. As a kid I rewatched Star Wars so many times that I knew the lines in the entire movie by heart, these days the Big Lebowski is comfort food that I'll throw on when I'm bored. So the "rent" option on iTunes never made sense to me. And my concern with something like Netflix is--will it be there when I want to rewatch it?
If Apple ever gets out of the game I hope they give an out for people who have bought things, but I'm not optimistic. I'm less worried about them pulling content they lost a license to because I hope that licensing for purchase is a different world than licensing for free streaming.
(Also, remember that this is exactly the same for app stores. I did have an app pulled that I paid for. So it does happen, I'm just hopeful that it doesn't very often.)
EDIT: I just looked and I own two copies of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (a mistake since I already owned it, and later saw it on sale and bought it without checking my list. It had changed hands and was being sold by a different distributor.) I searched for it on a non-logged-in computer and its not available to purchase at all. While this is a guarantee of nothing, it suggests that Apple's licensing with the movie rights owners may retain rights beyond the termination of the license.
I also haven't noticed any missing or anything, but my understanding when I click the "buy" is I'm not buying to OWN the content like I'd expect with a DVD/VHS, but buying the right to watch it as long as the content is available as many times and whenever I want.
I personally think people are clinging too much onto the description of "buying" that comes with physical goods, not digital goods.
It's also cheaper if you have a family and don't intend to watch it together at once, or even in a single day. It's also more flexible regarding which device can play the movie (iTunes rentals were bound to the device clicking the play button lady time I tried)
It's way more niche than a few decades ago, but there's a bunch of cases where buying is a better choice.
No, there's always another option: not watching the movie.
As to why people who buy prefer to buy physical? Because there's actual ownership. I haven't even as much as investigated my options for buying 4K content, because I am 100% sure it doesn't exist in a form that's not hooked into some DRM system (AKA worse than useless). With physical content, at least you retain the control.
To an extent, yes. Practically, you have control. Legally, you have still purchased a licence to view that content on that media in limited scenarios.
You can't (legally) copy it, or display it in public (for free or money).
I buy digital films occasionally, only the ones that I know I’ll want to re-watch every year or two. It’s a much nicer experience to call one up on a whim than it is to find out which (if any) streaming service currently has them, sign up, then cancel. That’s worth the $10 or $15 I paid, especially considering that the wine consumed during each viewing matches or exceeds the same cost, depending on how many folks I’m watching them with.
At the very least, I know it'll be a good movie instead of taking a gamble with an unknown quantity.
Property developer leases a beachfront land for 99 years and builds a resort. You book a vacation at the resort. You enjoy the facilities -- pool, spa, restaurants etc., during your stay. At the end of your stay, you lose the privileges of staying at the resort/using the facilities.
Even if you bought a timeshare in the resort, you still do not own it. Heck, the property developer also doesn't own it (remember, they just hold the 99 yr lease)!
Electronic-sell-through/Download-to-own is pretty much that esp. if the player is controlled by the platform. You may download the artefact (or the player software may do it for you), but playability is dependent on the platform still holding rights. This is implementation dependent and you have to look through the Terms of Service to really be sure.
All streamers who license third-party content do it for a limited period (from a few months to several months or a year). I wouldn't be surprised if many of the platforms have licensed the "Download to own/Electronic-sell-through" titles only for a finite period. Those titles will go away / become unplayable at some point in the future (unless you downloaded them from a DRM-free platform). When the eventual consumer backlash occurs, the platforms will point to their ToS.
And to add to this complexity, copyright rules are quite different across jurisdictions.
Data is different, it is infinite. You can copy it infinitely at nearly zero cost. You can transmit it to anyone anywhere in the world at nearly zero cost. Any attempt to own bits fails because of the inherently infinite nature of data. Any notion of property is imaginary, an illusion. Intellectual property degenerates into number ownership, it's that ridiculous.
If you follow this logic to its conclusion:
> the player is controlled by the platform
Then intellectual property will lead to the end of free computing as we know it today. We cannot have computers that do what we want while simultaneously preventing us from copying data some rightsholder "owns". The copyright industry will lobby the government until free computing is illegal and all computers come pwned from the factory so that we can only execute "legal" code. This also goes hand in hand with government desire to control cryptography, paving the way for total surveillance and oppression.
Taking your point about "free computing", I wonder why we haven't had the equivalent of open source software and the success we have seen over the last few decades hasn't spawned open content movement where we could get great movies, music, books etc., Sure, there are pockets of availability that is an exception, but not the kind of mainstream success that we have seen with open source software.
What's the legality that stops this from working?
Generally speaking neither of these parts are legal in most territories without rightsholder permission.
happy to hear if my math is off and learn more about the pricing structures
Right now, I'm dealing with unrelated problems with my warehouse so the service is only partly functional. In my opinion the basic model, with true ownership, should be completely legal under copyright law.
Movie Studio offers (what is effectively) a lease of Digital Media to Digital Retailer. Digital Retailer is then allowed to sublease copies of Digital Media to End Consumer. When Digital Retailer's lease ends, so does End Consumer's sublease.
How it seems like it OUGHT to work:
Movie Studio offers resale rights of Digital Media to Digital Retailer. Digital Retailer then sells copies of Digital Media to End Consumer. When Digital Retailer's right to resell ends, End Consumer is allowed to procure/store their copy of Digital Media.
> than buying the movie
it's "then". probably. :)
Also, for most physical movies, they had a "+ digital" code included that lets you redeem a digital copy of the movie too. So I can stream most of them on my laptop anyway if I'm away from home or something.
Physical media for movies is super underrated, at least for the situation in my country. It's often cheaper than "buying" the digital version! I can even go to my local used bookstore/Goodwill and find tons of Blu-Rays for cut rate prices. And then I own it forever, and it's 100% legal.
The discs look like trash. Noisy, grainy, just bad. The iTunes versions look phenomenal.
It would be nice if there was a way to know how good the quality of a particular release is before buying it. Reviews I read don't seem to go into a lot of detail. I realize it's probably somewhat subjective and hard to put into words how an image looks.
AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In this case, you prefer the DNR - but if you read online forums, most collectors hate it and consider it a crime against humanity to have ever been invented.
Edit: I'm bemused that my subjective personal preferences have made multiple people this upset.
Essentially grain is a lot of detail that video compression algorithms have been taught to ignore/remove. H.264 was notorious for virtually removing all grain making it impossible to have authentic film grain on YouTube for years. (I work in advertising).
Exactly like you said - grain is a common first victim of video compression.
The other curious thing - modern movies that are shot on film / have grain actually get it removed during VFX stages. You have to do it so you can integrate CGI - grain is usually “sampled” first by the compositing software (The Foundry’s Nuke in 99% of occasions) and removed since the CGI image won’t have any grain from the CG renderer so you have to integrate it onto a denoised image. You then re add it at the end!
Using the same software you then re-add the sampled noise back onto the image, and since you’ve now integrated the CGI, the noise goes on top of everything helping it all get integrated.
Just saying this because you are right - using noise reduction to remove film grain for release is considered a sin (I myself would agree with the sentiment). Yet actually most films today will go through some denoise stage in VFX. Which is an interesting thing to think about - we actually remove the grain for a lot of the work then re add to keep the filmic texture.
The other interesting thing is how beautiful and different grain is when it’s from silver halvide film. I’d dare say it’s truly gorgeous to watch. Such film was used in the 1900-1930s age and if you watch a great print or restoration of that time the effect is quite stunning. I believe John Ford’s Stagecoach is a good example that should be relatively easy to find.
unfortunately I think the same epoch has lost immense amounts of film due to the flammability of the materials (which is extremely high, as seen in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds). Which is why every once in a while you’ll get a huge fire in some film archive and so much of it is lost.
Yes, but it wouldn't be used across an entire film. Likely just in flashbacks and other dramatic scenes, the way it's applied to digital productions today.
Similar to how in the 2000's, hipster bands added photographic pops and crackle to their tracks as an artistic measure.
Modern digital music can be completely clean and flawless. But it can also have some weird artifacts that can only exist digitally, like aliasing, stuttering from a corrupt file or skipping CD player, compression artifacts while streaming or from very low bitrate sources.
And nowadays we're seeing genres like Hyperpop, Glitch Hop, and Future Bass which all play with these artifacts.
Flume even has a song[0] where you can hear the distinctive whine of an improperly grounded USB audio interface. It's inserted into a silent part of the song, so it is 100% intentional and not an accident in the recording. I like to think he's giving a little wink-wink to other music producers.
It's on the "My Name is Flume Mixtape" album, which itself is a great example of intentional digital artifacts in a creative use. There's lots of aliasing on things that shouldn't, and things that "should" alias like square waves sliding into the 10khz range are perfectly alias free.
[0] Amber at 1:51. The ringing sound that comes in after the first bass hit is also some sort of ground noise, but very distorted.
https://youtu.be/RM2cNhVep40
Also most modern synths have noise oscillators for this purpose (eg Serum, Pigments, etc, etc).
Things just sound too clean and perfect/boring if you don't use some kind of saturation/noise or distortion for ear candy.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure Skrillex puts CamelPhat on his master bus. The music video for one of his songs was his Ableton set and it was shown in there.
I just wonder if the reason it sounds like it's missing something is because subtle noise and saturation sound objectively better to human ears, or if it's just because that's the precedent that's been set and we've grown fond of it. Early music was recorded to tape by necessity, and the digital era tries to bring those subtle distortions back to sound like it. Even a teen who has never listened to older music recorded to tape still listens to modern music that tries to sound like it was recorded to tape or passed through saturating transformers.
I think the uptick of intentional digital artifacts in music shows that we grow fond of what we're used to experiencing, even if it's considered a negative in an objective sense. But we can't ever really prove that without a separate society that somehow skipped the entire analog music (or film) era.
Also yeah Skrillex really breaks all the typical rules but his mixes sound fantastic (or garbage, depending on your opinion. His stuff is really divisive). The hosts of The Mastering Show podcast thought his youtube video was fake because of how much saturation and limiting he uses. I'm pretty certain it's totally real.
There's nothing that would generate perfect sine/sawtooth waves or perfect, undistorted echoes. So anything else just sounds unnatural/robotic.
I think it's the same with film grain, looking at flat perfectly polished surfaces can seem boring and unnatural to the eye.
In the YouTube case, the low encoding bitrates make it really difficult to encode fine detail. (Blu-ray discs use H.264 as well, and at those bitrates it reproduces film grain well.)
> Which is an interesting thing to think about - we actually remove the grain for a lot of the work then re add to keep the filmic texture.
This is a great point. Even with older "remastered" movies, analog artifacts like film grain are sometimes removed during cleanup and then recreated during mastering.
https://waveletbeam.com/index.php/av1-film-grain-synthesis
For example, compare the WebP and AVIF (VP8/AV1) compression artefacts with JPEG (and MPEG).
With WebP and AVIF all textures and low contrast details tend to be erased or smoothed out, preserving only high contrast parts of the image.
The JPEG image may have some visible ringing and block edge artefacts, but at least the textures and fine details are preserved!
But essentially, losless compression is all about throwing away impercetible details. Noise is an interesting case here because the presence and fequency of the noise (the texture) is significant to the viewer but having the noise match 1:1 is not. Which is why newer codecs remove the noise and then re-add generated noise during decoding.
Just something to remind us that there are pros and cons to everything.
https://www.google.com/search?q=review+picture+quality+blura...
Film grain from pre-digital era movies is a divisive issue. All older movies originally had some amount of film grain from the analog film. Some people like it and want it there on purpose. Some people prefer the movie run through a de-noise filter. The pro-grain people claim this removes fine detail. The anti-grain people say why the hell would you want it there on purpose. Some modern movies even add film grain on purpose. See Disney's Luca as an example. I personally don't care for it but it usually doesn't bother me as long as it's not extreme.
But seriously, HTPCs of yesteryear are essentially dead due to Windows' terrible handling of Dolby Vision, Atmos, DTS:X, and HDR. Even though there are players that will allow you to get much better quality out of your source file on PC, the hassle of licensing and HDR modes is just absolutely not worth it.
I've heard that you can get efficient re-encodings, but that typically means torrenting it from somewhere. I'm not aware of a way to make high quality re-encodings locally without lots and lots of tweaking/testing/re-encoding and it takes a particular set of skills.
14TB+ hard drives are not too bad (~$235) so that would be 210 movies right there (though you are going to need to "burn" 1 drive for parity). The other option is to more liberally interpret copyright laws and buy the disk then pirate a copy that matches your requirements. Seeing how there are many people out there just doing the pirating step and that you aren't running a pay-for-plex scheme then I can't imagine you running afoul of law enforcement.
You don't even need backups for this, really. If you own the discs and lose the digital version, just copy it on the disc again. If you acquired it via other means, then... it should be possible to replace most such data. Even if you do choose to make backups, then that doubles your cost per terabyte at most.
Storage is really cheap, assuming you're fine with something that isn't a fancy ZFS/RAID array.
It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some custom tuned settings and has really good results from my experience.
If you have a stand alone player, however, perhaps that trick still works. Just press stop, then press stop again, then press play. It skips the warnings, pre roll stuff, menus, and just plays the movie.
I get a better quality experience and no one is probing my psyche.
I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I can't vouch for this at all.
I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me about the experience was how much worse it was from what I remembered.
You get a bunch of prefatory material (copyright infringement warnings, trailers, bizarre PSAs, etc.) that you have to individually figure out how to skip through. (The menu button doesn't always let you jump straight to the menu; you might get a No symbol[1] with a message "operation not permitted".)
Instead of being mostly pure content that gets streamed at you over a dumb pipe, every disc, like many Web sites today that haven't abandoned practices from the age of lame Flash intros, is crafted to be a package that provides an "experience"—a bunch of silly flourishes injected by way of themable menus, etc. that're supposed to be consistent with the look and feel and mood of the movie. In practice, it makes navigation cumbersome at best, and as far as their tastefulness goals go, they tend to have a half-life of, I dunno, a year or two, because they don't age well at all. The same can be argued for movies generally, but the timescale for aging out is somehow much longer (decades rather). Plus movies have, like, plot and stuff to capture your attention.
Several of the Blu-Rays I played from Universal Pictures had an obnoxious tendency to go to screensaver if the movie is paused for more than a minute or so. Apparently it uses some clever trick to abuse the Blu-Ray format to do this. (You can see on the player's hardware LED readout that it has jumped into a 1–2 minute video sequence played on a loop.) Most obnoxiously, it breaks the prime design constraint of a screensaver, which is that when you return to your device, it should get rid of itself. No amount of button pressing is apparently sufficient to get this to happen, and the only way I found to get back to the movie was to stop it entirely, re-enter through the menu that begins playing it from the beginning, and then seeking forward to roughly the spot that I remembered the movie was at when I originally paused it. Fucking ridiculous.
Turning on subtitles can be an exercise in frustration. Are you allowed to use the "Subtitle" button on the remote? Do you have to navigate the themed menu by following your nose[2] to find the relevant setup screen where you can turn them on? Is it perhaps hidden behind the "Audio" button on the remote? This adventure can be yours. With one Criterion disc, I ended up giving up upon realizing that it was actually available on a streaming service that we subscribe to (which wasn't listed when I first picked up the disc).
1. Aka the "do not" sign <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol>
2. <https://www.w3.org/wiki/FollowYourNose>
I had a whole paragraph in that post (but that I ended up deleting) about how Blu-Ray would be great if "Blu-Ray" were as simple as a single-file filesystem with an open media container format at the root, burned/pressed onto a BD physical disc (or some other high-density optical media). Like the digital equivalent of a reel (or set of reels) of 35mm film. But that's not what it is.
other than that I 100% agree with you and have a collection as well.
I don't have gear that can decode Atmos, unfortunately, so I haven't tried ceiling speakers myself - only at movie theaters. Why not 7.1.2? =)
Surely, this is just a current business decision of Netflix. As internet speeds increase, the bit rate is almost inevitably going to catch up (most likely if Netlix et al decide to charge a premium for it!)
Good luck winning this with Amazon, Apple and Disney on the other side.
No. I bought a revokable, limited access right to see a particular performance.
Should we not use the term "buy" here as well?
It's still copyright infringement if, for example, you buy a Blu-Ray disc and then open a movie theatre and start playing that disc publicly. The license you bought with the disc doesn't extend that far.
Whether you "buy" a movie via a disc or a streaming service, you're really just buying a limited license to display the movie along with either physical or digital delivery.
We had a word in the olden days for buying a limited license to watch a film - we called it "renting".
Buying a VHS was still a limited license. You weren't allowed to reproduce it and sell the reproductions. You weren't allowed to then operate a movie theater around your off the shelf VHS tapes. You weren't entitled to a new tape once the tape wore out.
Yes, but no one would take the physical tape away when Target or their distributor lost the right to sell the video tape.
Do I know this? Are you assuming I bothered to read the ticket ahead of time? I bought a ticket to the Red Hot Chili Peppers 2022 Tour. I should be able to go to all the tour, right?
Oh wait, you're telling me there's text on the ticket I should have read to understand it was only for one location and one evening? You really expected me to read all that legalese?
> With a digital movie, ostensibly buying lets you view it whenever you want wherever you want in perpetuity but that's not actually the case.
Ugh. I bet I would of had to read something to understand the limitations of what I was buying. I can't believe companies expect people to read about the things people buy these days, totally taking advantage of everyone by putting knowledge behind words.
There is an actual legal concept of an undue burden and that is exactly what having to read through many pages of fine print is. If you don't actually own digital content it should be highlighted very clearly, while placing a minimal undue burden on the consumer. Otherwise, it's deceptive.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0B213HG4N/ref=atv_hm...
I see "By ordering or viewing, you agree to our Terms[link to terms]" Huh maybe I should look at what I'm buying before I click checkout.
https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...
Hmm, what's relevant to this. Ah, Digital Content, generally.
The Service may allow you to: (i) ignoring subscription talk (ii) ignoring rental talk (iii) purchase Digital Content for on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time ("Purchased Digital Content")
So obviously even "buying" the movie only gives it to me for an indefinite period of time. I wonder when it might not become available then. Let's scan more section headers to see if it talks about that.
i. Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.
I don't get how this is an "undue burden" to read this before forking over $14. It is not fine print, the default styles render it pretty clearly on my screen but you can feel free to resize it to render however you wish. Its not a long document. It has obvious sections. The link to this document was a few pixels away from the Buy button on my screen and was easily visible. It took me less than a minute to understand what I would be buying if I clicked "Buy". They're not hiding this away behind some far away unrelated site or only giving you this after requesting it by mail with legal letterhead. This is pretty out there and open.
To me, suggesting that people can't read this might as well be the same as arguing people shouldn't be required to read what's on the face of a ticket. The information is right there, it is not hidden in the slightest.
> Event tickets are an established practice
Maybe to you, but maybe I've never bought one before.
If you're going by "event tickets have been sold for a while", well, so have digital movies with DRM that can make them unavailable. This isn't something that just came out this year, I bought a movie from Amazon Unbox sixteen years ago which had these limitations. How long does it have to exist before it is an "established practice"?
definition of fine print: inconspicuous details or conditions printed in an agreement or contract, especially ones that may prove unfavorable
definition of inconspicuous: not clearly visible or attracting attention; not conspicuous.
You can note that you had to click on the "Terms" link to get to those...
> I don't get how this is an "undue burden"
If you have to read 20 paragraphs of text for every digital movie purchase, it is considered an undue burden to me. You can calculate the amount of reading time that would take. I'm not going to.
I'm not going to argue with you anymore as I feel I'm wasting my time but in short I don't want to live in a dystopia where companies start foisting time wasting tasks on me until I give in and accept their unfavorable terms on everything.
It is a link probably millimeters away from the Buy button on the screen to read before even clicking Buy, and then Buy asks you if you did read it before it charges your card. I don't know how that's "not clearly visible". If there wasn't a link on the page, or was tiny and at the very bottom of the page, sure I might agree but that's not what's going on here.
I guess its "fine print" when you don't want to read it but I'm just overly reductive when I don't want to read it. That must be the distinction.
> If you have to read 20 paragraphs of text for every digital movie purchase
I mean, you don't have to every time. This argument seems to be coming from an emotional rather than logical argument. These terms don't change very often and they're very similar for every digital movie platform. Once you've skimmed it on Amazon there's not really a point to reading it again. I'll look over the ingredients list on a food product once but it's not like every time I eat a Snickers I re-examine the ingredients label.
Do you really not bother reading contracts when you agree to them?
Your main point is essentially that consumers shouldn't have to actually pay attention in the slightest to what it is they're buying. That they have practically no mental capacity to glance over the terms of a service they're agreeing to when they click "agree".
> I don't want to live in a dystopia where companies start foisting time wasting tasks on me until I give in and accept their unfavorable terms on everything.
Cool. Nobody is forcing you to buy these movies. I haven't bought a digital movie in decades precisely for these reasons. But I don't act like it is this massive undue burden for me to read about the thing I'm buying. It took one minute for me to scan that document and understand what buying a movie on Amazon is like.
And how do you know what the limits of the ticket or the license are? You read the document you're agreeing to when buying the ticket.
A better analogy, that does not involve a one-time event, would be a lifetime pass to concert venue. You buy this pass, only to have the venue refuse to honor it a few years later.
This is a bad analogy. A better one would be, your bought a car from me, and three years from now, I tow your car away and do not compensate you for taking the car. Because buyer beware, caveat emptor, etc...
If you "buy" a car, and don't get a title, then yeah sure I guess the title holder can take it away. You didn't own it; you never had the title for it.
The issue is telling someone this:
Rent ($2.99) Rent HD ($3.99) Buy ($13.99)
So I pick buy, and it sure looks like I own it because the other two choices were presented as rentals. The buy option really is a "long term rental" and should have a very easy to read disclaimer under it that says: "Buy access until 12/31/2029". That way the consumer does not conclude it is a purchase, like a DVD or VHS that I own until it wears out, or forever, whichever comes first.
> If you "buy" a car, and don't get a title, then yeah sure I guess the title holder can take it away. You didn't own it; you never had the title for it.
I bought my car with a loan. I did get a copy of the title, with the lien-holder listed on the back. The car is mine, but I cannot sell it without the lien-holder releasing the lien. Legally, I do own the car. It is very much mine. If I fail to make payments, the lien holder may go to court, and the court can allow them to reposes (note the "re" in reposes) the vehicle.
Presenting something as "buy" when it is really "rent" is unethical at best, and illegal at worst, and it needs to be litigated now.
It isn't a "long term rental", it is a limited license to use it until the service provider isn't able to provide it. There isn't a pre-defined end date you're agreeing to with this buy button. Depending on the movie, putting an end date of 2029 is actually more limiting than what many of those videos will have. I bought movies on Unbox 16 years ago which are still available today, something you'd ensure wouldn't be possible with forcing them to put an end date only 7 years away.
You're literally arguing I should have had less ownership of access of the media than I currently do have.
I'd like to understand how buying a streaming video license is more akin to buying a car than buying a concert ticket. You brushed it off as a bad analogy and seemingly only offered a seemingly worse one. One is directly a physical object with government backed ownership registrations, one is a limited access token to enjoy some media. Which seems more like buying a concert or theater ticket?
You're obtaining a license for exchange of payment.
You're buying a license.
The car isn't my analogy, it is yours. You're the one suggesting buying a license to stream movies on Amazon is like buying a car. I don't get how its more similar to that than buying a movie or concert ticket. You still haven't explained why you feel a car purchase is a better example other than now suggesting it is a bad analogy now that you presume its mine.
The terms of this license are clearly listed in the link right next to the Buy button. Is the person also deceived if they didn't bother reading the showtime for the ticket they bought?
I wonder how long a used-car dealership that made people sign an unfair agreement similar to streamed movie legalese, and then later came to repossess people's cars, would last.
If a retailer dared attempt such seizure of people’s Property, there would mass outrage. The media would shout about the retailer being thief’s, questions would be raised in parliament and the business would most likely face legal problems.
On the other hand, if the distributor simply added the Blu-ray you bought to the blacklist of your DRM compliant Blu-ray player, I'm not so sure there would be the same level of outrage, even though the end result were the same.
My suspicion is the level of public outrage is less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights and more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar. Which is a problem, really.
I don't see what leads you to that conclusion. I've also never heard about that happening, and I don't suspect this would happen unless something actually illegal was happening (illegal copies and such). The justification for actually blocking you from watching that movie for which you own a digital copy would be pretty hard to find. And the work around is relatively easy - dont connect your blueray player to the internet. With streaming services, you're at the mercy of the service provider to just lose a contract with a studio and stop providing their content.
> less about some deeply ingrained sense of natural rights
At this stage fairness is proven to be deeply ingrained, even in animals. There is something deeply unfair with losing access to something you were supposed to own, just because they can, and some corporate bean counter decided to not renew some licensing contract on their catalog because the competition offered a percent more.
> more about what kind of actions feel familiar and which feel unfamiliar
9/11 was a one-off, I didn't get familiar with this type of terrorist event. On the other hand, school shootings happen so often that I'm not surprised by them. Both still trigger outrage.
At the penultimate scene, with the bell ringing on the tree when George is back home with his family, the blu-ray just stopped, glitched out, and I could not get it to play properly. Something to do with firmware and others were experiencing similar issues.
I tried! It's incredible that even when you follow all the rules, you still get the shaft.
Never again.
same goes with full-online games... you don't own the game, you just have the right to play on servers... when the server shuts down, you have nothing left
buying physical stuff may be the "old" way, but it's reliable stuff
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20297331
Which one?
Just going full on pirate with an HDD full of instantly accessible files seems way more practical, especially living in a country where it's de facto legal.
Damn, I must've missed the models that come with DVD drives haha.
Honestly imo even on a tiny phone you can still tell the difference between 480p and 720p, not to mention 1080p. Not having high levels of compression definitely helps but only to a degree. I have a decent DVD collection from the pre-fiber era and honestly these days I rather just download a FHD version in a few minutes it takes to complete than take it out of the box and find a machine that still somehow has a drive. It's all just collecting dust.