Hacker News Reader

Comment by libertymcateer | Hacker News Reader

Does no-one see the irony in patenting an anti-piracy standard? If it is remotely effective, it will, itself, be pirated. If it is not effective, it will only make the lives worse of people who choose not to circumvent it.

Additionally, I just do not see how this passes subject-matter standards post Alice.[1] Seriously disappointing to see vague algorithms of this type receive patent protection.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...

View on HN

This is one of my pet peeves with movies as well.

When I buy a DVD, I have unskippable trailers and an ad that warns me not to pirate it at the beginning. Seriously, it's about 10 minutes of crap that I need to watch to see the movie I f*ing paid for! The viewing experience with pirated movies is much more enjoyable and streamlined. I get the movie, double click on it and booom - it starts right away.

I mean, I've torrented every single DvD I own and the disks sit in the attic. Strangely, not once I have missed the lack of "hilarious cut scenes" or "Directors commentary" features.

Man I love clicking on a folder, scrolling for 30 secs and pressing play and the actual film just starts playing. The only thing that it fails on is remembering where I am in a series. So for eg. Blackadder I'd rather just stick on Netflix thank play in VLC

> The only thing that it fails on is remembering where I am in a series. So for eg. Blackadder I'd rather just stick on Netflix thank play in VLC

You can easily solve that one with something like Plex :-)

Upvote for Plex. Setting up a Plex box in my house was astonishingly easy and we now use that more than Netflix.

Yep, only issue I have is that I now forget my netflix series because when I go to plex, my progress with those series isn't tracked or shown.

plus if you I guess do want to pirate, sonarr and radarr are freaking amazing to have a long with a plex server.

I've noticed Plex has stopped working with my TVs. It's kinda a bummer that the only help, that those on forums are willing to give is "buy a better TV". Is spending another 700 bucks really a tenable solution?

Apple TV Gen 4 has a Plex app that works extremely well. Still $130 to put down but you also get all the other things it does.

It's not a great solution, but there are several "streaming sticks" like the Roku, Chromecast, or FireTV for less than $50 you can buy and plug into your current TV.

I had been hearing about Plex for a while and when I bought a Seagate Personal Cloud drive, I decided to give it a try.

I like it. I have moved a lot of media to it and I can watch it all at my convenience from multiple devices or computers in my house.

I have young children and after they destroyed several of the kid-movie DVDs I gave them, this was a godsend.

Can you install Plex in a standalone fashion, or do you need to set up a server and client?

With Kodi it'd just be a case of install and point it at your media directories.

If you don't mind using a web client (and you shouldn't, it's pretty good), you can install the Plex server on your machine and then open the web client on the same machine.

I just keep a little document in the same directory.

    echo 9 > last-episode
    mpv s01e09.mkv

If you're using mpv, do this instead:

mpv tvshow/season1

Now use Shift+Q to exit. The next time you run mpv tvshow/season1, it will resume from where you left.

Thanks for the tip!

Install mpv and use Shift+Q to exit. That way when you open the folder again in mpv it will start exactly where you left it.

The original "Barbershop" DVD had over 25 minutes of non-skippable previews and ads on it... So much so, that when the DVD player started skipping 5 minutes in (scratches on netflix rental), I never got around to watching it later (or asking for a different disc).

That's when I started ripping DVD content, just so I could watch it as the studios had gone way too far.

Yes. Thank you, Microsoft, for stifling the anti-pirating industry.

By the way, pirating seems to be in the interest of big non-content companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google.

The iPod became big because of pirating (what teenager can afford 64GB of music in the first place?), and this also holds for YouTube.

EDIT: fixed iPad -> iPod

Do you mean iPod? I never saw the iPad as a 'music listening device', but I never really used one though :-)

Not ironic. Just very fitting. They're using a failed system (patents) to try to monopolise their (probably very obvious) method of enforcing a failed monopoly system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com