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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content. Otherwise, I'm not sure where everyone is getting all these non DRM digital downloads.

And most aren't using special plugins with Kodi, they just use Kodi to play their content they get from torrents and Usenet.

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I can't speak for anyone else, but I only use Plex for format-shifting DVDs I've purchased. While this may be a violation of the DMCA's prohibition against breaking copy protection, it is not piracy or even actionable copyright infringement.

In UK this is tortuous again, having been made specifically allowed.

Apparently people watching DVDs they've purchased somehow harms the public good. Yay, go Tories!

I knew I wasn't the only one. Once I have a disc in hand I'm going to handle it once, get it on the NAS and watch it on any device in my house without thinking about the media that it was purchased on. Throw an old laptop SSD, a raspberry pi and a USB wifi into the mix and you can stream your collection while driving across the country.

I have little kids who can't be trusted to keep physical media from being damaged. :-D

I would ask that unless you have solid statistics, please do not assume this. I feel it is incredibly disrespectful to the developers who put out a great product that is legal and people legally use. Like other comments, I use Plex to format shift my legally purchased DVDs and CDs onto a media server. I also use it to legally DVR OTA TV.

There are also countries outside of the USA in which format shifting DVDs is explicitly legal (France for example).

Granted, it's a guess. And 99.99 is hyperbole. But if I had to make a real guess, I'd say more than 90% of kodi installs are used for piracy.

Sure, there is a contingent of people using it to rip their own movies, but if that was really a core usage of Kodi, it would be a core feature. But it isn't. If you rip DVDs or bluerays, you have to integrate third party software.

What is a core feature of Kodi? Grokking large numbers of video files that use usenet/torrent naming standards as well as a nice API that virtually all torrent clients integrate with.

Ripping physical media for personal use is not piracy despite what the MPAA would have you believe.

Yea but who goes through the trouble of ripping blu-rays to put them on plex?

My home setup is entirely digital. Just a Shield Android TV attached to the back of a TV. I don't have any spinning disc players anymore. All discs are ripped, put on my NAS, and served with Plex.

<chimes in> Same here. I still have all my physical CDs from the past 25-odd years but they are in sitting in boxes after being ripped. 99% my "TV watching" is time-shifted using the Shield, with a combination of streaming and downloaded stuff. I have weaned myself off of all physical media except for vinyl records (don't ask - it's a hobby). I wired my house with Cat5e and everything lives on a fat XFS formatted RAID array.

Now that I have a streaming subscription to Tidal (CD quality) I find very little reason to look to alternative music sources. With Amazon Prime the same goes for a lot of TV and movies. But for niche stuff there will always be torrent sites.

Speaking only for myself, blocking commercials is probably the biggest motivator for myself in seeking DVD sets and/or series of TV shows. Once you have stopped watching "live TV" you'd be surprised how sensitive you become commercials blasting every 10 minutes. Kind of like turning off your ad blocker (I honestly don't know how people survive the web without those things). I'm willing to pay for the "privilege" of not being yelled at every 10 minutes...

In the UK, we get three or four per hour on the most popular commercial networks. We record everything we want to watch on a Humax just so we don't have to suffer the ads, and pause for a piss, drink, or surf as and when. Or rewind parts we didn't pay enough attention to. Or skip bad segments. I wouldn't bother otherwise. I'm sure it's provider dependent, but US shows appear to have ads every 5mins, and that looks like torture.

(Well, added to my iTunes library, actually, but - you know.)

I do, because I only have to find the disk once to rip it. From then on I don't have to get off the couch!

Except that is a DMCA violation and just as illegal as downloading from a torrent site. Although, I would say, a morally superior option.

People who get busted for torrents are charged with commercial-scale distribution, because torrents upload as well as download. It's not at all the same thing as ripping your own disc.

Edit: I mean yes, it's technically illegal but I've never heard of anyone being charged for personal use. And if it did happen the penalty would be a lot smaller because the damage done would be the price of a new blu-ray.

Present

Most publicly available pirated content is terrible quality anyway. If there are shows and movies you really love it's worth it to make yourself a high quality rip. Emby/Plex are super convenient, especially playlists. Who wouldn't want their own private streaming service with all the content they love. The discs sit in the basement as disaster recovery.

I don't know where you are looking, but I have no problem getting fully digital rips of current run TV shows in 720p/1080p that are wonderful - excelled only by BluRay rips from the box-sets when they come out.

Most have no problem getting "remux" versions of movies too. Which is the raw digital copy from the Blueray, so of equal quality.

That'd be me. It's almost meditative.

I have been 100% digital media (we're talking movies, music, PS3 games, PS4 games, Nintendo Switch games, iOS app store, Mac app store, and Steam/Origin Client/GOG on PC) for over 10 years now. Maybe even 15.

This is where things are going IMHO.

Sometimes this has forced me to spend more money on drives/other storage (for example, I manually upgraded both my PS3 and PS4 to the largest capacity drives they support). And I have a NAS with a bunch of drives in it. Worth it, IMHO.

I do! And my parents and brothers and sisters families do, too. And once the DRM is gone we can share from each other in ways that we find ethical (these are the same people that I'd happily lend a physical Bluray disc to).

As a Kodi, Plex, iTunes, Windows Media Center, etc. user I've converted hundreds of movies, CDs, and TV shows into a format and library that easily moves countries and continents. It has been that way for me since I installed XBMC on the original Xbox.

> But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content. Otherwise, I'm not sure where everyone is getting all these non DRM digital downloads.

Do you count digitizing my existing DVD collection with Handbrake "piracy"? I don't.

Nobody does (or should)-- it's not copyright infringement.

Sometimes people group it with piracy since technically it's a DCMA/DRM violation

It is in multiple jurisdictions; please be careful to be specific if you're talking about a limited geography.

In the us it is illegal. Dmca violation since virtually all DVD and Blu-ray has DRM these days.

> But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content.

While you're grouping them in that category, why not put Microsoft Windows Media Center, XBox Media Center, and Playstation Media Center, and Apple TV in that category as well.

Sure, but Plex and Kodi are geared for library and collection organization. They take your files and parse filenames based on common naming patterns used in Usenet and torrent sites. Then create a beautiful collection from them.

The one off video players are more likely used for home videos or one off video files.

They're just players though. Are you going to get onto VLC or mpv because they majority of their users play pirated mkv files?

They aren't just players. They are way more than that. They are specifically made to organize and display large collections of movies and TV shows. VLC or wmp doesn't have an integration with IMDb to download all the titles, descriptions and cover art for movies based on their Usenet/torrent standard naming conventions.

I'm not saying there aren't plenty of legal uses for Kodi and Plex, I'm just saying that people aren't paying for a Plex pass or spending countless hours on Kodi to catalog their personal home videos.

Neither program is even well suited to that. There isnt even an easy to use interface on either for including custom content.

But drop in a file names the.big.bang.theory.s05e11.720p.brrip.mkv and they both know exactly what to do.

A few people I know just check out movie from the local Library on DVD and Blueray, rip them and then watch them from Plex.

Which does fall under the umbrella of piracy.

Yep, but the motivation may be simply one of convenience. My DVD player loops the menu all night long if you happen to dose off - and it's a struggle to get up and stop it. Even selecting and starting a movie on a DVD can be a trial.

If that is illegal, then I am breaking the law when I modify a computer program for personal use.

As far as I am aware, if they are not distributing their changes, there is no copyright violation.

I'd be interested to see what laws they are violating.

I'm reading a tiny bit into the comment so let me state it plainly:

> A few people I know just check out movie from the local Library on DVD or Bluray, rip them and then watch them from Plex, [and then return the DVD or Bluray without deleting the ripped copy].

This is textbook piracy.

Again when it comes to the USA copyright law, it is about distribution.

A person who copies a specific work and does not distribute it is not breaking the law as far as I am aware.

That is why I'd be interested in seeing what laws have been broken.

It's certainly a DMCA violation if you broke any DRM to make that copy. That does not require distribution.

It's not piracy at all.

If they watch the movie again without a license then it would be copyright infringement.

Assuming they live in a jurisdiction that allows format shifting they've not made a copy without a license or right to do so.

You're mistaken. The clue is in the name, you commit tortuous infringement when you copy without permission.

It is the copying that is the tort. Distribution is a separate tort/crime.

You don't mention your jurisdiction but this is common to international law and applies in almost all countries.

I use plex to share home movies which were ripped from DVD (and converted earlier from VHS) 100% legally (although the MPAA is probably trying to make it illegal to record home movies these days too /s)

Home videos is an edge case use for Kodi and Plex. They have built in integration with services like IMDb for goodness sake. They don't even have good interfaces for namings and cataloging home videos. Getting custom stuff into Plex is basically kind of hacky. Not nearly as easy as dropping in a movie and letting it sync all the info from imdb automatically.

Kodi is the only way I've managed to get my HD HomeRun cablecard adapter to work for my local TV channels through Comcast. So it's not purely pirated content...

We're using Emby to play OTA recorded (via HDHomeRun) 2018 Olympics coverage because we don't want to stay up all night to watch it. We do this for all the OTA television shows we'd like to watch. It works out really well for us.

I don't think so. Would youtube account for less than 0.01 % av Kodi use?

Ya, probably so. YouTube is not even an officially supported service for Kodi. You have to install a 3rd party plugin.

Besides ripping owned physical media, I've also used Kodi to watch OTA broadcast TV that I've recorded via software from a HDHomerun tuner.

Back in my day we ripped dvds to our systems.

I use mine exclusively for the DVDs and BRays I've ripped from my collection. No more scratches!

I'm not sure how you can claim honesty and then immediately pull that statistic out of thin air.

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