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Comment by idatum | Hacker News Reader

Put in an old DVD of Dr. Strangelove:... recently in the XBox. It was just a random thought to pop it in and enjoy. (okay, was cleaning up shelf)

I eventually realized I could skip around and enjoy the parts I liked. Freely. Without that feeling of being watched.

Flashback.

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Is your XBox online? Are you sure the DVD player doesn't report back what you're watching and how you're watching it?

Fair question.

This is exhausting.

Or your smart TV.

Which, for those out of the loop, is likely taking random screenshots of the displayed image and uploading enough data up positively correlate images to known content, or more, I haven't bothered to learn these things. The people who implement them are creepy af though.

These comments made me wonder if any smart TVs have something like built-in content-id detection, which then somehow gets shared with the mother ship.

One precedent is Nielsen Audio's Portable People Meter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Audio#Portable_People_...

I assume that if surveillance can be done, someones are doing it.

They absolutely do, which is why I always deliberately give mine bad wifi credentials (if I didn't give it SOMETHING, it would nag).

They do. That's literally the reason Vizio TVs are so cheap.

Knowing this, I leave it on because I want everyone to be forced to watch what I watch.

yes of course. Roku tv does content recognition.

So, what's happening when I watch a video on my PC that is feeding into the Roku tv via hdmi?

Is Roku actually capturing info about the content of the stream, or just the fact that I'm streaming from the PC? I'm fairly sure they aren't so blatant as to grab screenshots, but are they doing some sort of analysis of the video stream directly?

Just stuff I wonder about.

I sometimes want to rewatch a funny scene, but the fear of having to sit through a 2min ad on Hulu after I press the back button outweighs the few seconds of joy I'd get from that scene. Nor is it worth the money to upgrade.

This is the default experience of vlc, mpv, and kodi. You have to do the surveillance-navigating work when obtaining content, but then when you're relaxing you're free to relax.

It's amazing that in 2021 piracy is still superior to all the paid products in terms of quality and user experience. They've had over a decade to figure this out, and they just don't care.

Piracy wins yet again. If someone is watching what mp4 files you load into VLC, you probably have bigger problems.

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