Why can’t I play Ultra HD Blu-ray movies on my new Intel CPU platform?
cyberlink.com
cyberlink.com
Some drives need to have their firmware flashed in order to enable ripping of UHD discs:
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19113
I'm not affiliated with the product other than having used it to rip my entire disc library. It can also rip DVDs and regular blu-rays.
Once ripped, they can be played back with VLC, mpv, or derivatives. (On Macs, IINA is very good.)
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-10-28/pdf/2021-2...
But it's worth noting that virtually every country in the world has a prohibition on acquiring software to bypass DRM. In the UK for example it's a criminal offense with potential jail time attached to import it (i.e. download it from a foreign server) or sell it.
Format shifting à la iTunes CD rips is tortuous in the UK, AFAICS, making iTunes unlawful as it's produced in order to enable infringing behaviour.
iTunes isn't unlawful in the UK, as there's no prohibition on making software to format shift. It's just using it to format shift that's unlawful. But software to bypass technical protection measures is prohibited, and similar laws exist in almost all countries because having them is a requirement for WTO membership.
U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices. For example, space shifting, by making a copy of a personally owned audio CD for transfer to an MP3 player for that person's personal use, is not explicitly allowed or forbidden.
Existing copyright statutes may apply to specific acts of personal copying, as determined in cases in the civil or criminal court systems, building up a body of case law. Consumer copyright infringement cases in this area, to date, have only focused on issues related to consumer rights and the applicability of the law to the sharing of ripped files, not to the act of ripping, per se.
I'm not sure this has ever been tested in court, though. And even the DMCA itself does provide for a rather clunky system of "exemptions" to the no-circumvention provision.
> The 2021 exemptions, issued in October 2021, are for:[15]
> Motion pictures (including television shows and videos), as defined in 17 U.S.C. 101, where circumvention is undertaken solely in order to make use of short portions of the motion pictures for the purpose of criticism or comment, for supervised educational purposes, to accommodate for accessibility for disabled students in educational institutions, for preservation of the motion picture by a library, archive, or museum, or for research purposes at educational institutions;
And that exemption only adds cases in which stripping DRM from a DVD becomes legal. It's still generally illegal, and most people using makemkv are likely using it illegally.
The reason you can’t find a commercial vendor that will directly ship something to bypass the DRM is because it also says “No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”
This is also why for a while the t-shirts with the dvd decss key were popular among nerds, because they are illegal.
Are you saying this is incorrect?
No annoying upsells, no subscriptions and you can use the officially provided beta key (valid until the end of a month, a new key gets released every month) to check it out.
Otherwise if you just want to watch a movie and don't care that it might not be available at a later time, use a streaming service, it's by far the most convenient.
Moreover, it can follow RSS feeds for automated downloads, and has plethora of other features.
[0]: https://put.io
So, yes, people easily could be sued for torrenting and plenty of people have suffered significant penalty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent
FWIW almost all the people listed on your wiki page were tracker operators, but I am aware that there have been a few exceptions.
However, they're still operating, they only know my e-mail, nothing else, and they honor DMCA take down notices.
Oh, and the company is local to me.
They don't access to your card details. Just an API integration, that's all.
This is mostly an issue when streaming, which I prefer not to do for that reason. When I've had slow connections, torrenting a movie has generally been fine as I just let it run overnight.
Similar constraints, different solutions.
* filehosters - they get money from subscribers (some offer a free crippled options just to frustrate users into buying the subscription) * uploaders - they got money from filehosters * downloaders - they got the content they need
Take for example PTP. It is one of the best movie trackers. It recently exceeded 250,000 unique titles available in many different formats. Netflix in contrast only has 15,000 unique titles and their library is shrinking not growing.
We also have unlimited cards here, they're tied to each movie chain. So if you have the AMC unlimited thing it only works at AMC owned theaters etc. It's a great deal. I canceled mine in early 2020 for obvious reasons though.
The last time we tried (again), the sound was overdriven (again) to the point we had all go to the toilet and muffle our ears with toilet paper.
Except for small, independent cinemas it has been the same crappy experience for me: expensive, bad sound quality
- to watch things I don't wanna watch,
- while being gouged for double the BR-retail price PER person PLUS overpriced amenities,
- with no option for original audio but only trash-tier dubs (in Germany you'd have to go to one the bigger cities like Berlin for the option)
- while sitting together in a hot and stuffy room with a bunch of other (noisy) people
- not to mention the time investment of going to the city, standing in line for tickets, waiting for the movie to start and going back home, not even being able to have a beer unless you can/want to take the bus (slightly more money if it's even still running at that time) or a taxi home (considerably more money).
In all this makes it:
- ~5-15€ per BR, rip it to external drive, watch what I want when I want anywhere in my local network with Jellyfin or on that connected computer with mpv in full quality, with any of the available audio tracks (though usually original audio), in multiple different playback speeds with no extra time and/or money investment
OR
- 15-20€ per cinema ticket, for any of the small collection of German dubbed they have at what times they decide to show them, ~30-45 minutes of going to the cinema (plus costs thereof), ~20 minutes wait till the ads stop and the movie starts, "enjoy" the full length of poorly dubbed movie in an uncomfortable environment, ~30-45 minutes of going back home (plus costs thereof).
So WHY would I EVER choose to go to the cinema?
Personally I find the quality of the cinema projectors to be lacking, but I still enjoy going.
Is there any evidence to suggest that the likes of Netflix and Disney+ are doing this?
Of course, if the privacy policies do not include a data sharing provision, then evidence of the sharing would be interesting.
Viewing data is largely used in aggregate to make decisions about content. They’ll collect demographic data because it’s useful to know, but by and large it’s all used in aggregate or as cohorts because there really aren’t enough permutations. On a streaming service like Netflix or Disney there just isn’t enough content for people to look all that different at an individual level.
You might not care about Z, but the rest of those variables could be sensitive.
I find this phrasing quite fascinating. What does it even mean to "own" a movie? If you torrent or rip it, you now simply possess a copy and with the ability to watch it without any artificial restrictions, but I'd hardly say that you "own" it at that point.
I find it so depressing that our legal system does not even have the concept of an individual having access to a movie such that they can play it for themselves conveniently without restrictions. Even when you physically own a DVD there is no "sanctioned" way to watch it without being forced to watch the commercials and legal disclaimers at the beginning.
Which reminds me of the irony always repeated in these threads, that the folks who rip or torrent the film never see these legal disclaimers and only the folks who obey all the "rules" and don't need to see the disclaimer are constantly exposed to it.
Why can't we have nice things? This world is so distopian.
Bonus: As technologists and developers, we are actively creating this dystopia! I'm sure a non-zero portion of HN's audience is hard at work implementing DRM, locking users out of products they own, and coming up with new roadblocks for users. Perhaps someone reading this very comment implemented this exact Blu-Ray DRM in a devices's firmware. To the rest of us, it's dystopia, but to that person, it's just another JIRA ticket Boss says they need to implement, so they do.
Blame the evil managers all you want, but you, dear reader, are the one writing the code and hitting Commit.
Because if you don't implement DRM, then you simply raise the marginal price that it costs a company to do so, and you make another engineer – who is willing to implement it – marginally richer, thus indirectly rewarding behavior you despised in the first place!
The only ways to eliminate things like DRM are to either globally coordinate all software engineers' efforts (probably impossible), or somehow... socially change the incentives such that DRM is a net-loss for content producers? Also seems probably impossible.
I still refuse projects and jobs I consider unethical, but realize it's pissing in the wind until there is some larger coordinated framework (like a Hippocratic Oath for developers).
This works for them as most people do not how the technical know-how to break through the DRM and most people are therefore discouraged by it.
Although what is the alternative in a world where producing digital copies is a matter of pressing a button?
The whole idea of IP is to protect content creators. Those content creators sell their IP to large corporates to maximise their earning potential. Corporates subsequently take steps to protect those rights. Taking the ability to take those steps away from corporates by extension means taking those rights away from content creators. Is that what you're advocating for?
* I pay $10-25 for a movie
* I can then personally view that movie with myself and my family on the display I want (the last hotel I stayed at didn't have a HDCP compatible TV so I couldn't display my purchased film on the TV)
* I am not forced to watch advertisements or piracy warnings before the film
* I can put the film on other devices I own to watch via more convenient methods (my phone, tablet, home theater setup)
Are those requirements fundamental to having a legal system that protects the rights of copyright owners? Honestly I don't think they are! Because the DRM schemes that enable the above situation clearly aren't stopping pirates in the first place. But who knows, maybe there's an alternate universe where content creators allow all the above bullet points and – as a consequence – very few entities invest in creating art! In the end if I had to choose between that universe and the one we have today, I'd still take the one we have today where art is legally well protected enough that we have a plethora of it.
And of course there's always the whole, "Well actually the government has the final say in everything so does it count that you 'own' something if the government can simply take it away from you." but that's a whole other can of worms!
DRM is as anti-consumer as Apple and Tesla's policy saying the owner of a product can't repair their own product. Having physical ownership and removing drm is the only meaningful way to take ownership of a movie that doesn't rely on the good grace of an outside party. The US has laws against unrightful search and seizure and due process. The government can't "simply" take things away from me, at least in the US. True digital ownership of media requires the ability to playback things without relying on a third party. That's only possible having a dedrmed rip/reencoded copy. In practical terms, my legal rights on how I can view content is tangential to owning media, what matters is my actual ability to view it.
Yeah, maybe calling it "simple" was a mistake, but here I'm thinking about exactly such things as search & seizure and eminent domain where you can be legally deposessed of literally anything that you "own".
EDIT: DVD Decrypter! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter
I love their summary of what the patched firmware does:
'A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself “revoked”.
(...) Change the optical drive embedded software in a way that the drive becomes a “primitive” device - one that just positions a laser, reads and decodes the data. Make a drive free from “policing” functionality, a drive that just passes all data from the disc to the user.'
- from What is LibreDrive? at https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=18856
And once you've pried the data out of the drive's hands you still have to decrypt it.
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&p=96988 https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=24312
And, like what SGX is providing, if the film industry really want to stop pirating, they can. Then makemkv will be a history.
I doubt that, if for nothing else the Analog Hole[0]. At some point in the chain, the video data has to be turned into usable information for a display panel and speakers.
They keep adding steps to the chain, moving the final step closer and closer to the end, but it is still possible to bypass. In the ultimate case, you could probe the display board directly and convert the raw panel voltages, but in practice there are many earlier opportunities.
But I'm not talking about doing the copying itself. I'm talking about circumventing DRM which is a separate offense from copyright infringement. That is illegal in the USA, with certain specific, narrow exceptions, whether you use such circumvention to infringe copyright or not. Trafficking in circumvention devices, including publishing or downloading firmware that disables access protection measures, is illegal full stop.
(Remember DeCSS? Yeah, hosting that is still a federal crime, irrespective of what you or your audience intends to do with it. The irony is, that means the Feds have every right to take Eric S. Raymond's guns away and bar him from owning a gun for life: http://www.catb.org/esr/netfreedom/)
Now whether "latest Intel chips don't support playback" is sufficient to fall under this flag is obviously a complex topic but I think it is certainly not cut and dry.
The issue here is that the DMCA makes bypassing copy protection illegal regardless of whether or not the actual use of the media infringes on copyright, and exceptions are only added every 3 years[1] and are generally very specific in scope.
From my understanding it's less of a gray area and more of a dithered black and white area that can look gray from afar.
Mind, it's not worth it for most movies. However, those flames are a good example of why bandwidth can matter.
Which doesn't really matter though, you can also find 40GB files of most movies, they should (if encoded well) definitely match the quality.
The disc capacity contributes a lot to disc authors tweaking codec settings to value quality above file size. Visible artifacts are fairly rare even on complex scenes. You could practically believe you're watching a lossless source.
It's just that I come from VCD rips and still think that anything better than DVD is fantasticly detailed. Just never had the urge to let myself get used to better, but I'm starting to with 1080p.
What's the point of a beautiful 2500 kbps h.265 video if they're going to kill the audio quality by squashing it to 128 kbps?
So I gave up, googled rarbg and can get the same stuff in perfect quality in a few minutes. UHD killed legal "dvds" for me, it's so stupid.
It was surprisingly hard to do the homework on the "best" way to do this on a Mac -- I ended up using MakeMKV to rip + Handbrake to encode, but it was hard to find a robust recent technical discussion of what the pros do.
At one point in this process I was looking at the Internet Archive's copy of http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/ which has just quietly disappeared from the Web? It was a bizarre experience.
Wow, the official solution is to use old hardware and software. I'm sure that's a great idea :)
Sarcasm aside, I wonder when corporations will realize that until they offer proper easy and affordable solutions, people have little incentives to actually jump through the official loops and simply not pirate content. I hope to see this realization sometime in my life, but maybe I'm too optimistic.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
The truth is most copyright holders offer absolute garbage service to consumers and the only reason they're still in the market is it's illegal to compete with them.
First there was Netflix, and everything was on Netflix. Then a few publishers decided they didn't want to share their pie with Netflix, so they started their own streaming service and pulled their content from Netflix.
Next, you have multiple streaming services and surely, piracy goes up and the pirate just throws the pie out the window. Nobody wins.
1. Create incredibly addictive tv shows
2. Release episodes once a week, with a huge cliffhanger
3. Release in Europe/UK one week behind the US
A growth hacker couldn't create a better incentive for piracy if they tried. Anyone know why this is a thing?
For example - I have never purchased a music subscription even though I spend a much larger amount on food/rent and could comfortably afford one. Why? Because YouTube is free.
It's been covered ad nauseam at this point: content owners want to be able to dictate the who, what, when, where, and how of content consumption. They have enough money to get taken seriously, and know how to use it; ideally, consumers would push back by not watching movies, but that isn't happening. So here we are. It's disappointing.
I still remember a good decade ago getting a DVD from Redbox and trying to watch it with some friends. Tons of unskippable ads, FBI warnings, etc. Partway through the hell of enforced watching I started a torrent, before we got to the title screen it was done and we watched the downloaded version instead.
Furthermore, look at the state of TV today with all the streaming platforms. I'm excluding "live" TV because I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that cesspool. Having to jump between streaming services/UIs/UX/etc is terrible. "What platform was that show on?", "Wait, weren't we watching this on service X? That's why it lost our place in the season", "Oh, did they remove Y show?", and the list goes on.
It's incredibly sad the the best TV experience is some combo of Plex/Jellyfin+*arr-type software. Music piracy is practically non-existent in my friend groups (the same could not be said 10+ years ago), Spotify and friends did that. Not any laws, not any enforcement, not any crackdowns, etc, no a /paid/ service beat music piracy. Why? Because it was better, it was easier, and it had everything. As long as we only have a choice of disjointed services and platforms TV/Movies will never be better than piracy.
Things like Amazon Channels and Apple TV (yes the app, not the device, not the service, come on Apple...) are somewhat of a step in a better direction but Plex is still bar none. No ads, instant playback, no BS.
Recently I've seen even ad free, paid or unpaid, streaming options that still force ads into their shows at the beginning or the end. There is a new Nerdwallet ad that says, "Enjoy this ad free break before getting back to your show - brought to you by nerdwallet" I almost screamed at my tv when I saw that. If your name is plastered on the screen and the show/movie I'm watching is disputed to display it its an ad...
Live sports.
TV/Movies can be solved with piracy. Sports can't be solved with money or piracy.
[0] https://www.mlb.com/live-stream-games/subscribe/offseason
The pirates offer superior product, every time.
As a side note with the original DeCSS DVD code now considered a virus by many antivirus vendors I basically reject DRM technology everywhere I can.
I pay for Netflix, but that’s a recent thing. The kids watch YouTube. That’s it for my household. No local news, no over the air free HD TV. We cut the cord and never looked back. If its not on Netflix I guess we just wait or go to a theater (rarely) or don’t watch it.
I ripped my first DVD in college approximately two decades ago. I’m not oblivious to new technology nor am I some type of techno-Luddite; the selling points of BluRay are just weak imho.
That said, I'm not entirely sure that cord-cutting overall is a good thing. For my kids we've practically always had Netflix (and Youtube) and almost ignored regular channels with me consuming news mostly via online newspaper articles.
This really hit me when I separated and ended up living at my brothers for a short while a couple of years ago. Their family had a far bigger presence of news in their house due to watching linear TV news every day.
See here in Sweden we have fairly decent tax-funded public broadcast news (even if it's under attack and hated on by some parties), while much of it is fluff (and most of which I'd personally grasp with reading a couple of articles far quicker) it did strike me as something that I might leave as a dis-service to my kids in not providing an environment of learning about the outside world.
I do not see why the Swedish public broadcast news could not be available via a website and app, nor why the internet would not be able to offer far more access to information about the outside world than Swedish broadcast news.
It does however take some effort to say, ‘okay let us learn about this topic now’ and then put in a documentary note and then.
If someone from netflix is reading: I would very much like to self curate (e.g. whitelist) which movies are are available when signed in via kids profile. Not blacklist, whitelist. Only show series and movies that are allowed.
Most people don't watch TV or movies on their computers. They watch them on big-screen TVs with streaming built-in (or attached to streaming devices like Rokus, Fire Sticks, or Apple TVs) in their living rooms, or on mobile devices like tablets and phones.
My guess is that the movie industry is purposefully killing off PC viewing. Bluray players and TVs are much easier to assure content control on. I'd also guess that in general they don't care about bluray, period. They want everyone to stream, where there's no "ownership."
In 2010 I had several 1TB HDDs, fast broadband, and a 32GB USB stick. Getting a blue ray drive for my PC wasn’t worth the hassle.
I own a 3D Blu-ray player. I haven’t used it in about two years, since the nearest Redbox went away. I only used Redbox because it was cheap and more convenient than waiting for streaming releases. Now that many movies are released in theaters and on streaming at the same time, I don’t know if I’ll ever use it again.
Physical media is on the way out. Records continue to be manufactured for nostalgia (and better audio quality, for those that care), but that’s about it.
It's reasonable for a non-technical person to agree with a solution that claims to prevent piracy because they have no idea how these things work and their trade-offs. They don't mind it because they don't see themselves as pirates given that they just bought the media and are unaware of how the DRM scheme can backfire on them despite not being a pirate.
Very few people would agree to DRM if the DRM scheme explicitly had a disclaimer "we can, for any reason, prevent you from playing this in the future even on the same hardware that successfully plays it today".
In the current world, they are no longer needed, and they know it. But they still have power. So they are doing everything they can to keep up their revenue streams. If they admit to progress, if they try and make a working ecosystems, they are working on something which, at best, requires massive downsizing for them.
So instead they are flailing about looking to construct ecosystems that still have a place for them.
Big tech long ago decided that the PC is a problem to them and they want to move to locked-down gadgets.
They can, for example, enforce market segmentation: You bought the DVD in the USA and play it in the EU. Legal, but DRM stops you. Wait for the EU release and pay the different price.
If the content middleman screams piracy, react as if a politician screams child porn. They want something else, but cant' get it without invoking the bogeyman. Hordes of (starving artists/concerned parents) will provide the necessary rope to hang themselves on command.
Ok, but don't they risk discouraging people from buying disks? Who buys disks nowadays anyway?
The real problem with computers and disks is these days most computers do not come with any sort of DVD/BR/UHD drive. You can find the odd one here and there and sometimes in desktop format. But in the mobile space they have pretty much disappeared, except as USB addon. Once apple ditched them everyone else did too.
I had one of the cyberlink bits of software. It worked just fine for 6 years. The drive is fine. The certs on the software however expired. Once that happened no bluray would play at all. They wanted a decent amount to 'upgrade' so I could watch my movies again on my computer. So I used that money and bought some ripping software. So I rip and use things like VLC and KODI to play them now. Which is kind of 'meh' as the java emu layer is not there yet. Most of the time you can pick the right title out of the list. But sometimes (usually sony) they will throw several thousand titles on the disk that are not quite right but have the right size.
These companies have not totally worked it out yet (they are well on their way though). With 100% streaming digital they have a decent amount of physical control, probably prefect pricing, and re-editorial control.
I never made the connection between these two ideas before. Now I am wiser. Thanks for this.
DRM has nothing to do with piracy of even control over end-user. It's all about media companies having leverage over hardware manufacturers of TVs, computers, game consoles, etc.
So media companies want extort money from hardware manufacturers. Manufacturer might choose not to pay, but then most of movies and Netflix (FullHD, 4K) wouldn't play on their devices.
1. Stopping "casual" piracy, that is, stopping a tech illiterate person (most of the population) from simply copying it to another tech illiterate friend (they don't want a repetition of the K7 mixtape era).
2. Create a walled garden were you have a monopoly that you can abuse to extract better deals from other stakeholders.
It's both. Easy generation of pirated copies also vastly increases the number of sources and the speed of propagation.
Disney CEO: "We want a DRM system that will make piracy impossible. Can you do it?"
Developer: "That's impossible, it can't be done."
Disney CEO: "My son is constantly asking for $70 games for his playstation/xbox, so I'm not convinced DRM is impossible. Could you do it if we paid you $300,000 per year? Or do you have nothing to offer the company?"
Developer: "Well, when you put it like that, I'm happy to try. We can certainly make something that doesn't have the holes previous systems had, and that will slow down piracy, initially."
Disney CEO: "Ah, so it might be possible after all...."
The desire to support the unreasonable demands of the film industry here has led to the perversion of the x86 architecture to add all sorts of peculiar DRM functionalities, and has precluded firmware components from being made open source; as I have previously written about here [1], which links to forum posts by an AMD engineer:
I'm sure I don't have to explain to you that the essense of DRM requirements in the OEM PC market is that the owner must NOT have full control of the machine if that includes being able to tamper with or disable any of the DRM mechanisms.
I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.
In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising).
Which also explains why the studios insist on ridiculously bullshit in terms of DRM - the banks backing these enormous loans want their money back.
With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low and so there is no incentive for studios to invest in DRM, it's simply not worth it any more. The real money for musicians is tour tickets and merch... CD/vinyl sales and streaming income isn't much.
I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue.
>With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low
Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.
Meh. Similar to music production, filmmaking itself has become ever more affordable on the technical and on the software side, DaVinci Resolve is available for free (and the Adobe suite for ~60€ a month), and thanks to digitalization distribution is relatively painless too (since you don't have to produce and copy literal reels of physical film, but can ship around Blu-rays or SSDs).
A feature-length film however will always need many hundreds to thousands of hours worth of work for everything from planning over shoots to post-production, there isn't much that can be cut there.
> I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time
I wouldn’t read that as the quality of the movie itself, but the technical quality of the production. You can have movies that are technically great, but that lack a story. But I don’t think we’ll see many more movies that have a good story with low video quality. When you can get a good 4K video from an iPhone, something like “Clerks” isn’t going to work nearly as well as when we had to use physical film and you could only afford to use so much of it.
It's worth considering there's one tech company that makes its own chips, integrated hardware, operating system, software, and is now also a media studio.
As owners of the content, and the entire tech stack, they don't appear to be opposed to DRM.
because ultimately it destroys competition by holding vantage points to suffocate competition
in this instance, producers of distribution should not be content holders let creative be creative, let supply chains be supply chains etc etc
i guess one can always add a clause, exemption applies below a certain size etc.
In general, for corporations of then & now, "being good" only matters as long as it aligns, or at least does not interfere with, their sources of income.
The owner should still have full control and be able to disable DRM support. If that means you can't play certain movies afterwards that is fine, but the control should be there.
I totally agree with you, for what it is worth.
You cannot have effective DRM without taking away full control from the user.
This is the true definition of the system's owner. The system's owner is whoever must be trusted in order to trust computations on that system. If the application doesn't trust the person who bought the computer, but still wishes to trust computations done on the system, the only solution is to change the system's owner. That is why DRM must either be utterly useless, because I still own my computer and can do as I will on it, or utterly tyrannical, because it asserts ownership over something that I have purchased.
This is only hard if you try to make it hard.
"Why has my playback gone silent?"
And isn't the IME only a few decades old ?
(Of course Microsoft with its "trusted computing" and the NSA with its job to backdoor everything that can be likely had a hand in that too...)
Also I don't think that this has an effect on Intel's Management Engine ?
BTW, older AMD CPUs (of the Bulldozer line) are still performant enough, and don't come with a likely backdoor in the form of IME / AMD PSP.
P.S.: It does really suck the effect that this has on GPU's openness... (and so performance for very specific use cases)
On the other hand: It is still not possible to play Amazon Prime Ultra HD on AMD CPUs and probably also on the new Intel 12th gen as of now.
The one thing I hate about these limitations is the amount of detailed knowledge that is required to know what is happening. As an average consumer I would have never thought of such bullshit. I only read about the problem wehn I had already bought my CPU...
Everything good on the streaming sites is quickly available via torrent, and VPNs are like $5. Don't continue paying the media cartels for abuse.
This isn’t as true as it used to be. The torrent scene seems a fraction of what it used to be.
Presumably it’s still fine in private sites but I wouldn’t know.
Interestingly, if any montior you connect is not HDCP 2.2 you don't get 4K.
GeForce Stuff like Nvidia instant replay gets disabled if you have Netflix up in a tab - so close those before you game.
Of course, you also need to be on the 'premium' plan, have a fast-enough internet connection, be watching 4K content, have the T2 security chip, have an HDCP display, and so on.
[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
I know why (I think there's some bs about not running HDCP over DVI even though it's basically HDMI in most Configs) But it was bizzare to actually see it.
However it's your legitimate customers, the ones who actually paid for your product, who suffer.
I mean it's reasonable that Cyberlink shaw the SGX as a way of implementing DRM, but I don't believe it's the only way they could possibly do so.
For UHD/4K Blu-rays, the DRM scheme was renewed (AACSv2). As far as I can tell, studios seemed to decide that the above model was too insecure and to require something more for PC playback of UHD Blu-rays. The requirement seems to basically be that some kind of platform-integrated hardware DRM is involved so that the CPU never sees the decrypted video (or equivalent; presumably SGX is used to lock the decrypted content inside an enclave which is remotely attested and then securely transported to the GPU somehow. GPUs also have had this kind of hardware DRM functionality added to support this use case but I don't have the details to hand as they're not to my knowledge public.)
Slight clarification. This is primarily a limitation specifically for software
like Cyberlink’s PowerDVD because Cyberlink is one of the very few officially
authorized software vendors for encrypted UHD disc playback.
Intel SGX is not a requirement for playback in the UHD Blu-ray spec. PowerDVD
just happens to make use of Intel SGX for their decryption implementation /
HDCP handshake enforcement. Other software players that don’t make use of Intel
SGX can play UHD discs just fine, so AMD CPU owners need not worry.
Just use MPC-HC or JRiver Media Center, etc. Of course, you may need to use
“alternate” decryption options like AnyDVD or DVDFab, and naturally you also
need a UHD capable disc drive with compatible firmware. like the Asus BC-
12D2HT. Many sellers will flash the stock firmware with UHD-capable firmware
for drives sold as “UHD ready”.
The only way to win in this game is not to play it.
Meanwhile, the torrents, with Dolby Vision or HDR10, play just fine everywhere, without any hardware restrictions, any software arbitrary nonsense restrictions, etc. I’ll continue buying those at the torrent tracker shop.
The original blu-ray video and audio that I can stream anywhere in my home or even over the net should I wish (although for internet streaming I use a smaller encoded version obviously).
Honestly it is like the movie studios want you to pirate their content by making it so difficult to watch what you legally own.
https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-14-steve-jobs-calls-blu-ray...
Feels nice to be able to watch old movies that I bought back in the day that aren't available on streaming - at least around here :-/
A few years later I upgraded my machine and lost access to these files. I guess these days I understand more about keys and how they work, but back then I was just someone who had paid rightfully for my music and as a result losing the collection a few years later.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any PC playback progress yet. However in addition to the Nvidia Shield there are Chinese devices like the Zidoo Z9X [1] which show that the work can be done. The PC space is still waiting for a champion though.
—-
[1] https://www.zidoo.tv/Product/index/model/Z9X/target/VEMg6VRC...
There is? I searched around and couldn't find it. As for tonemapping on open source players, there's madvr, but it's imperfect compared to the official SDR release.
Unless you can link to the specific "HEVC windows 10 app", I'm pretty sure you're referring to "HEVC Video Extensions", which is just a codec pack for decoding HEVC files.
>DV app is called Dolby Vision Extensions app
The linked article says that you need a "Dolby Vision licensed device"? That suggests it might need some sort of calibration for it to work?
* Movies and TV player
* HEVC extension
* Dolby Access app
* Dolby Vision extension
Additionally Dolby Vision works on Windows with a few big budget games. Thus the pipeline exists and can be used. It’s just obscured by proprietary secrets.
I'm still holding on to an old Asus USB blu ray drive, although I haven't used it much lately, and I got an old NAD C715 receiver, that has USB recording, so I can record my FM radio shows, or anything really being input (streaming audio), straight to MP3 so I can keep the shows. (yes, I know about podcasts, but not all of them are available).
Of course, the NAD was limited to 117 minutes per mp3, and when I contact them, they said it was due to memory issues, but I think it was due to people wanting to burn it on a CD.
Either way, the analog world is still so much easier to play and record anything for audio at least, and it looks like the video world is moving away from physical media. Is 8K blu ray even going to happen? If not, it's all digital streams from this point on.
As a technology, SGX became interesting the moment Intel added the ability for anybody to launch enclaves (and not only the anointed companies that signed NDAs with Intel) and especially when support for it landed in Linux.
Assuming Intel somehow manages to fix its security problem to a decent level, is SGX as a technology worth learning still?
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security/confidentia...
Intel's equivalent of SEV-ES and SEV-SNP is called TDX: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... . While you could probably put both under the "confidential computing" umbrella, they do really different things well. As far as I know, SGX and TDX will both be around on the same hardware.
Also, just to be explicit about it: I work on Linux at Intel, including on SGX.
Otherwise first sale doctrine would allow people to sell mountains of imported cheap discs from poor countries in the USA legally.
It's to protect the margins in places where $5 isn't much money. Vastly more units are sold in places where $5 is a lot.
It also allows distributors and content houses to repeatably charge for same content as it goes through media conversions (pay once for DVD rights, pay again for BR, pay again for localized BR, pay again for UHD-BR, pay again for iPhone Apple TV version, pay again for version with extras and special edition)... it's a legal hammer that enforces each middle man to stand in the line and to make sure each piece of content extracts as much money as the overextended copyright system allows.
And if anyone DOES pirate the content, it's used to cover the middlemen asses by being able to show the abusive DRM practices and saying "we did all we could, YOU ceritified this DRM as good you see!"
This follows a long term trend of decoupling between the consumer electronics and the computer industry.
For instance CD-ROM and DVD drives were ubiquitous for personal computers but Blu-Ray never really caught on. For a long time Windows came with DVD players but Blu-Ray was always a third-party option.
Today there is a divergence between video codecs used for consumer electronics (HEVC) and computers (AV1, etc.) Some of it is fighting over royalties, some of it is the industries having different visions.
I went through the whole piracy gamut including torrents, usenet, radarr, sonarr, plex, emby, jellyfin - you name it I tried it. The best solution I'm using today and try to keep it hush is Stremio + RealDebrid.
https://i.ibb.co/Mn6VSvq/image.png
No piracy ISP letter risk, no torrenting, just a direct download from one single server that keeps you private. Like having a Plex with _everything_ on it.
You.
The only reason Hollywood has power is because you buy DVDs and go to movies.
If you stopped, Hollywood would go broke.
Quibbling about Intel or legislation is pointless. Just don't buy their product and you'll bring them to their knees.
"Ultra HD Blu-ray" ... There is so much marketing BS in that phrase. The brain washing goes deep. Pick up a book. Get a hobby. Go outside. Put down the passive entertainment. Send a real message if you don't like all this DRM shit. You don't NEED to park your ass on a couch and be entertained.
Thanks, companies. Thanks, companies. You are the perfect P2P marketing advisors.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-intel-chi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Guard_Extensions#Atta...
You should also consider not updating the OS
Plus a Blu-Ray off eBay or CeX is usually half the price of 'buying' a film to stream, can be lent to friends and family, and is something that I meaningfully own into the future (not only until the service I bought it from goes bust, locks me out of my account, etc). The fact I can rip them with MakeMKV if necessary is handy too.
Unless streaming sites up their game, we'll see a drop in movie image quality everywhere except cinemas.
Streaming services' bitrates top out around 40 Mbps (4k UHD on Apple TV), and most services are actually closer to 20 for 4k, often even lower. 4k UHD Blu-Rays have up to 128 Mbps bitrate. The quality difference is evident, including in the sound. You can see compression artifacts in dark scenes on streaming, and jagged lines in color gradients. The simulataneous dynamic range of sound (some things being loud while other, quieter things are audible on other speakers at the same time) is lower on streaming. And on top of all that, the quality is inconsistent, and the stream will drop into a lower resolution for no apparent reason.
I get the sense that the market is drying up, but I hope it doesn't, because the quality of streaming is legitimately worse. The discs are currently the only way to get uncompressed quality, unless I guess if you find a torrent with a rip. But that would be a 50-100 GB download, for one movie.
Also, when I buy the disc, I own it. It's mine forever, in its definitive edition. No scene cuts/edits for political or monetary reasons are possible, and streaming services cannot yank the movie and prevent me from watching it.
It is worth noting though that the content on BD/UDH-BD is not uncompressed. They're still compressed using h.264/h.265/VC1/.. for video and DTS, AC3 and various other codes for audio. It's just that you get a much higher bitrate from the BD compared to streaming. This does make a difference on bigger TV, especially since our internet connection is not as good as it should.
As for the future, when world eventually transitions to H.266 or some other next gen codecs, and at the same time internet speeds keep increasing, this whole debate is largely theoretical. You will be able to stream UHD movie at half or less of of bits that it would take today when compressed using h.265, using internet connections that are n times faster than those we're using today.
Call me old school, I still like owning those BDs. But it's hard to imagine future where they would age very well (compared to quality you are likely to get from streaming services).
Note that in the US at least, owning a physical item can be legally important due to things like the first sale doctrine.
Why? I'm fortunate enough to have gigabit symmetrical fiber, so streaming isn't an issue. That said, when viewing content on higher quality TVs and sound systems, there's a very perceptible improvement in both video and audio quality compared to streaming. For example, on my 65" LG C9 OLED with a Klipsch Atmos system, the difference is immediately noticeable.
Even with dedicated streaming hardware like new generation Apple TVs, which offer 4K streaming with Dolby Vision/Atmos, it still doesn't quite compare to physical media. Ditto for the native LG apps with identical options.
Of course, there are downsides. Good luck finding UHD content on physical media. Redbox doesn't offer 4K discs in my area, and local stores rarely have physical media in stock. Even with physical media, there's other annoyances--e.g. the Xbox One X produces a loud hum as the disc spins, not to mention the delay when seeking/skipping around.
That said, for rarified material such as Blue Planet (or anything by Attenborough)--or movies known for their sound quality like Mad Max--physical media can be sublime.
We live at a time with high demand for developers. Wouldn't your talents be of better use at some other company - working on something not ultimately hindering your users?
It's OK to quit your job on moral grounds, and now is the best time ever to do so.
Plus, some devs enjoy this kind work and some companies working on DRM are in areas that are not as hot as the Bay Area (small cities in Europe) so they might not have that many lucrative options you assume.
Sure, no consumer enjoys DRM, like how no driver likes police officers issuing speeding fines, but demonizing devs working on such solutions is something I did not expect from the supposedly enlightened HN reader base.
How about you target your disapproval at the Bay Area devs whos' generous compensation packages plastered around here depend on them building nefarious ways of siphoning and data-mining peoples' private data to get them addicted to consuming content and click on ads.
Not exactly NSO level, but this certainly caused issues at the time.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...
Many companies implement DRM in ways that are poor, excessive, overreaching, needlessly restrictive, etc. .. and yes, while poor implementations are frequent, it does not mean that DRM itself is worthless or an enemy of society.
In fact, good implementations of DRM are exactly what is needed in order to prevent hackers from stealing your most valuable digital assets.
The issue is that in conversation DRM is used as a perjorative, whereas terms like data loss prevention are somehow seen as non-malicious, even though it is the same core idea.
People can e-mail the documents or do whatever they want with them, and Microsoft's DRM ensures that only the users that have access are able to view them.
The whole thing is totally seamless and requires no extra effort on the part of the users.
Our corporate documents can't be stolen without comprimising both someone's account and two-factor authentication.
It's a great example of DRM done well.
No DRM is a perfect solution, my only point is that DRM itself isn't inherently evil.
Whataboutism...
It isn't, until it is: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/adobe-spyware-reveals-...
It’s the cigarettes of modern technology.
The OP didn't make any such comparison; yet you make such a comparison, a few sentences later:
> Sure, no consumer enjoys DRM, like how no driver likes police officers issuing speeding fines
DRM props-up uncompetitive business models, to the detriment of customers and society at-large. It is in no way comparable to speed limits, which have literally saved millions of lives over the years (random Google link: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/reducing-s... ).
When will the US join the 2000s and get cameras so police can do actual work?
If you don't think doing your job every day is making the world better, please remember that what the parent comment says is true: it's never been a better time to make the switch!
Your work matters, and we can all work to make the world better, or worse, a little bit every day.
Thanks for proofing me wrong :)
> If you don't think doing your job every day is making the world better
Actually, content moderation does make the world better. No one except Nazis will say that the presence of Holocaust denial on the Internet is a good thing. No one except pedophiles wants to see naked genitalia of children.
For what it's worth, even this forum is moderated (pretty strongly, one might add) to keep discussions somewhat relevant and from devolving into endless threads of flame-warring.
It is, but given the scale these tech companies can reach we have seen way too much evidence that moderation is required for a stable society. People have been literally lynched because of viral fake postings [1] on messengers, not to mention the entire clusterfuck that is the coronavirus pandemic and the influence of propaganda peddlers and profiteers.
Censorship is not how you fix a society's bad habits. Correspondingly, censoring social media is not how you fix society's amplified bad habits.
You can actually make a cohesive argument that algorithmic, "if it bleeds, it leads" timelines are in fact censorship (as they push down more recent, but less titillating/outrageous content), and that this algorithmic censorship of less outrageous but more recent/potentially balancing content is the basis for increased social fervor.
Ultimately, the solution to speech you don't like is more speech. When that additional speech is deprioritized to the point where no one sees it in practice, or is hard censored outright, the societal balancing functions can't work.
Social media causes lynchings and worse when it algorithmically amplifies the most outrageous, divisive and controversial content in a bid to maximize "engagement". "Moderation" and "healthy community" policies are the band-aid. There's no such thing as "neutral" social media when these algorithms are used, it's an oxymoron.
No. Social media, particularly ones where algorithms determine which content is shown to users, amplifies the content that is most likely to see more eyeballs or maximize other arbitrary metrics of engagement. And that means content that drives outrage of any form.
> Censorship is not how you fix a society's bad habits.
If I go on the city plaza and deny the Holocaust, I will probably get Spencer'd in the face and then dragged away by police for causing mischief (or in Europe, for Holocaust denial which is a crime here). Will you call that censorship, too? I guess not.
But on most social media, I can deny the Holocaust, call for the murder of politicians or virologists all day long without moderation or any consequences - and any calls on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram or whatever to put a stop to this hate get decried as "censorship".
> Ultimately, the solution to speech you don't like is more speech.
It should not be the job of unpaid individual citizens to do the job of the government which we pay taxes for. We citizens pay taxes so that police keeps the physical city plaza clean of crime and nutjobs, why should a digital city plaza like Facebook be exempt of the rules?
This divergence between the realities of the digital and the analog worlds is what is the problem.
Yes, that is also absolutely censorship. It's a shame that people don't have free expression in Europe.
I am not a Nazi and I think it is bad when people deny facts (like the holocaust happening, and being a bad thing).
I think it is a good thing that people are able to reliably publish falsehoods freely on the internet, if they so choose. There is at least one other YC company that I know embodies similar philosophical beliefs.
Your claim is false.
You don't need to be a Nazi to support the ability for people to practically exercise their rights to free and unrestricted publishing. It is a good thing to have that in a society, even if some people use it to say false things.
That said, as you accurately noted, this forum is moderated and I don't wish to participate further in what is now an offtopic discussion, so I will not reply further in this thread. Feel free to email me if you'd like to discuss further.
Data harvesting, monopolisation of bottlenecks, the whole advertising ecosystem, DRM and systems of IP/copyright domination, etc. These are the unbelievably profitable industries generating the current demand.
Demand is fungible, so this doesn't mean you can't go find a job working on something else. It does however, put some perspective on it. Developers, via the current labour market, are major beneficiaries of said practices.
Again, this does not contradict your comment.
I think it's more because the computer does most of the work, and that just has really good economy of scale.
But to the extent that there seems to be any orthodoxy on HN around what is more and less ethical, there’s a lot of emphasis around the “unbelievably profitable” part.
In my personal experience there is a world of difference between “all your data belong to us” and “pay for content by seeing this ad” which are far from joined at the hip, and to the extent that cryptocurrency has any demonstrated utility it’s pulling in yet a third direction and yet all three are often lumped together into the “trivially unethical” bucket, whereas having deep structural advantages before you’ve written much code via the YC old-boys network is not just “how the game is played”, but maybe even “living the dream”.
I know I’ve personally been guilty of letting my righteous ethical indignation at X or Y get a little blurry with “it’s not right that so many programmers make xMM/year”.
I don’t mean to say that you’re guilty of this (and I know you didn’t mention cryptocurrency or being a YC founder), but it is something I’m still trying to figure out a way to diplomatically add to the discussion and your comment felt like a not-insane place to do so.
People who make DRM are paid by content producers, not content viewers. They're not hindering their users. They're doing what their users ask them to do. It's just that we aren't their users. If you want to influence DRM developers to stop making DRM, refuse to buy/view/stream DRM-protected media. Then they'll have to find new jobs because their customers will stop paying them.
I haven't bought a Sony product since their rootkit fiasco in about 2004. I remove the Widevine library from Chrome when I'm forced to use it, unclick the box that says "Play DRM" in Firefox, and don't really use Safari. At work, I challenge suppliers who use activation to provide us software without it, and I run entirely Linux-boxes.
Yes, I am one of those zealots. Yes, it makes life harder at times. Would I change it? No.
We created a system where employees have zero say in what a company does, so the rest of society has not deal with this issue.
Anything consequential enough to make an impact is a trade off, with winners and losers. If all the employees listened and there was a universal collapse of DRM, I really highly doubt people who make content would be better off. Maybe some of these devs feel good about helping make sure people who make movies get paid. Maybe they feel like they are part of the moviemaking process (which they are!).
It’s not as though it’s difficult for people who want to make their content free to do so. Why should someone who wishes to make content under a DRM model not be free to do so? It’s entertainment, you are not forced to consume it.