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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

> Plex, Jellyfin, LibreELEC, Kodi... those are the best solutions for those wanting to manage their own destiny and TV experience.

As long as one produces their own content, right?

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Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn’t it been found (In the US) that making a digital copy of a DVD you own totally okay?

Sure, and the "water pipe" they sell on the boardwalk is for "tobacco use only".

Let's be honest, most people use this software to serve up their library of pirated content. The number of people who are even still buying physical media is relatively tiny. That is why retailers like Best Buy are abandoning that market. The population of people who buy that physical media and then manually rip it has to be miniscule.

Quick side note on Best Buy abandoning selling physical media, the cashier at Best Buy said they'll probably just throw the rest of their stock in the trash when they stop selling them in early 2024. So if anyone is interested in some free blu-rays and doesn't mind dumpster diving...

Correct. Personal archival is protected under fair use. [1]

1. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...

Personal archival isn't exempt anymore, that dropped some years ago. The only archival exemption now is for "qualifying institutions".

You have a source on that? I can't find anything - so as far as I can tell you're just spreading misinformation.

I mean just read through the link above. You'll find no exemption for personal use when it involves bypassing DRM. Which I don't think any DVD or blu-ray anymore lacks.

I'm also reasonably sure that "3. Proposed Class 6: Audiovisual Works—Space-Shifting" in the above link would cover personal archival and that was explicitly rejected.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still all for it, but it's not permitted anymore like it used to be.

Correct (as long as you don't distribute it), but not all content is available on DVDs, and many things come to DVDs much later than they are available elsewhere.

That said, there is a _less legal_ solution to those problems...

Unfortunately not. The exemption dropped some years ago.

Archive.org has vast amounts of video; from public domain through "that's not supposed to be here."

There's lots of other sources too.

I'm curious now, can you give an example of one of the 'that's not supposed to be here' things?

cheerfully!

Here's 3 examples of movies of Cultural Import * that are copyrighted and technically, probably shouldn't be there. But they're unavailable, or hard to find; possibly outlawed in some places.

I'm quite grateful to someone for taking the trouble to find, digitize, and upload these classics, and that archive.org can host them.

+ I'll leave it to you to figure out what the "cultural import" is in each case here. As with all Art, it's certainly debatable.

https://archive.org/download/rollerblade/rollerblade.mp4

https://archive.org/download/flesh-gordon-1974_20220429/Fles...

https://archive.org/download/barbarella_202110/Barbarella.mp...

What exactly are you implying? You think I can't rip a Blue-Ray or DVD?

Those all have apps for Netflix and others, as well as video on demand.

what do you think

No, just pirate. I can kind of understand why people started giving Netflix money for the convenience, despite that supporting an industry desperately trying to destroy the Internet. But now with a thousand and five different "services", continually squeezing users for more revenue, digital restrictions management that makes perfectly good hardware stop working, and ever more surveillance telemetry in the various apps and devices? Rent an off the shelf seedbox, or set up your own with a consumer VPN, and don't think twice. Consider it just another "service" and see if it wins out in your life. And if down the line you end up deciding it doesn't work well for you, you still get to keep access to everything you've obtained!

So instead of just paying a few bucks a month I’m going to go through the trouble of trawling the internet to find a good torrent and then set up my own Plex server (been those done that) - alternative I can just open an app and not think about it.

For a while now there are services out there (usually on discord) who will rent you a plex container hooked up to a ridiculous size media library (I’ve seen multiple in the 1.5 PB+ range) with basically everything from every streaming service , Bluray, or DVD in the original bit for bit download, just sans-DRM

This is probably going to catch on more and more - it’s not free, you have to pay, but! - it’s $10 a month for everything like Spotify

This is, unfortunately, a point very much tied to the region you live in. In my region, even if I pay the same price as the users from US, not only do I pay much more in terms of percentage of my income, but I also get just a fraction of the content available.

Imagine, I'd want to watch some Doctor Who for example, there's exactly zero streaming services offering the show in my country.

Judging by the various threads on this topic, the current streaming reality isn't "a few bucks" and it actually involves quite a lot of cognitive overhead (exactly when you just want to be relaxing!). Neither do you have to go "trawling" for torrents - public trackers/catalogs easily get you the contemporary zeitgeist and its back catalog. But sure, keep on enjoying the simulated liberation of the corporate sandbox. My comment was meant for those on the fence.

It's funny you mention that. Convenience is exactly why I switched to piracy earlier this year.

To watch content legally, I first have to work out who owns the rights in Australia (it can be different to the US, and often changes - e.g. last time I watched The Terminator it was on Netflix but now it's on Amazon Prime), see if I have that app (I'm not signing up to an app to watch one film, even if it were free it's not worth the bullshit), and if not pick a different film and start the whole process again. It's worse for TV shows, where season 1 could be exclusive to Netflix but seasons 2-7 are only on Stan.

To pirate content, I open the Elementum tab in Kodi, type in what I want to watch, and 20 seconds later it's directly streaming from the bittorrent network in fantastic HD quality.

Elementum is a plugin for Kodi, works great.

I've never understood this idea of good torrents being hard to find. TPB has been around for a long time.

Popcorn Time is "just an app" too.

These days you get a much worse service if you pay[0].

Can't make that shit up.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs

To me the biggest frustration is that they can and will pull content with no warning or notification. So you are always gambling whether or not the thing you want to watch will appear, even if you've watched it dozens of times already. Personal digital collections do not have this problem.

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