A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates
audioholics.com
audioholics.com
I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I'm ethically in the clear; I'm not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any damages from my habits.
Streaming is absolutely more convenient than physical discs, but it's also objectively horrible for a company to be able to arbitrarily remove my media. With my discs, I always have a physical copy, so it's more failure-proof.
That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it's something that really is limited to geeky people. Sure, as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse.
Blu-rays really aren't being produced anymore, so I suspect that the only sustainable preservation effort will end up being piracy, and this has been an issue long enough that the large media companies cannot pretend to not understand that.
i.e. one doesn't need "crazy" (i.e. more than a handful of consumer hard drives) amount of storage to store a lot of bluray movies and tv shows and keep them online available to you.
That said, since I have an elaborate tape backup system now, I've debated keeping the "masters" as archives on the tapes, and keeping compressed versions for streaming, but laziness has kind of won out on that.
I've entertained setting up a tape drive local backup for my NAS (4x 14 TB) for a few years. Is it worthwhile from your experience?
I have two LTO-6 tape drives. They only connect via SAS, which is a little annoying, but I bought a 2-port used SAS card on ebay for $20. I ended up buying a pack of like 100 LTO-6 tapes on eBay two years ago for a steal, like $150 in total. Each tape is 2.5TB, so I can pretty easily back up my movies. Each movies is written to two separate tapes. I keep a spreadsheet of which tape every movie lives, in case I need to restore a specific backup.
I would really like to get an LTO-7 or LTO-8 drive with Thunderbolt, but they cost an arm and a leg even used on eBay right now. If you get lucky, an external SAS LTO-6 drive can be had for about $200-$300.
It's a slightly expensive up-front cost I'll admit, however, it came after I was using Google archive storage, and when I did a restore of 21TB of movies, the next day I had a bill for like $700!
It's saved my ass one time thus far; I accidentally broke my ZFS RAID and lost everything, but fortunately I was able to restore all my blu-ray rips from tape, and it was pretty easy, and more importantly, didn't cost me anything extra.
If you decide to go down this road, I do recommend getting one that has support for LTFS; otherwise you're going to be stuck using tar commands I think.
You could just buy DVD's if you want to save space and are willing to take a hit to image quality.
Let's imagine an 8TB drive costs $100 and can store 200 movies as their raw bluray encoding. that means each movie costs 50 cents to store without any real work. If one can divide the space needed by half, one only saved 25c.
But how much did it cost to save that 25c.
Lets imagine one can encode a movie with x264/5, but it will consume 100watts of cpu power over 10 hours to do that (or a kilowatt total). If one is paying 20c a killowat hour (US national average is 19c a kilowatt hour, california is 33c per google) one just paid 20c more to encode it, so if one cut the size in half, one in practice only saved 5c. If one spent 5-10 minutes setting up the encode, did one spend 5c of one's time doing that? Personally, the setup for me was also 25c worth of time.
Now, one can "save more", if one is storing duplicate copies. (i.e. I'm storing it on 2 or more hard drives, not 1), but its still not really that significant.
Now, if one isn't spending one's own time and energy to encode it (i.e. is pirating it as others did the work), then perhaps one can argue that a "good" encode vs the raw is better and makes more efficient usage of one's space. But the argument here isn't about pirating, but about storing one's own legally obtained media.
As I've argued elsewhere, the only reasonable reason I've found for encoding is that one runs into "physical" space limitations (i.e. how many hard drives one can keep online). I'm just unconvinced that should override the time and cost of doing the encoding oneself.
4k, something like 25GB-45GB, depending, but I have several in the teens of GB that I wouldn’t guess weren’t full quality.
I reserve full-quality rips for movies I both care about a lot and that benefit from it. I don’t need more than 4.5GB dedicated to Happy Gilmore or what have you.
That said, I have 24x16TB hard drives in ZFS RAID. It's three separate RAIDZ2's, so the amount of space on there is 18x16TB, so about 288TB. It's a fairly expensive amount of waste, but it's nice to be able to lose up to six disks at a time without having to worry. I could fairly easily get another 8 drives in there if I really needed it, but thus far my total consumption is only about 50TB in total, and I delete actually stuff when I'm done with it.
Specifically:
- What hardware caters to 32x disks (24+8)? (I'm picturing enterprise gear)
- What software are you using to coordinate it? TrueNAS?
It's a fairly typical 1U HP Proliant server, which counts as "enterprise gear". I don't remember the model but it's somewhat unremarkable. It only has like six bays in the front, and I use one for a NixOS install, and two of them with SSDs for read and write cache. It has an old 10 gigabit ethernet card for connectivity. The server I bought used for around $150, the ethernet card I got for about $35 used on ebay.
The actual disks live in 8 bay external chassis, and connected via USB3.0. This may sound horrifying, but USB3 is rated for like 5 gigabits, way more than you can easily get from a home RAID with spinning disks. I have a PCIe 3.0 x16 USB3 card in there, with four plugs, each with a dedicated controller, meaning that in theory each port could get 5 gigabits. The reason I could fairly easily get eight more in there is that I'm only using three of the four ports, so without much effort I could buy 8 more drives (of any size I suppose), put them into another 8 bay chassis, and just add vdev to my RAID. This particular PCIe USB card was $41 on eBay.
I use ZFS for a software RAID.
This sort of happened accidentally; I didn't used to have a rack mount server, I was using a bunch of Nvidia Jetson Nanos, and as such there wasn't a real way directly plug hard drives in, so I ended up having to use the external chassis. Eventually I bought three of those cases, had all the drives in there, and when I decided to buy a "real" server it was substantially easier and cheaper to just add proper USB support to a server than it was to find a decent 24-bay server at a decent price, particularly since I already had the cases.
In hindsight I probably should have got chassis that have eSATA support, but they've been getting decent speed and it's an extremely convenient system. It's also come in handy once when I accidentally broke my server, and I needed to get files off the RAID; all I had to do was plug them into my laptop and mount the ZFS RAID there.
ETA:
Forgot to answer what I use to manage it. I installed NixOS on my server with a pretty vanilla ZFS on Linux install and an NFS mount. I do the tmpfs-on-root trick, so the root partition gets nuked on every reboot. https://elis.nu/blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
I don't use any fancy GUI tools or anything; NixOS does a good enough automating away the un-fun parts of maintaining a server, and if I break my server I can very easily roll back to a previous state, and if I really have to, reinstalling it from scratch takes like 20 minutes since I can just copy over my configuration file (which I back up on Gitlab) and have everything automatically set up again. NixOS is pretty cool.
ETAA:
According to `dmidecode` and `lscpu`, server model is `ProLiant DL380 G7`, 24 cores, 128GB of RAM. I think it's actually 12 cores, and it says 24 because of hyperthreading.
It's pretty unremarkable. I like it a lot, but it's a fairly typical and bog-standard used server.
Can you talk more about this? I personally have a Dell R720 and about 90TB available for use, and use 40TB of it for my media server. I'm wondering if that's some use case I want to look into.
I wanted to play with paper trading strategies. I listen on websocket streams of cryptocurrency and stock ticker stuff [1], and the service listening on that socket just plops it into Kafka, with the partition key being the ticker name.
The reason I bother adding Kafka largely comes down to the ability to use the Kafka Streams API. Kafka Streams allows me to do time windows of different trades, or lets me do a sql-style join across two different streams, or lets me filter out data that I don't think is relevant.
Kafka Streams gives you most of the fun of a map-reduce framework, but without having to administer a map-reduce server; it's even smart enough to handle internal state by creating intermediate topics and/or creating local RocksDB instances. It's pretty cool.
There's also has the advantage of allowing me to set retention, so I don't have to worry about doing any kind of manual cleanup; I only have to worry about having N days of stuff on the server, and it's trivial to change that.
Also, I have a number of topics, each with 32 partitions, meaning that if I do find any kind of strategy that works, I can very easily scale it up without changing any code.
I'm basically using Kafka as a streaming-only database. I think it's neat but I haven't actually found any strategies that make or lose money. It's just been a fun way to play around with different bits of server stuff.
[1] https://docs.alpaca.markets/docs/real-time-stock-pricing-dat...
I can read about all the fun theory behind trading math and for distributed systems, and that has some value, but I will understand stuff a lot better if I give myself a real project to do stuff with. I guess I am more of an engineer than a mathematician.
that is a lot.
maybe it (and this comment) will be subsumed in the next 10 years, but for now it is spacious and amazing.
I should point out, part of the reason I do this is as a learning tool. I feel like you learn a lot of neat tricks when you build and run this stuff on your own, and I think that there's really no negatives in the software engineering world to being proficient with the command line and server administration.
One advantage, though, is that when you have a "nearly-unlimited" place to dump data, it kind of changes how you think about problems. If I want to do some experiment with video encoding, there's really nothing stopping me from encoding a video into 100 different configurations so I can directly compare stuff. I don't have to be sparing, and there at least won't be any surprise bills from Amazon or Google later.
They're spinning drives so I don't really worry about the write-cycle stuff.
However, if you want to rip 4K blurays, you've got to flash the firmware on your bluray drive and then run MakeMkV + handbrake (or much harder CLI stuff) to process a disc into a useable media file which can THEN go into Plex. All of that takes time and effort, and usually some trial and error.
I also keep a bluray player next to the NAS. Simply because it's too much of a pain to deal with ripping sometimes. I still have to get through my 30-disc Ingmar Bergman Criterion Boxset that I bought 2 years ago. Much easier to pop a disc in the player!
Apparently as of recently at [CCC 37C3: Unlocked] (December 2023) Adam Batori demonstrated a side channel attack against Intel SGX and AACSv2 in his talk called "Full AACSess: Exposing and exploiting AACSv2 UHD DRM for your viewing pleasure" although that has nothing to do with the specific drive used to my knowledge, though the specific Intel CPU used may have quirks which may make their particular implementation CPU and/or CPU microcode and/or motherboard dependent.
Previously on HN:
Full AACSess: Exposing and exploiting AACSv2 UHD DRM for your viewing pleasure [video] 6 points by hcadam | 2023-12-29 | 1 comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810011
https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12296-full_aacsess_exposing_and_...
Video of the live demo above. Additionally, I have included a version of video on from the official media.ccc.de YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEBuiecLZGg
Referenced by the above talk is prior work on defeating/bypassing AACS[v1] by Peter Eckersley in his talk titled "A Spotter's Guide to AACS Keys" at [CCC 24C3: Volldampf voraus!] in December 2007, which I also link below:
https://media.ccc.de/v/24c3-2331-en-spotter_guide_to_aacs_ke...
Also of interest from [CCC 36C3: Resource Exhaustion] is a talk by oct0xor titled "Hacking Sony PlayStation Blu-ray Drives" in December 2019:
https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10567-hacking_sony_playstation_b...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW39dsbffMw
Apologies for lateness of my reply! I hope that helps.
I’ve heard that some setups struggle with higher resolutions and bitrates, which is compounded on 4K (HDR also with its own quirks for downsampling in post processing for playback on unsupported devices) versus 1080p. These factors are exasperated when direct play isn’t possible due to incompatible files, unsupported container formats and/or codecs, or insufficient bandwidth, especially when remote mounts, caching, and transcoding come into play.
Honestly, I've been happy enough with 1080p. I think 1080p blu-rays still hold up pretty well visually. My biggest TV is 70", and I watch it from like 15 feet away, so I don't think I'd benefit much from the increased resolution.
I know that there's other variables that are enhanced with a 4k blu-ray, but they haven't been significant enough for me to bother collecting/ripping them. When I buy a 4k blu-ray, I've just been ripping the regular 1080p blu-ray that always comes with it.
Also, I think anyone that tells you that you can just have always-online media that you don't have to babysit is lying. As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. Your server will break at some point, for no apparent reason, and you're going to have to fix it. Usually the fixes are easy on their own, but you end up accidentally nuking the RAID and losing all your rips. It's hardly "user friendly".
This isn't crapping on Plex, it's sort of the nature of the beast
I've had jellyfin serving my music, family videos and youtube rips (e.g. university lectures) for years. Haven't had to touch it since I set it up. I just plop files into folders and it picks them up.
I got a lot of family videos from my mom, who keeps them on her computer plus an external hard drive, which she brought to me to copy. Copying files to USB drives as a backup and sharing that is pretty understandable for non tech people.
That’s certainly more than many people are able (or willing) to put up with, and it requires a several hundred dollar investment. But NAS ease of use for common tasks is pretty good theee days.
Dude, really bad example, printers are hell to set up.
I think 99% of problems are wifi related or trying to share the USB connected printer over the network.
Until about two years ago, I was happy enough to pay for two streaming services (HBO Max and Hulu), along with Amazon Prime, and I treated that like my "rental store". The first viewing would be to see if I like the movie, and if I did then I would immediately order the blu-ray.
Now I've canceled all my streaming services because I don't want to pay for a million of them.
Just a note, I will very frequently put a movie or TV series on in the background while I work on other things, probably even more frequently than I turn on music. I just like having noise from a movie or show that's familiar for me.
It's how I justify running a server 24/7; the increased power costs are lower than what I'd need to pay to have all the major streaming services every month.
I recently through away all my CDs, DVDs, and BluRay after carrying them from apartment to apartment for years (in notebooks) and never once opening them during those years.
As for the embarrassment. I get from some POV it's a waste of time but I easily have a list of ~400 movies all of which I've watched 3-20 times each. Examples might be a movie like The Matrix I'm sure I've watch 10+ times. A movie like Harvey, 2 or 3.
do you have a paid $99/year dev account?
I loop through the collection by putting a watched disc back in a separate spot until I've gone through them all and then start over.
At least in France (possibly EU) it is (droit à la copie privée), there's even a tax for that, paid on every storage device, whether or not it's intended to store such media. Yup the tax is about paying for a copy of something you already own.
You can rip anything all you want from a source medium you own. But you can't fetch it from another source even if you do own an original medium and the resulting data is 1:1 identical down to the last literal bit. The bits have a legal colour depending on where they come from!
I figure, though, that if I'm buying a legit copy of the blu-ray, and I'm not distributing copies to people, I'm probably not very high up on Disney's "sue them" list, even if I am technically breaking a rule.
To be honest, I think that it's a pretty stupid law; obviously distributing the media makes sense to be illegal, but I think it's idiotic to make breaking DRM illegal.
Breaking DRM to format shift in France is illegal and has been for many years.
This has been ruled in court. See the "Mullholand Drive" case, where a consumer (backed by UFC Que Choisir) sued producer/distributor/whatever for the inability to rip their DVD.
Case was tortuous with back and forths, ultimately Cour de Cassation 28 février 2006 ruled that the use of DRM was legal in consideration of international agreements and so that the case was moot.
Then Cour d'Appel Paris 4 avril 2007 ruled that copie privée is not a right but an exception and that as such it meant that a consumer cannot sue on limitations caused by DRM, but that they can use the exception as a defense should they be accused of copyright infrigement.
DADVSI is more annoying, as it regulates the making, distribution, import, possession in view of selling, lending or renting, of DRM breaking tools, as well as (defined separately) working around DRM is made illegal, irrespective of exceptions.
BUT this only applies to DRM schemes that are deemed effective, which DVD's CSS is not (I seem to recall this has been ruled somewhere), making libdvdcss legal to use and distribute. It is in fact OOTB packaged in VLC, hosted in France, and if it were illegal Videolan would have been sued to oblivion. Arguably MakeMKV decodes BluRays with actual keys, so is arguably not an DRM breaking tool (like libdvdcss is) but merely a decryption tool using a legit process and legit keys, no different than a BluRay player.
One could argue that rendering the file immediately to a screen or to a file is fundamentally different, but these laws take all sorts of considerations like copies in buffers and whatnot (and yes in the debate at some point majors wanted you to pay for the in-memory buffer copies that happens when decoding MP3 which is astoundingly ridiculous). So the decoding process is not DRM breaking and the storage of the decrypted result is not that different from these buffers, except it's a bit longer lived.
But there's one more thing: in addition, the same DADVSI defines that DRM must not prevent interoperability as long as author rights are respected, as well as cannot oppose free usage of the work or protected item in accordance with author rights.
Well, Conseil d'Etat 16 juillet 2008 ruled that usage of FOSS software to work around DRM for interoperability purposes is legal. The pain point is MakeMKV is only partially FOSS but DADVSI says nothing about things being FOSS and I don't think anyone is going to ever get sued for making private copies of their legally owned BuRays for their sole usage in order to play content on a variety of devices and OSes they use and would otherwise be unable to play without being decrypted.
https://www.droit-technologie.org/actualites/le-regime-de-le...
None of that matters because nobody is going to try and litigate against individual disc rippers, they are going to litigate against the people who actually wrote the ripping software, and DMCA 1201 is far more harsh to them. There is basically no exception to the prohibition on DRM-breaking tools - I'm not even 100% sure that, say, verifying each individual's usecase before letting them break DRM is enough to escape DMCA 1201's ire.
Jellyfin supports multiple users, she can mail you some disks ;)
Or OP can just host public; I've got some disks I can send in, too. I'll chip in $/month for OP's troubles.
I don't think you can, I mean DNS is public.
Is this something you are able to work around?
This should be the tag line for those of us building homelabs for little to no practical reason.
1U short-depth (12") chassis
Low-power Arm SoC
4x3.5HDD, 2xM.2 storage
2x10GbE, 2x2.5GbE NICs
QNAP OS replaced by Devuan (no systemd)
serial port
ECC SODIMMIt's one thing to have a personal collection of movies that you painstakingly ripped on your own, but if you were to try and sell a machine that automatically circumvented DRM, I cannot imagine that I wouldn't get sued and/or arrested by multiple entities.
This of course, makes me sad, because it would be nice to have a system that wasn't just a nerdy custom setup.
Why must running a media server be such a chore when it's just TBs of movie files?
I think most media servers also have an operating system, software to transcode and serve the media files. You will also want a client to be able to read the served content and your server needs to stay up to date with the client.
I would argue that such a device does indeed represent painstakingly ripping your own movies. After all, it is slow - I think it's safe to assume it takes at least 1:1 to rip a blu ray. And it will take you a long time to watch your collection even once.
There are two difficulties. First, the fact that people might never own, or stop owning the blu-rays they've ripped. This is in part mitigated by the fact that such a device would be expensive, and as such its a luxury item not a piracy item. Second, you'll have the stray ornery hacker who'll want to do something more with the device, and dammit I paid for it so its mine! They'll insist on seeding torrents with it or cloning the hard drives and selling them or something and honestly I don't think this is mitigable.
The UX is better than any streaming service.
Fortunately I had a synology nas already as a backup server so I just installed Plex on it and it was so easy. This was probably 15 years ago and I still have all those video files and the dvds are in a box somewhere untouched.
Only real maintenance I’ve done is replace the DVD rips with Blu-ray rips slowly over time as I figure out which ones are most watched.
Super easy to run as a player for a network share, you just lose by account things (save your spot and pickup anywhere, content filtering, etc).
(If anyone knows how to do the actual checking, I'm all ears - I'm an Exact Audio Copy guy for my CDs)
Not that I'm not planning on re-encoding for everyday use, but I'll take the hit in storage costs to keep the "originals" around.
They do use a much higher bitrate than streaming services tend to use, but the streaming versions are sacrificing some quality to save bandwidth.
4K Blu-Rays are also usually already at least H.264 so it really is limited how much smaller you can make them without sacrificing image quality.
Older 1080p Blu-Rays really do use stone-age codecs though and can easily be compressed to a fraction of the disk size without visible loss.
That's why we have to post individualistically and learn that everything is social, that solutions are societal. Your mom might never be able to self-host, and you might never be able to make the wine that you drink. That's fine, and that's why we share responsibilities as a group. Be the one that "knows how to do that king of things" for your group, host services for you, your mom, your friends... It's fun to do and a very good way to collectively re-appropriate our digital lives. You'll be the technical person, but all governance, directions, values can be decided collectively: that's what democratic societies are, after all. If you can't/don't want to be there 24/7, let the group know that it might break but maybe the group will decide that it's fine enough.
I'm also the person they usually call with any kind of tech support questions.
In practice I see plenty of people sharing access to plex servers, but it is unsettling that someone could somewhat arbitrarily be subject to violent interference for sharing media with friends.
“make decisions as a group” sounds great and democratic - but you really think anyone cares about this enough amongst non-techies to be part of all this “decision making” about what apps to use? And this is in addition to your day job. And please don’t say well we can evangelize - again: no one has time for that.
It sounds great esp to us techies - that’s how WE would solve the problem as a group. Doing that with non-techies esp with family and friends would be HORRIBLE in practice. Unfortunately I have a feeling I’ll get responses of the type “well you never know till you try” and “maybe YOU can’t / don’t want to do it but others will”. To which I say more power to you :) but this is def not a solution outside of hacker forums where we can pore over tech surveillance and freedom etc. and create a bubble where everything is libertarian and can be solved if only we had the right systems in place for the normies.
> If you can't/don't want to be there 24/7, let the group know that it might break but maybe the group will decide that it's fine enough.
You don't owe anyone anything, and I'm not advocating for being their tech support helping them in any and all tasks. The goal is not to be able to help them plug a webcam when they need it. I'm talking about redefining together social conventions and tools to be together. What kind of software you want to use for that, agree on rules, what to post, what is not tolerable, how do you do to share photos, and stuff.
> just out of curiosity: are you doing this yourself?
Yes, I installed and created accounts on the messenger I use with my parents. Yes, it can be as simple as that. That's the point.
> but you really think anyone cares about this enough amongst non-techies to be part of all this “decision making” about what apps to use?
You really are assuming people are stupid and that's sad. Of course people are interested in questions like "I want to talk with the group" or "I want to know where my photos are" or "I want to be able to see my videos in 10 years". Even when their reply is "wherever", it means it's acceptable for them to use another tool that isn't a FAANG.
I ask the question the other way around: have you had replies telling you "we don't want to leave Google because we actually like Google's surveillance capitalism" ? Until you haven't, "normies" are interested in getting out (and please don't use that term, you make it sound like you're superior to them when you are absolutely not. No one is superior, no one is inferior)
I setup a Jellyfin server for my parents. It works, but ripping blu-rays--even with my efforts to largely automate and simplify things--is a nuisance they tend not to bother with. You can expect some phone calls and/or stacks of discs that were "forgotten" when you're around :).
Even then, it's still a more pleasant experience for them than the fragmented mess streaming has become, where added friction and annoyance are the glue that hold streaming apps together. IMO, setting up your own server is worth the occasional added hassle. Not that it eliminates streaming, sadly.
Now, if you're willing to spend a large sum of money to make the process painless, Kaleidescape[0] makes home media servers for the ultra high-end home theater/home AV market. They originally sold massive 300 Blu-ray disc changers you'd hook up to their system, adding more as your collection grew, but now you buy servers from them and download movies with with Blu-Ray-level bitrates from their store.
Of course, the same ~$300-500/TB for just the servers alone will buy you a hell of a lot of tech support for a Plex/Jellyfin setup.
Obligatory IANAL.
You should be in the clear (including the circumvention of DRM) since all you're doing is making an archival copy for your own personal use.
Legalese:
But the others could just put the disk in the reader, without needing any server. Is it so inconvinient?
Unless your collection gets as big as yours you don't really need to maintain a server - a harddrive full of media files works pretty well.
> Blu-rays really aren't being produced anymore.
Wait what - since when?
You know whats wrong, you price gouging me for 15 services that are all awful.
Unlike TV where channels compete for eyeballs, unlike the theater where they only make money when you show up streaming services have perverse incentives.
What is the ideal streaming customer: one who pays, and never watches. The content only has to be good enough often enough to make you not want to unsub and resub. I have to suspect that these servcies are programing this way.
It explains why free + ads is a model for better content. You only get paid for what I watch... It means that 800 hours of shit content isnt worth having up, and you need to have better stuff.
Netflix is an all you can eat buffet... It's cheap and the food is half assed at best. Every now and again the come out with something good but your gonna eat a lot of mediocre to get your moneys worth.
I can pay Amazon or a theater to watch ONLY what I want to see. I pick it I pay for it. If it sucks I'm out 3-6 bucks for a rental or 15+ for a theater. Unlike a restaurant, you're never getting a refund or a freebee if the content is bad.
Or I can watch something like tubi. Where I don't have a true profile... I get to watch ads' to watch content. IM trading a bit of my attention for not pre paying for the hope of good content and being able to abandon something if it is bad with a minimum of loss.
Give me a streaming service with a reasonable amount of ad's and give me a micro transaction to skip them when I really want to...
Fun quip but not a sophisticated view on business models.
The big categories include: AVOD (advertising subscription on demand) is a different business model from SVOD (subscription video on demand) is different from TVOD (transactional video on demand).
There are 3 kinds of TVOD:
* Pay-Per-View (charge viewer every time you watch)
* Download-to-Rent (access title for limited time)
* Electronic-sell-through (one time fee for unlimited access)
Some business start with one simple model but embrace some hybrid for different content types or to reach a more diverse customer base.
If I pay 99 cents to watch a movie once that's Pay Per View.
Are you making the argument that me sitting through ads for 99 cents worth of value to the streamer is different than a direct transaction? The money per stream is still changing hands, Be it from my hands or an advertisers to the streamer and then the content producer.
Because of modern profiling you could make the argument that the no sign up services are tracking who watches what at a household level (shadow subscriptions). But that does not change the fact that in a pure ad based model If I dont watch no one gets paid...
Regardless of who is paying for the view, myself to streaming service, an andversiser or sponsor, me to a theater... if the product isnt quality no money changes hands. This is in direct contrast to streaming service where the ideal customer pays and does not watch (or watches the minimum)... where consumption reduces profit.
Are you seriously trying to argue that it isn't? You're basically arguing that making waffles at home is exactly the same thing as getting pancakes from IHOP because the farmers get paid either way, never mind that the meal isn't actually the same and neither are the parties involved.
Nothing really if we both enjoy the content. If it sucks however we both have choices. I move on to the next thing and enjoy it. IF you move on, then you're paying again, if you stay your funding shitty content and wasting time.
The most important differences are:
* pay per view doesn't have advertisers to satisfy * people's time is worth much more to advertisers than it is to the average viewer. People are only going to pay cash for things they really specifically want to watch (e.g. Game of Thrones), not channel hopping trash (24 hours in A&E) - but they'll happily watch adverts for the trash.
Instead of telling other people how to run their business, perhaps people should be putting their money where their mouth is and create the media and try selling it by the minute, and see how successful they are.
If streaming services did similar, you likely wouldn’t be that much better off
Plus, but not unsubscribing, you’re reinforcing their current business model.
No one is price gouging. You can easily survive without watching ANY media. You can also easily only pay for the exact media that you want at the exact time you want. You can also easily pay for less than 15 services, even just 1, anytime you want.
People seem to like to complain about not being able to afford a luxury, which is more affordable than it has ever been in the history of media.
Edit: to reply to comment below, consider the price for 1 month of the subscription to be the price of the media.
Edit 2: the root cause of all these complaints is excessive copyright terms. Make copyright expire after 10 years, and there will be plenty of streaming competition.
Great where is the three body problem available for its fair market value.
Wait it isnt, it's locked behind a monthly subscription.
How about the bear... nope locked up in another service.
I would happily pay fair value for these items. Marking them up like its blockbuster new release shelf circa 2000 or in 15 different pay per view services is ... dumb.
This is why folks stole cable and got cracked boxes. This is why piracy ran rampant in music for so long. Video has yet to catch up and its leading to a new round of piracy...
The DOJ went after apple but we cant reflect on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
It's 2024, we shouldn't be content with only what's needed for "survival" and we shouldn't accept being exploited in order to have access to art and culture. With modern technology and nearly free and instant global distribution art and culture should be increasingly made more accessible to everyone, but instead the paywalls grow ever higher and arbitrary restrictions are put in place.
Sadly we can't always pay for the exact media that want. The amount of lost works is increasing. Streaming services are pulling content and refusing to release it on physical media making it unavailable, and they are censoring content making unedited works unavailable at any price (at least legally). Expect the problem to get worse.
I like youtube premium because it is ethically correct to pay for the cost of the content I watch + a reasonable profit for everyone involved, and youtube manages to be a highly centralised location for everything I care about video wise and I spend about 20hrs a week of watch time. I'm not paying for a billion different services Disney, HBO, netflix, blah, blah just to watch maybe a few hrs of content a month on each (at most). The value proposition of all streaming services besides youtube premium is atrocious.
Corporations are not humans and do not honor the social contract.
Hard disagree: telling me what I can and cannot share with third parties is YOU not being nice. Me sharing things with third parties does not involve you at all.
Copyright (in the US) is not a moral framework but a ulitarian one - intended as a way to incentivize production of creative and scientific works by intruducing entirely artificial scarcity. But that's just a handwavy justification for the invasion of our rights that is accepted without question not because there is data backing it up but because that's what people are used to. In reality the need for copyright is questionable at best as humans have been creating long before copyright was invented. It is also questionable that we need to keep creating new content at the current rate when we still have (or could have without copyright) the entirety of creations from human history at our disposal.
What I do mind is: suited executives shaking hands for exclusivity meaning that if someone wants access to everything they have to use a dozen streaming services. I also hate that you'll pay a subscription for a streaming service and then within that there are additional subscriptions to that service's partners so you end up paying for the base service + Y additional ones. Or paying for streaming and having a selection of the content still cost money to rent. And don't get me started on things being available only in certain regions (also due to the stinking hand shaking).
EU needs to ban exclusivity contracts imo. If Apple make their own content, sure, that could only be on Apple TV. But if Netflix shake hands with HBO on something to make it only available on Netflix...that sort of thing should be illegal.
This isn't the library I went to as kids that had a tiny rack of VHS tapes in the back. They seem to have fully embraced the digital era.
But the majority of video games and movies being produced are empty wastes of time. It seems to me loaning those items is just an attempt to stay relevant lest libraries become vacant and useless. What other value is there in loaning out PlayStation games?
Trying to limit libraries to "educational" content is preposterous.
If you are writing from Egypt I think you have a strong case
It was likely one them, or their lackeys, that -1'ed you.
Frankly at this point it's just virtue signaling on the order of "I'm not a raging consumerist like you, I use a public good instead." The demand to be thanked, and the refusal to be criticized are part-and-parcel of the virtue signal.
In the digital age it's absurd to say that we should have to rely on public libraries to access our culture when we have the means for everyone to have their own personal library in their pocket.
It doesn't help that libraries that do carry digital content have fully embraced DRM, thus giving a pretense of legitimacy to anti-user technologies and absurd laws that give them teeth and thereby weakening attempts to correct problem.
and how do you intend to implement public iPhones and connectivity for the homeless?
Hoopla, however, is abysmal both in selection (though this depends on your local library) and in software/service quality. The search is broken, and it has some of the most confusing UX I've ever experienced. It's as if it actively wants to prevent you from watching anything.
Hoopla is just based off a relic.
File sharing is clearly the most user friendly and therefore correct choice.
Far cry from what they used to be, and, well, you're paying for it anyway via taxes so silly to not use it.
I’m interested in the concept of donating media to the library instead of buying it for myself. However, it doesn’t seem like there’s a simple way to do that…
See 'first sale doctrine': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine?wprov=sfla...
Most libraries have way more than they can fit on the shelves, but if you talked with the purchasing person you might be able to work something out.
I've seen her frustration as series come and go from the catalogs, and the lack of things that we can watch together. So recently I've gone back to DVDs.
Many local shops sell used DVDs for €1 each, and I recently discovered a store in Helsinki which is lined with DVDs basically from floor to ceiling - a little more expensive, but not much. It was fun spending an hour browsing around looking for things I remembered or wanted to see for the first time.
Sure DVDs won't last forever, but I think having TV shows, and films, on disk is going to keep me going for the next 10+ years quite happily. Maybe after that I'll switch to something else, but I struggle to imagine it.
And by ripping I of course mean "create a private backup".
480i was built for the exact opposite, CRTs where pixels fade slowly.
I've yet to see a poorly mastered Blu-Ray, and only watched a couple Blu-Ray 4k discs, but online streams at 1080p or 4k are sometimes rather bitstarved so...
With DVDs, some, perhaps many look just fine on a larger screen, but there are some whose mastering is very poor, and those will look really bad on a larger screen. My copy of Forest Gump features closeups where the characters face translates around on their head. But most of the other DVDs I've watched are fine. Yes, Blu-Ray would be better, but not so much that its worth rebuying.
But other examples, like the first season of "Reacher", look like shit in 4K. Many artifacts resulting in skintones that get pushed into green or red. Super weird.
Good encoding comes a long way, and not all services go the extra mile.
It was a big relevation to me watching classic movies carefully remastered on Blu Ray.
If I really like it or watch it more than twice, I’ll get the Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray.
"No termination date. I didn't know how long we had together... Who does?"
Of course, if you're not careful you end up like me having spent multiple thousands on disks and servers and data tape backups, so be less dumb than me.
Decades ago my wife and I would go to blockbuster every Friday night and pick the movie we wanted to watch for the weekend. Now we do the same thing, just by streaming it instead of getting a physical copy and having to take it back. I have no complaints.
Every time I go to a friends house and experience how terrible all the competing bargain bin chromecast/shield/fireTV shit is, watching every button press take seconds to result in a screen update, taking ages to type in anything (vs ATV’s dictation or just the built in remote app on iOS) I feel more and more confident in this. The current gen ATV is ridiculously responsive and quick by comparison.
> If we know we’re really going to like a movie we sometimes buy it.
I meant buying instead of renting in this case.
Renting costs $5-ish, the “buy” option is often $20.
We need a return to Blockbuster-like selection, but streaming. A streaming service should purchases however many copies they are streaming, and replace them on a schedule as the copy “wears out”, like Blockbuster.
Easy to find out by coming up with a business plan, and then pitch it to investors. If you are right, then you'll be the next Reed Hastings. If not, you'll just be another person with an idea nobody else believes is worth investing
You are kind moving the goal posts with your first statement "If that was profitable, the service you describe would not have shuttered." and this one.
Saying that a company is profitable but not worth the investment is not going to solve the streaming is our only option. We are looking for a solution other than streaming that is still legal so that people do not have to resort to pirating. If you are suggesting that a service providing shiny round discs through the mail or any other brick&mortar Blockbuster or mom&pop video rental solution is going to be profitable to the point of sustaining a business, then there's a bit of realism that needs to be brought back into the conversation. This seems to not be wanted and instead point back to me not understanding what words mean.
Also I don’t think suggesting a giant task like starting a business is anything but a bad faith rhetorical tactic. I’m not going to pitch a DVD mailing company to investors for reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not it is viable (I’m a programmer, not a businessman, and I don’t care to run a business, for one thing).
But anyway if you meant “you” as just a hypothetical person, we’ve already got one, Reed Hastings.
it's like we just want to argue and not actually have a conversation
Now that everything has fractured into a million pieces, media rental once again seems like it may make sense. Redbox is still around still lending out blurays. It wouldn't shock me if that model made a resurgence.
however, it does make me wonder if owning/operating/maintaining all of the boxes is more or less expensive than paying the USPS to deliver and collect on behalf of your service.
The key is they don’t have to pay for mailing, AND I can get something last minute with a short walk or a short drive (which puts three in range).
So never then.
(Also if this is circa 10 years ago every study suggests piracy is lower today than it was then.)
Physical media isn't always an alternative either. Movies usually still come out on physical media, but TV shows increasingly often don't.
Following the example of Hollywood which forcefully split content studios and cinemas would create a much much healthier market.
I think it would be really cool if there were ways for people to share their physical media because I don’t have the room to maintain a big media library, and also don’t have the energy to rip and store locally.
I also want to add that I’ve changed my streaming behavior- I will subscribe and immediately cancel the subscription so that it expires after a month so that I don’t end up with a bunch of active subscriptions that I’m not actively using.
When I do subscribe I always pay for the more expensive ad-free versions but recently I couldn’t get anything to play on Paramounts streaming service. After some trial and error I found that their “ad-free” service won’t run with my blocker running on my router and I needed to allowlist some ad services for it work. That’s pretty annoying.
Most people have heard of Criterion and of course they’re still going strong. But there are easily a dozen labels of various sizes dedicated to physical media these days. Arrow is one. Vinegar Syndrome tends to focus on more exploitative titles plus they act as distributor for many smaller labels. Severin does a lot of horror. The UK’s Radiance Video is carving out an interesting niche in more obscure genre offerings. Kino Lorber has a lot of classics. And so on, and so on.
I don’t know the financials behind this but a lot of the print runs seem to be around 3K copies and many of these labels have sustained for a few years now. Radiance and Vinegar Syndrome both have subscription programs which probably help with predictability. Some people buy these for the movies, some because they’re collectors, and some for both reasons.
https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/blu-ray-labels-film... is a decent article on all of this.
No, I’ve gone back to pirating everything with Radarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin and the likes. Enough is enough.
How come more of stuff is not made more efficiently, with all the computers and such?
And remember that is money that is coming from their customers. Thats why it is important for streaming companies to use the money to invest in content that people want to watch and produced at a price that makes sense.
If you make a bet that turns out bad, it is better to cancel the series rather than continue to waste subscribers’ money on another season.
The net result of what you’re asking for is crap reality tv and a million more generic superhero movies.
IMO...
Return of the King < The Two Towers < The Fellowship of the Ring == Rings of Power
And I never bothered to watch The Hobbit, because I can tell I wouldn't like it. A friend described it as "Hobbits of the Caribbean", because it has that helter skelter style where they somersault from one set piece to the next. Very unhobbitlike.
Update: https://i.ibb.co/52Q5cfr/Screenshot-20240323-152512.png
Is that DiCaprio number salary, or profit/revenue sharing as a producer? Looking at [0] it seems like his highest salary was $30M. He made more on Inception and Titanic, but that was total income, not salary.
Anyway, when thinking about it as cost and value, then it makes sense in our economic model.
Dis we really need Chris Pratt and Jack Black to do the voices for the Super Mario movie? Especially when Chris Pratt is basically using his regular voice the whole time?
I was just learning to rip blurays onto my disk server. I did this a lot during the DVD era, but the tooling is now slightly different. (Still ffmpeg or mencoder and the like, but now libaacs. And matroska is much more of a thing.) Sometimes I'm picking up higher res copies of stuff I already collected from that era.
https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/dvd-vs-streaming-eine-d...
It can sometimes take an effort to explain to an outsider why we don't do streaming and don't want to. It's like we are swimming opposite to the flow. But I see streaming as something geared towards casual listeners, while downloads are for professionals and enthusiasts.
I guess it comes down to bandwidth considerations; a blu-ray has between 25-50gb to play with and there's basically no reason not to fill up the disk. With streaming, there's a direct advantage to reducing bandwidth costs.
Sadly, I suspect that pirate torrent sites will preserve a lot of this stuff better than the streaming owners of the IP. We are in kind of a golden age for quality transfers of niche films. Even if there are still significant gaps.
I WANT to pay creators I just don't want to also pay for 10 different services to watch what I want.
HBO Max is good, YouTube is not for example
I have so many UHD movies on YouTube can only watch in 480P less I buy an ad ridden tv
I will say there is a big downside of physical media that has to be mentioned: the physical space. In my apartment it really makes the whole thing a bit of a non-starter unless I’m willing to discard jackets and put discs into soft binders like my old CD setup that I had in my 1999 Civic.
That issue can be made worse if you’re just not the type of person to watch and rewatch content over and over. That’s where streaming shines: I’m sure to some people, the fact that content rotates in and out isn’t that much of a downside. They just want to watch “whatever is on.”
I am also not a big fan of how much ripping and data hoarding becomes a hobby. In terms of the fact that you’re doing something illegal (breaking cryptographic protection to rip a personal collection), your risk certainly minimal, but it’s technically a non-zero risk. You’re technically supposed to keep those movies on their discs and not decrypt their content in order to back them up.
With that in mind if you’re already getting into ripping content and setting up Plex/Jellyfin for yourself you might as well just go the whole way and start downloading off of Usenet.
Aside from that, I also think that digital purchases and downloads can be a decent way to go. I’ve heard of some providers like Sony removing purchases from libraries but that also seems extremely rare. I have a few random movies purchased on iTunes (now renamed/moved to the Apple TV app but still available) and they’re still there many years later, but it would be nice to get that as more of a guarantee. Apple’s streaming quality is also second excellent and certainly close enough to what you get on Blu-Ray for 99.9% of people.
I should probably start buying physical media for shows and movies as well, but again, there's not much coming out that's actually good. Most of it is utter trash.
Its always wonderful to discover something amazing going for a steal. And I think DVDs hit a good sweet spot between having good-enough quality (after some upscaling), being cheap, and being quick and "fun" to rip and backup.
Its on the more minimalistic side of hoarding at least.
That said, I recently discovered Tubi, which is completely free, has a crazy amount of shows and movies, and ad blockers seem to work fine. Re-watching Andromeda while I finish up my dissertation. It's been great fun.
On the other hand UHD/4K drives require flashing firmware to get them to rip with MakeMKV and manufacturers have been seemingly patching them. I've not given it an honest try yet.
I haven't had any problems with a random ASUS drive I picked from the libredrive compatibility list (internal with SATA connection though, but you can always get a USB adapter). But was a couple of years ago so it is possible the avilability situation has gotten worse.
The only issues I have had were with brand new releases where the decryption keys weren't yet in the list MakeMKV pulls. But that is always only a short-lived problem.
I was doing research and that is what I found. Seems like a gamble if you order on Amazon- could get old stock with older firmware, but it is random.
The end result of the streaming services era seems like it will look no different than the cable era that people were fleeing.
Looking for recommendations of PC apps that I could have on a dedicated media player, or apps for dedicated hardware like Apple TV etc.
Media servers match based on the directory/filename then store the metadata in their own way (files stored with the video, their own database, etc).
So if you're ripping your discs you'll need to name the files correctly, easy enough for films, a little time consuming for TV show episodes.
Surely the problem is that we just haven’t gatekept popular culture well enough? It’s the children who are wrong.
Yes, streaming is that bad.
Is it OK/legal to download/torrent a movie/show (media) if you buy/own/paid for a physical copy Blu-ray/vinyl, etc.?
I'm pretty sure it works better not connected than if it was connected because prior experience with disc players which wanted to be online was they would boot slower and play discs slower due to doing online DRM updates, content checks and load movie studio web pages containing nothing but promos and ads - all while providing no actual end-user value from being online.
"Introducing the Mauhúr-1 indoor drone from Curunír Defense. This quiet and nimble drone revolutionizes clandestine operations and urban warfare by bringing unparalleled combat situational awareness to all war fighters in the base scout configuration[1]. Enemy combatants will have nowhere to hide with the infrared loadout. It can also carry out offensive duty with 4 anti-personnel shaped charges.
1. Base model starts at $500,000"
This tech is cool as hell, it's too bad it a couple of steps towards the inevitable killbots. The other major milestone will be when drones can identity and turn door knobs...
Here's an example https://youtu.be/HjJQBX2Nw2A?si=awZAc-a9ZYjJv8BY
On the other hand, All in the Family was offensive, but it served to highlight existing racism.
It can be hard to know where the line should be drawn. But, I do think the line should be drawn somewhere.
Even just a convention for storing crop coordinates in metadata that players could automatically make use of would be godsent. Although a perfect solution would need to support varying this throughout the movie as some cunts (Nolan) like to use different aspect ratios for diffent shots.
1. The Blu-ray software/data design itself is a monstrosity, seemingly designed for hostility towards users, and otherwise indifferent to user experience and reliability. (DVD wasn't too bad by comparison, with the only offenses being DRM and the obnoxious unskippables mainly used for threatening police-state messages at the start of your entertainment.)
2. Even with a better recent Sony Blu-ray player, I frequently had problems playing, which slams the brakes on whatever entertainment you were having, and turns it into a work task or frustration. I guess causes probably mostly from library disc wear, but also a few discs that just wouldn't play due to to what appeared to be software problems.
3. Modern surveillance capitalism behavior by devices. Virtually all companies, and some non-companies, will spy on you and then sell/give the data to sketchy other parties, with how normalized this has gotten. Just finding a modern player console that was airgappable but should work with all/most discs was difficult, and it wasn't a great ergonomic solution.
4. Assembling a better media player with Linux (despite being very familiar with Linux tinkering) looked time-consuming, duct-tape-ish, and legally questionable. Out-of-box solutions I tried seemed piracy-oriented, with disc-playing an afterthought. And search hits would overwhelming be SEO pages full of BS-ing sales pitches to sell sketchy VPN services or occasionally trick people into installing malware.
(Streaming, OTOH, has gotten ridiculous, with the services I've tried recently having mostly disposable content, and sometimes user-hostile UI. I canceled Amazon Prime mainly because Prime Video had gotten blatantly user-hostile in such ways that I think Bezos would've picked up that customer's chair in a meeting, and thrown it at people pitching the changes. But Netflix does some anti-user things too.)
More generally, my current mode as a consumer who doesn't like to be violated is to pick up tablescraps of value while minimizing harm. While wistfully keeping an eye out for the elusive collaborations of people who aren't just expending their energy towards extracting money by making the world worse for everyone else.
Personally, I like the disc options because of no commercials. However, it does take us back to the storage problem and surely they will start putting commercials on the discs.
No they don't. It's not even in the spec (it is in the BD+ and UHD Blu-Ray specs, but no disc has ever been released that used it for anything other than interactive extras).
That's only for BD-Live which is very limited for a few releases. Most studios only released a couple of films that way and ditched the whole thing years ago