Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The deception of “buying” digital movies

worldofmatthew.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 565 posts

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#101

Post by rthomas6 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #64
rthomas6 wrote: post #47

I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. It takes maybe 90 vs 20 seconds to get the movie playing, but in return I get noticeably better quality. 4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s. It really does look and sound noticeably better if you have the TV and surround setup to take a…

I don't have much physical media since finally going 4K HDR, but so far my experience hasn't been great. I purchased the Mission:Impossible boxed set, and it came with a download code to use on iTunes. The discs look like trash. Noisy, grainy, just bad. The iTunes versions look phenomenal. It would be nice if there was a way to know how good the quality of a particular release is before buying it. Reviews I read don'…

Wow, that's really surprising and disappointing. Usually the disc is considered the ideal "canonical" way to watch the movie, but I guess not always. I think blu-ray.com has user reviews that are focused on the quality of the disc specifically, but I usually don't look at them. I looked at MI:1 and they talked a lot about the grain, but seemed to see it as a stylistic choice.

Film grain from pre-digital era movies is a divisive issue. All older movies originally had some amount of film grain from the analog film. Some people like it and want it there on purpose. Some people prefer the movie run through a de-noise filter. The pro-grain people claim this removes fine detail. The anti-grain people say why the hell would you want it there on purpose. Some modern movies even add film grain on purpose. See Disney's Luca as an example. I personally don't care for it but it usually doesn't bother me as long as it's not extreme.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#102

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

akomtu wrote: post #3

The biggest deception was convincing the public that knowledge is a thing, so it can be bought, sold and change "owners". Convenient access to movies can be indeed sold, but not the movies themselves.

I don't much care for this weird equivalency that a motion picture is "knowledge", but regardless should every bit of knowledge be offered and given freely? Given that I know where I was last night and you don't is it within your right to demand it from me? Is it enough you want to have that knowledge that requires you then get it?

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#103

Post by poiuyytrewq »

it was the same sh*t when the first kindles with digitals books came out ... you don't "own" the book...

same goes with full-online games... you don't own the game, you just have the right to play on servers... when the server shuts down, you have nothing left

buying physical stuff may be the "old" way, but it's reliable stuff

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#104

Post by titzer »

abraxas wrote: post #12
stewx wrote: post #7

One under-appreciated limitation on digital movies is geographic restrictions. You buy a bunch of iTunes movies in Canada, then move to the USA, and you no longer have the right to watch them anymore due to licensing. Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes movies. IMO,…

Unfortunately geolocking isn't new or unique to the pure bits movie format. DVDs were regionally locked as well and even analog media like VHS tapes used color encoding formats that were specific in different regions (NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM). That said, the situation is quite a bit worse now as the modern DRM is harder to circumvent and geolocking more granular than ever before. But the intent to lock us down was alway…

> DVDs were regionally locked as well

It's easy nowadays to get a DVD/Bluray player that is multi-region, if only because of an aftermarket mod. E.g. I have a Samsung one that happily plays both media from any region.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#105

Post by necovek »

shockeychap wrote: post #89
necovek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loaning a copy to a friend, which is what your example basically is, should also be protected by consumer laws.

If you're talking about loaning a physical copy of a movie to a friend, sure. We have to make arrangements to get the "thing" from one location to another. Surely you can understand that freely "loaning" digital copies - with none of the friction involved in physical media transport - would de-incentivize purchasing by others. If you want that, fine. But that will jack up the price of movies, since a lot fewer of the…

With streamed digital copies, one can limit simultaneous playback. Simply "loaning" it in a service where you select who do you loan it to will add friction, and considering how any little friction (instead of torrenting or getting BR disks) is keeping people on streaming services anyway, it's unlikely it would move the needle too much.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#106

Post by apetresc »

antoinec wrote: post #31
chucksmash wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes? Because it is the same thing, but cheaper. > And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy it from ITunes. Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you recoup, say…

I'd be curious to see if a system like that exists already for some kind of digital asset: secondary sales for something that is not limited in quantity, and can still be bought from the source at a higher price.

Certain NFT marketplaces have this characteristic.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#107

Post by 1980phipsi »

josteink wrote: post #70
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DVD has an incredibly weak 40-bit encryption scheme due to US regulations on exporting cryptography when it was developed. As a result, it was broken very quickly after launch. It has no real key revocation system (just stop including keys for certain defeated devices in new releases), and nowadays a computer can brute-force every possible decryption key within seconds, rendering revoking stolen drive keys completely…

> Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications... It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer. Given the current state of things, I wouldn’t count Blurays as me…

You have to pay for an upgrade on Windows to even play a Bluray movie.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#108

Post by taylodl »

josteink wrote: post #70
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DVD has an incredibly weak 40-bit encryption scheme due to US regulations on exporting cryptography when it was developed. As a result, it was broken very quickly after launch. It has no real key revocation system (just stop including keys for certain defeated devices in new releases), and nowadays a computer can brute-force every possible decryption key within seconds, rendering revoking stolen drive keys completely…

> Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications... It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer. Given the current state of things, I wouldn’t count Blurays as me…

You purchased a license to view the media content. I don't agree with this philosophy, I see it as a variant of "right to repair" that we should call "right to own", but that's the way it is for now.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#109

Post by nsxwolf »

kranke155 wrote: post #94
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Noisy, grainy, just bad." AKA, it was shot on film. Film has film grain, which can only be removed by Digital Noise Reduction. DNR removes film grain, but also scrubs away detail and can leave waxy faces among other artifacts, as well as a fairly artificial and non-cinematic look. Film grain compresses very badly over streaming, so DNRing the streaming version before compression is probably what you are seeing. In t…

It’s funny if the poster is actually complaining about grain. Digital compression, like the one that Netflix uses, will often clean up the image of grain as a secondary effect of the compression algo. Essentially grain is a lot of detail that video compression algorithms have been taught to ignore/remove. H.264 was notorious for virtually removing all grain making it impossible to have authentic film grain on YouTube…

I wonder: If film grain never existed, would we invent it? If we had originally developed film technology where everything looked completely clean, would anyone have thought "Hey I've got a great idea, let's figure out how to make this look grainy"?

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#110

Post by thinkingkong »

Buy pricing also acts as an anchor vs the other options. This happens a lot in pricing; something seems excessively costly just to make the option next to it seem reasonable. Ski resorts do this all the time. The daily lift rate at Whistler in Canada is around 200CAD but a seasons ticket is 1700. It makes the seasons pass seem, almost reasonable.
Post reply on HN