121–130 of 565 posts
I am hoarding DVDs and it's because a.) it's cheap, b.) it's reliable c.) it's future-proof and d.) I don't trust tomorrow's political/cultural landscape to not disappear things down the memory hole as well as subtly editing out offensive material or otherwise altering things in hard to detect ways. Case in point, not long ago a family member witnessed "Scrubs" being scrubbed of a particularly offensive joke that ran…
We face incredible political oppression and extreme economic exploitation in the context of global capitalism melting down. There are more important things than whether your $10 Hercules purchase still works in 20 years.
By all means be angry about this, but try to connect it with things that have actual stakes in people's lives. This isn't even in the top 20 worst things Amazon does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But unless something change :)
4 words that explain why, if I ever wanted to collect movies, they would all be DRM-free torrents. When the "legal" way to do it is self-evidently a scam perpetuated by corporations and governments working together against our interests, then they only honourable ways are either to watch illegal downloads or not watch movies at all.
Has anyone tried a legal challenge to the word "buy"? It seems like a straightforward case of misrepresentation.
It's a massive degradation of consumer rights you had guaranteed with physical media.
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…
Was region locking really that big of a deal?
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…
It doesn't seem like that. It is like that.
Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin. We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value continues because we've normalised it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you play those downloaded movies outside of Apple hardware/software?
Yes. A bunch of non-Apple devices have an Apple TV app now¹, and you can also play movies to any device that supports AirPlay 2¹. ¹ https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-app/devices/
In both scenarios the playback support is that the file just gives the credentials for the device with the Apple TV app or Airplay 2 to go and stream it from Apple's servers. No transfer of the video from a local download occurs.
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…
Which is why some of us were rooting for the somewhat-more-consumer-friendly HD-DVD. In retrospect, given the choice, there was no way in hell the industry was going with a "more consumer-friendly" anything.
"Buy" is just "Rent" without a specific end-date. Is this not commonly understood?