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The deception of “buying” digital movies

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#211

Post by arthurcolle »

makeitdouble wrote: post #148
barelysapient wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And let's not forget, that if you brought your DVD player with you, you could still play your DVD's no matter what region you were physically in.

Except if your player wasn't conpatible with your TV of course. At the time DVD started prolifering more and more player and TVs had full support for NTSC, PAL and SECAM, but you could still be stuck with some hardware only supporting standard and your DVDs would be black and white or scrambled on the display side.

No post body was provided.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#212

Post by mafuy »

IanCal wrote: post #48
bigyikes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? A seller would do this to undercut iTunes, making a sale much more likely. >As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes Because the seller would likely price it lower than iTunes. The real question is: how does this affect the digital goods market overall? Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable?…

This I think is one of the places where smaller technical differences make things legitimately different. I'm not coming from the side of "it shouldn't be allowed" or "it must absolutely be allowed like physical goods". Second hand items are often * Lower quality, as they've been used * Lack consumer protections The first just doesn't apply to digital goods and the second is much more minor (not expecting technical f…

I'd say this goes both ways. It's vastly easier and frictionless to sell content. It could and should also be easy to re-sell this content - it's only fair that both seller and buyer benefit from the properties of digital content.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#213

Post by pathartl »

rthomas6 wrote: post #176
iamacyborg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I buy blurays, rip them and then store them on a NAS to play back via Plex. Much, much better quality than any stream from Netflix et al.

I thought about doing this, but I was worried about codec compatibility issues with Dolby Vision and Atmos, and DTS:whatever. Everything I've read says you need to buy an Nvidia Shield to do it right. This is probably even closer to ideal than my setup, but in the end I decided it's not worth the effort/cost vs just putting the disc in the player.

This is essentially correct. I've been bouncing between different boxes and HTPCs for almost a couple decades now and the best experience I've had has always been the Nvidia Shield. The only annoyance I have is I want to reliably set Kodi as the main launcher, which is more of Kodi's issue rather than the system.

But seriously, HTPCs of yesteryear are essentially dead due to Windows' terrible handling of Dolby Vision, Atmos, DTS:X, and HDR. Even though there are players that will allow you to get much better quality out of your source file on PC, the hassle of licensing and HDR modes is just absolutely not worth it.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#214

Post by alexfromapex »

iamacyborg wrote: post #83
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 buy blurays, rip them and then store them on a NAS to play back via Plex. Much, much better quality than any stream from Netflix et al.

I think this is what everyone should do instead of "buying" or paying for subscription services

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#215

Post by senko »

Copyright, as it exists in the 21st century, is a scam.

It does not protect the artists, the creative works, or the little guy. It is a product of decades' worth of lobbying by very rich and powerful organizations and megacorps.

I'm not against the idea of a copyright. An artist has the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and creative works do have value.

However, the original idea of copyright has been bent, broken, dismembered, and sown back together in a Frankensteinian abomination and now serves only to line up pockets of people in the publishing industry. And the US has, through its trade deals, exported this thing worldwide.

Disney lobbies for life of author + 70 years copyright duration not out of goodwill towards authors (in fact, it's been trying to wriggle out of paying royalties to some of them!). Amazon uses copyright as an excuse to push DRM, locking out competition and limiting users' rights (Kindle, Audible DRM). DMCA is constantly abused to take down fair-use content.

Meanwhile, book authors are struggling to find a reason to write books, since many barely recoup the costs. Musicians decry royalties paid out by Spotify (that aren't actually so small, but the majority of the cut is taken by the music industry). Photographers try in vain to stop people just copy/pasting their photos online (what are they going to do, sue everyone?), including in some cases big companies that didn't even bother to check the copyright.

They aren't being protected. They are being milked.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#216

Post by kube-system »

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…

If the bar for “owning” something is that it is guaranteed to function unchanged 20+ years from now without exception, then I don’t own very much stuff.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#217

Post by pilsetnieks »

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…

NTSC, PAL and SECAM wasn't a case of intentional geolocking, those were simply different signal standards used in different parts of the world. NTSC had different frequency from PAL/SECAM because the signal was synchronized to the power grid; SECAM was different from PAL because the French being French had to make it their own way (and then communist-affiliated countries adopted it).

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#218

Post by Kon-Peki »

kalleboo wrote: post #39
jSherz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the downloaded movies have DRM attached that requires a network connection or limits their usage?

They have DRM attached and need to be played on a computer that has logged in to your iTunes account and been "blessed". But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that computer offline it will be able to play those videos in eternity. You can un-bless all your other computers (as you can only have 5 computers blessed at once) but I guess if the other computers are offline they can keep playing old downloa…

> But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that computer offline it will be able to play those videos in eternity.

I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed.

During the early months of the pandemic, we carried a Mac mini around that had a ton of downloaded content, and spent a lot of time in places with no internet service. It needed to "re-bless" itself every so often (I don't remember how often - maybe once a month or twice a month - it wasn't very often).

Our solution was to carry it with us when we were near enough to a tower. Using a phone hotspot with just a single bar of bad service, the process took 10-15 seconds.

So as far as tech/media companies go, Apple is almost certainly the least bad option, by a wide margin. But it's not perfect ;)

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#219

Post by danparsonson »

vel0city wrote: post #182
indymike wrote: post #61

There needs to be a very large lawsuit or two about this. Claiming you can buy something, and then renting it, even if the rental is 20 years is fraud.

I buy a concert ticket. Does this mean I can go see that artist everywhere they perform forever now? No. I bought a revokable, limited access right to see a particular performance. Should we not use the term "buy" here as well?

That's a false equivalence though - it's well understood in this case that you bought the ticket not the performance, and that the ticket expires after one use. The same is not true of buying films, as it used to be possible to keep a physical copy (e.g. DVD) that no-one could take away from you, and that was recent enough that I think most people still (reasonably IMO) expect a perpetual license when 'buying' a movie.

We had a word in the olden days for buying a limited license to watch a film - we called it "renting".

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