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The deception of “buying” digital movies

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#231

Post by rendaw »

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.

How do you handle the storage for this? One bluray disk is about 60gb. I'm not sure if movies typically take 60gb but if you watch TV shows they do. 15 disks is 1TB. In a short while you're running a data center, especially if you collect a lot of video content.

I've heard that you can get efficient re-encodings, but that typically means torrenting it from somewhere. I'm not aware of a way to make high quality re-encodings locally without lots and lots of tweaking/testing/re-encoding and it takes a particular set of skills.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#232

Post by dawnerd »

cxr wrote: post #193
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 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. I'm a big proponent of physical media (incl. ownership), but I can't vouch for this at all. I recently pulled out the Blu-Ray player, plugged it in, and picked up a dozen or so movies from the library. What struck me about the experience was how much worse it was from what I remembered. Yo…

I think your problem is using a Blu-ray player. If you use what I’d suspect most people use, an Xbox or PlayStation, the experience is much, much better. Even better is just using makemkv and ripping just the movie. Also works for 4k if you have the correct drive (there’s some inexpensive drives you have flash firmware)

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#233

Post by mixmastamyk »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #147
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.

And if you ordered a disc from abroad, you could completely legally import a disc player from, say, the UK and play your region-locked Blu-ray Discs and DVDs that way (and still can, eBay.co.uk works fine). It's inconvenient but it does work, and is 100% legal and hack-free.

Power, tv, and plugs different.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#234

Post by vel0city »

danparsonson wrote: post #219
vel0city wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 movi…

> buying a limited license to watch a film

Buying a VHS was still a limited license. You weren't allowed to reproduce it and sell the reproductions. You weren't allowed to then operate a movie theater around your off the shelf VHS tapes. You weren't entitled to a new tape once the tape wore out.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#235

Post by jaywalk »

1980phipsi wrote: post #107
josteink wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which is a good thing, if you think about it. It means that the vast majority of people who have no desire to play Blu-ray movies on their PC don't have to foot the bill for licensing.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#236

Post by intrasight »

ezfe wrote: post #188
rthomas6 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The iTunes Store continues to be the only reputable place to buy movies Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and Goodwill work pretty well for me.

I obviously meant for digital movies, even if I forgot that detail

I think all movies are digital now ;)

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#237

Post by pdntspa »

sbf501 wrote: post #209
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…

DeCSS was "cracked" because Xing accidentally included an unencrypted key in their firmware. The encryption wasn't cracked, it was subverted by poor security practices. If Xing hadn't screwed up, it may have been another decade before it was possible to rip a DVD, waiting for some other manufacturer to screw up.

I had friends running timing attacks against the Xbox 360 encryption key around that time, they never publicly disclosed their work but I saw them playing games on a hacked firmware around mid 2000s. No reason to think this wouldn't be the same for the CSS encryption key.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#238

Post by warner25 »

gcp123 wrote: post #87
drstewart wrote: post #27

How big of a problem even is this? Serious question: who buys digital movies? I don't really know anyone who even buys movies at all anymore, but if they do it's likely they prefer a physical copy anyway. There's just so much content out there that the number of people that even care to rewatch a movie they've seen feels like it's really low.

Parents with kids who like to repeatedly watch certain movies and shows.

Yep, we've bought every season of Blue's Clues and Daniel Tiger on Amazon because they started out as included / free content on some service and then became "buy or rent" after our kids were hooked. I'm happy that they're not physical DVDs because those would have been destroyed long ago from getting handled too roughly too often. With four kids, we've gotten our money's worth.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#239

Post by dangets »

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…

It sounds like movies need to start including gpu shaders with them to add grains or other effects regardless of the compression.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#240

Post by fsflover »

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?

You don't "buy the performance" but a ticket for a certain time.
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