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The deception of “buying” digital movies

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#241

Post by vel0city »

alexfromapex wrote: post #226
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?

When you are sold the concert ticket you know you are buying it to only view at the one specific time and location. It is an event ticket. With a digital movie, ostensibly buying lets you view it whenever you want wherever you want in perpetuity but that's not actually the case. We can use the term "buy" for digital movies if you actually are just buying a ticket that lets you view the movie however wherever and when…

> When you are sold the concert ticket you know you are buying it to only view at the one specific time and location.

Do I know this? Are you assuming I bothered to read the ticket ahead of time? I bought a ticket to the Red Hot Chili Peppers 2022 Tour. I should be able to go to all the tour, right?

Oh wait, you're telling me there's text on the ticket I should have read to understand it was only for one location and one evening? You really expected me to read all that legalese?

> With a digital movie, ostensibly buying lets you view it whenever you want wherever you want in perpetuity but that's not actually the case.

Ugh. I bet I would of had to read something to understand the limitations of what I was buying. I can't believe companies expect people to read about the things people buy these days, totally taking advantage of everyone by putting knowledge behind words.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#242

Post by ipaddr »

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.

Or buy a worldwide player like Philips offered in the day that would play all regions

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#243

Post by mixmastamyk »

rendaw wrote: post #231
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.

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-enc…

Handbrake, chose a profile, use a script, use a more efficient codec. Doesn’t take much manual work but computer chugs for a while.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#244

Post by tjoff »

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.

True in theory but in practice it wasn't much of an issue.

Especially as late as when the DVD came.

And the purpose of it wasn't geo-restrictions either.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#245

Post by ipaddr »

kortilla wrote: post #210
nonrandomstring wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 t…

> 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. This is a bad follow-on example because artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable. Making an actually worse model in the processor case has far more f…

In your scene you would see increased buying and volume at the higher price point which would offset the money lost at the lower tier.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#246

Post by warp »

makeitdouble wrote: post #154
astorsnk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. Maybe this is true from the perspective of the license but it's not something Apple enforces through tech. For example, I have a two iTunes accounts for two countries. I can purchase content through both and use that content anywhere without restriction. They make it a big pain…

I am on the same boat but found it more and more a PITA to manage as Apple started to push for 2FA (that damn prompt every fucking login to "upgrade" your account). Switching account is now way more burdensome, and it's also a pain to get the password prompts on updates as apps are still bound to your logged out account.

I find the password prompts an improvement over earlier versions of iOS, where there was no way to get updates to those apps without logging out of the app store entirely and logging in with the other region's account.

Obviously it would be better if we could be properly logged in into multiple accounts at the same time (The play store on android does support switching easily), but at least I can now (I think since iOS 15) get app updates while staying logged in in my main account.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#247

Post by brabel »

the_af wrote: post #40
abraxas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).

I havea few DVDs I bought in my previous country... I remember first time I tried to play them in a player from the new country, it asked me if I wanted to "move" it to the new region... I think there were 2 "moves" allowed. So, anyway, I was able to play it, no worries.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#249

Post by groovybits »

mttjj wrote: post #153
abruzzi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

damn, you're way ahead of me, almost double my number. I haven't looked into local backups. I'll have to see how that is done (and buy a bigger harddrive.) I didn't really realize that Apple made this possible since I only use an AppleTV to purchase and view movies.

Yeah, unfortunately you can't download the 4K versions. But for me that's an OK tradeoff since I've never once had to use the downloaded version to actually watch something on my AppleTV; everything has still been available in my account for streaming. Not to mention that over half of my library is movies from the 1930s to 1960s - way before 4K was even a concept. So except for a handful of recent movies, I've got th…

Hi, can you explain (or link to) the process you use to download them? Is it manually one-by-one? Or is there a way to batch backup?

Thanks

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#250

Post by ipaddr »

kube-system wrote: post #216
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…

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.

That bar include able to resell it and inability of company selling to have control over the product.
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