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The deception of “buying” digital movies

worldofmatthew.com

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#501

Post by rthomas6 »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #392
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…

The biggest difference for me is the sound quality. Lossless 7.1 24/96 or even 24/192. Compared to, at best, DTS or DD+.

I currently have a 5.1 setup, and I want your opinion. Do you think 7.1 or 5.1.2 with on-ceiling speakers would be better? I'm leaning toward 5.1.2.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#503

Post by happymellon »

mattl wrote: post #199
squarefoot wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, by then the best Windows 32bit compatibility layer might come from Linux with WINE and other tools using it. https://www.winehq.org/ https://lutris.net/ https://www.playonlinux.com/en/

I hope so. The Steam Deck has been pretty nice but I hate leaving Steam and fiddling with Arch Linux and KDE to get non-Steam games working.

Don't support Epic and other stores that are hostile to Linux.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#504

Post by joshspankit »

slim wrote: post #463
joshspankit wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to pile on, but it’s important that it’s part of the copyright discussion: Current copyright is dramatically limiting culture and cultural growth. Any artist now needs to make sure that they are not inadvertently copying anything from their entire lifetime, and that of their parents . It’s rarely good enough that an artist shows that they had never been exposed to a previous work, and so now I see artists t…

it's actually shrinking the realm of ideas (culture) by design. since ideas are "property" their value is function of their rareness. economic forces are literally creating artificial scarcity of ideas.

Mic drop

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#505

Post by rendaw »

joshstrange wrote: post #251
rendaw wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A Synology is good option here (I say this as someone with 2 UnRaid machines and 1 12-bay Synology). You can even get one that can run Plex for you as well (assuming your transcoding needs are minimal/none, else you might need a seperate box to handle the transcoding and just use the Synology as storage, like I do). 14TB+ hard drives are not too bad (~$235) so that would be 210 movies right there (though you are goin…

I honestly had no idea disks were that cheap now. I felt like I was looking for a new 1-2TB disk last year and it was around $100... camel^3 says I'm just imagining it though.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#506

Post by password4321 »

scarface74 wrote: post #163
JohnTHaller wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still Apple hardware/software. If you can't play it outside of the locked down Apple ecosystem which is checking your license, then you don't own it.

If your movie is from any of the five participating studios you buy the movie once and it works across all of the major video platforms if you use Movies Anywhere https://help.moviesanywhere.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150045768... Blu ray players are also locked down and the embedded keys are subject to revocation

Movies Anywhere App Launches with Joint Studio Backing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15456800 (2017)

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#507

Post by Rudism »

moffkalast wrote: post #368
titzer wrote: post #114

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…

Well you do you. If you ask me, DVD quality (480p) is not really watchable anymore these days. Looks like what VHS looked like when DVDs were new now that we have full HD and 4K to compare it to. Just going full on pirate with an HDD full of instantly accessible files seems way more practical, especially living in a country where it's de facto legal.

I think calling DVDs and 480p "unwatchable" is a pretty extreme take. Sure you might not be able to count an actor's eyelashes, but a well-shot film on anamorphic DVD properly upscaled can still look pretty fantastic. If watching on a tablet or phone (as more and more people seem to do nowadays) it would probably be hard for your average consumer to even tell the difference unless you were running them side by side. And that doesn't even take into account that most 4K content is consumed on streaming services that save money by serving content at the lowest bitrate possible, leading to compression artifacts (notably distracting banding and loss of detail in films with a lot of low-lit scenes), where watching an uncompressed DVD could arguably be said to look superior.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#508

Post by RealStickman_ »

franciscop wrote: post #417
RealStickman_ wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Blu Rays I have are MPEG-2. AVC compresses to about half the size for the same quality and HEVC does that again on top.

Cannot wait for hardware support for AV1, since encoding with software takes hours for short clips.

Hopefully good encoders. The hardware encoders in my RX480 are pretty terrible and produce huge files compared to software encoding.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#509

Post by selfhoster11 »

cgrealy wrote: post #453
selfhoster11 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content is not fungible. When I want to watch Terminator (1984) and nothing else, then no amount of having other killer-robot films on your platform will satisfy this want. As to why people who buy prefer to buy physical? Because there's actual ownership. I haven't even as much as investigated my options for buying 4K content, because I am 100% sure it doesn't exist in a form that's not hooked into some DRM system (A…

> With physical content, at least you retain the control. To an extent, yes. Practically, you have control. Legally, you have still purchased a licence to view that content on that media in limited scenarios. You can't (legally) copy it, or display it in public (for free or money).

If you buy physical content and subsequently rip it, you probably don’t care about legality all that much. Backing up discs or transcoding them is likely a violation of some law or other no matter where you are.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#510

Post by selfhoster11 »

javajosh wrote: post #461
selfhoster11 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stakes are not low. Denying access to, or altering, content in this way is equivalent to vandalising the cultural commons (and yes, even if it's not in the public domain - it's still cultural commons). People should be more upset about this.

On the scale of evil things in the world, modifying ~10 minutes of a popular fantasy movie does not rank highly. The implication is scary, but the act itself is profoundly unimportant.

Is it relatively as important as the looming threat of climate change? No.

Is it, in absolute terms, still a very important concern worth addressing at some point? Sure.

We should start addressing it now. We can work on more than one problem as a species, and moreover, we should. The big problems never stop coming, so focusing 100% of our energies on that means that the smaller problems won’t get solved.

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