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The deception of “buying” digital movies

worldofmatthew.com

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Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#551

Post by account42 »

babypuncher wrote: post #468
the_af wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

People complained, but I can't imagine the user experience of playing an NTSC DVD on a PAL player and TV would have been very good, or vice-versa. There isn't a clean way to convert between 50 and 59.94 fields per second. You would have ended up with either jittery playback or incorrect playback speed. The field sizes are also mismatched, which would have required some pretty gross scaling given late-'90s DVD player…

Even for DVDs, the region locking also applied to computer drives (which typically only had a limited number of region changes) where NTSC vs. PAL were not a concern.

Also, a 1.2x playback speed for the video is not even that noticeable - certainly a much better experience than no video. I intentially watch a lot of video contents sped up like that, even movies sometimes. Audio needs processing though to not pitch shift.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#552

Post by account42 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #96
Liquix wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone interested in the history of DVD DRM / region locking may be interested in the "illegal number": a hex code which defeated DVD AACS encryption, prompting an attempt by the industry to surpress it across the internet, leading to a streisand effect and the end of effective DVD DRM. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controve...

That was a leaked Blu-ray Processing Key that was quickly revoked - but the industry was livid that it was allowed to propagate before they could revoke it (which takes 90 days). This means, ultimately, that if you have a player that hasn't had a Blu-ray Disc made since 2008 inserted into it, and are trying to decrypt a disc made before ~2008, then maybe with the right tools you could. It's a shallow victory meaningl…

Stripping Blu-Ray encryption works just fine with MakeMKV (and other tools). Even UHD disks if you have a LibreDrive-compatible reader. Sure, it requires someone to decrypt the individual disks keys and distribute those but in practice it just works for anything that is not a brand new release.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#553

Post by mattl »

account42 wrote: post #549
mattl wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think eventually Windows will drop 32-bit support like Mac OS X did? What will that mean for a lot of those games?

WoW is already an optional component that is not always installed in server editions.

WoW is the name of the piece that runs 32 bit software? “Windows on Windows”?

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#554

Post by account42 »

mattl wrote: post #553
account42 wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WoW is already an optional component that is not always installed in server editions.

WoW is the name of the piece that runs 32 bit software? “Windows on Windows”?

Yes, well more precisely WoW64 [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#555

Post by account42 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #207
iamacyborg wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I still have all the discs too, obviously. I’ve not noticed any codec errors with my tv which is running the Android OS.

That's good. Some people seem to have issues with Dolby Vision. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/rw6mn3/what_is_the_cu...

Meh, ffmpeg doesn't support Dolby Vision yet either so you just get the non-DV fallback but unless you have a calibrated HDR monitor you're not really losing that much.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#556

Post by account42 »

PNWChris wrote: post #376
stackedinserter wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have to watch these non-skippable FBI warnings?

The worst part is that the old “stop stop play” trick doesn’t work on any devices I have that can play disks (Xbox and computers). Every time I play a disk and hit the unskippable nonsense, I’m reminded why nobody uses those things anymore. If you have a stand alone player, however, perhaps that trick still works. Just press stop, then press stop again, then press play. It skips the warnings, pre roll stuff, menus, a…

Meh, I just rip the video files and watch those in mpv.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#557

Post by account42 »

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…

Aren't films usually shot at higher resolutions (5K to 8K) so DNR or not you are going to throw away information during the editing/mastering process even with 4K output.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#558

Post by account42 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #109
kranke155 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder: If film grain never existed, would we invent it? If we had originally developed film technology where everything looked completely clean, would anyone have thought "Hey I've got a great idea, let's figure out how to make this look grainy"?

Perhaps. Eyes do have "film grain" in low light conditions.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#559

Post by account42 »

maskros wrote: post #116
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 not just extra DNR applied, modern image and video compression formats almost make it a point to erase all detail and texture from images. For example, compare the WebP and AVIF (VP8/AV1) compression artefacts with JPEG (and MPEG). With WebP and AVIF all textures and low contrast details tend to be erased or smoothed out, preserving only high contrast parts of the image. The JPEG image may have some visible ring…

I've noticed that too with cwebp (and other libwebp-based tools) encoding for darker images. My guess was that they their difference function is using the wrong colorspace so it does not match the perceptive difference. My quick tests of cjxl fared much better so all hope is not lost.

But essentially, losless compression is all about throwing away impercetible details. Noise is an interesting case here because the presence and fequency of the noise (the texture) is significant to the viewer but having the noise match 1:1 is not. Which is why newer codecs remove the noise and then re-add generated noise during decoding.

Re: The deception of “buying” digital movies

#560

Post by account42 »

deadbunny wrote: post #438
badcppdev wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a totally uninformed question. Are you sure the bad quality from the discs is the fault of the discs rather than your blu-ray reader? I'm assuming you've had good quality from the reader for other discs??

It's a digital signal, either it reads and works or it doesn't. You don't lose quality because a "bad" player.

That's oversimplifying things. Players and TVs can and do apply their own processing and then there are sometimes parts (e.g. Dolby Vision) that are just ignored by non-supporting players.
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