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Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#821

Post by marxisttemp »

saiya-jin wrote: post #816
marxisttemp wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. But I’m on private trackers where almost all content is well-seeded and long-term seeding is rewarded, so download time is less of a concern. Why? Because I want the highest-quality possible copy. Same reason I download lossless versions of albums. It’s less about being able to perceive the quality increase, and moreso about archival. Then my Plex server can transcode to appropriate streaming bitrates on the fl…

Man, I want best quality too, I have all my music in FLACs even on my phone. But even on 75" from 4m I simply don't see the difference, so for me thats chasing numbers or similar. And building and properly maintaining some not-so-small array of massive HDDs for those capacities... I just don't see the point when I can get all I need (and ie in sound much much more), without caring more than buying a single hdd and be…

I guarantee you can’t hear the difference between FLAC and 256kbps lossy either. The point is that you have the actual, canonical data as it was released by the creator.

You don’t need a massive HDD array, I have my whole collection of 10+ years of Blu-ray remuxes on a single Seagate Exos drive in my NAS.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#822

Post by api »

ta_1138 wrote: post #160
gchamonlive wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't online streaming profitable? Does it absolutely need ads and granular channel subscriptions to be profitable?

It's far less profitable than you'd think. Many of the competitors in the industry lose money. Licensing fees/production costs/royalties eat a bunch of the money, but the infrastructure to run a streaming service isn't cheap. I know at least one of the competitors that people would call the most successful is paying a 9 figure AWS bill, plus whatever the costs are for all the caching setup that makes most popular con…

9-figure cloud bills? What are they doing? Streaming from AWS? Are they mad?

Even with what I'm sure is bulk negotiated bandwidth pricing there is no way this is an economical way to serve bulk content. For those prices you could build out a whole physical IT operation to rack stuff up in data centers and maintain it for a lot less and your bandwidth costs will be a minute fraction of AWS. There's also tons of CDNs that specialize in blasting out bandwidth.

Putting command and control, accounting, signup / signin, etc. on AWS may make a lot of sense. Those are both more complex to run and lower bandwidth work loads.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#823

Post by paulmd »

realusername wrote: post #451
radley wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> About 500-ish MB per hour of content for decent quality. That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams. ATV+ is killing it with 30Mbps 4K HDR+ video (it used to be as high as 48Mbps). Disney+ is close. The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates, 2x better than their 1080p plan. Worth paying for.

> The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates Only if you are lucky and everything aligns well. You can't ask customers to debug their hardware to make it work.

Step 1: use appletv 4k

as much as it pains a certain set of nerds, using a dedicated stream device is still the best way to bypass the arbitrary hurdles that streamers throw at you. To build a general pc that gets Dolby vision and atmos working right requires at best some very specific hardware/software choices and at worst sometimes just don’t work at all on pc (unless you are willing to do things like hackintosh).

The audiovisual space has just always been intensely proprietary, even something as basic as divx was something you paid for or pirated back in the v3.x or v4.x days. Same story as HEVC: Fraunhofer and Dolby have been grubbing for licensing fees for decades now, and you either pay it or spend some time working around it. And if you’re a corporation then you just don’t ship that feature in your product.

Apple also does a really good job implementing those features at the margins, Apple TV is a nice device. But even if you buy (eg) something like a shield tv it’s gonna be easier than tilting at getting Netflix to send you a 4k stream on windows 10 or Linux. At some level it is platform discrimination plain and simple - they just won't send full-quality video to "open" platforms and you can either deal with it or go full pirate. Sometimes they won't stream it even if you have widevine set up properly etc - and it's all completely arbitrary and they could break it tomorrow. Or you just buy an apple tv/shield tv.

Plex, Infuse, and VLC also let you interact with plex/jellyfin on the apple tv, and there really is no question about what it can decode, the answer is "basically everything you'd interact with as a consumer", short of weird stuff (idk about something like 4:2:2 or ProRes). Ironically the A17 also might be my fastest processor (in single-thread) at the moment, lol - definitely faster than my laptop, might be faster than my gaming desktop.

Sucks but that's how it is - to this day, AMD doesn't have working HDMI 2.1 support on linux, because HDMI Forum won't do an open license. You either have closed-source blobs or firmware that implement it, or you don't get the feature. These are hard problems, and people expect to be paid to stare at them. And once you spend the time getting all the software and hardware vendors and studios onto the same page and then implement it etc you're going to want to be paid for that too.

It is one of the real problems for the linux kernel imo - not everything can be GPL licensed all, and (for obvious reasons) there is no escape valve for "ok but this vendor is really proprietary and the feature is really important...". When the unstoppable force meets the immovable object what you get is both vendors shrugging their shoulders. You want to fuck with NVIDIA over whatever GPL symbols? Then I guess you won't have HDMI 2.1 on your platform at all, then - because AMD's not gonna win that battle on licensing. The bulli approach worked with ZFS because ultimately there's diversity in filesystems, but if your hardware works best with HDMI 2.1 then you really don't have a choice in the matter. The very popular RDNA2 cards only have DP1.4, for example, so if you don't get HDMI 2.1 then you lose half the bitrate the card can support.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417

Anyway you can tilt at that, or... pay $125 for a refurb ATV4K ethernet 3rd-gen and go watch a movie. It sucks but that's kinda the reality of the space - it's only troublesome if you aren't willing to grease some palms to make the system work as designed. Do you want to consoom or not?

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#824

Post by hateful »

y7 wrote: post #422
jszymborski wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow. For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.

Amazon Prime Video is even worse, on Linux they only serve 480p. Any pirated file is much better quality.

It's unwatchable. I'd cancel Prime because of it, if I didn't want the shipping. What is the real purpose of them limiting the stream? It can't be because of pirating. The movies and shows show up on the torrent sites BEFORE they even hit Amazon Prime. So who's going to "Record" it there? They are only hurting their customers.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#825

Post by js2 »

walteweiss wrote: post #803
js2 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes the source think there is a display connected by responding with an EDID block. It may also handle the HDCP negotiation but I'm not sure about that. Technically an unlicensed device isn't supposed to be able to implement HDCP so while the Chinese manufacturers are totally willing to skirt around that, they also don't go advertising it.

But why would one need it? I don’t get get idea behind it, what’s with me having a fake extra display? Is it somehow tricks the DRM or what?

The primary use case I'm aware is for headless computing.

Re-reading what ladzoppelin wrote, I made an assumption that was probably incorrect. I thought they were saying that having an HDCP-compliant TV attached allowed them to watch DRM-protected content on their non-HDCP-compliant primary display. But in retrospect, probably they are watching the DRM content on the TV.

In that case they don't need an HDMI dummy plug at all. They could instead use the splitter I linked between their computer and the non-HDCP compliant display (assuming it's connected over HDMI and not DisplayPort) to fool their computer into thinking the display is HDCP-compliant. Then they can play the DRM content on either their primary display or the TV.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#826

Post by thisislife2 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #643
thisislife2 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think streaming services are overestimating that the 2k or 4k streams that they offer is a huge advantage they have over "pirate services". I don't think they have properly researched the consumer psychology or the network effect that is making piracy popular among a large segment of the middle-class and lower strata. An hour long 30 Mbps 4k HDR+ video file will be roughly around 10-15+ GB with H.265 enc…

And by "today", you mean a decade ago, which is when Popcorn Time got popular.

Not sure - did Popcorn Time ever allow streaming torrents through the browser itself? Some torrent sites today have a streaming section where you can browse a catalogue and watch torrent videos right in the browser itself. Check out https://ferrolho.github.io/magnet-player/ for an example of this.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#827

Post by hateful »

mkl wrote: post #579
jszymborski wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow. For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.

1080p = 2k; both are 1920x1080p. p is rows in the vertical dimension (p for progressive, as opposed to i for interlaced; e.g. NZ terrestrial TV is 1080i). k is columns in the horizontal direction, and comes from film making and visual effects (1920 rounds up to 2k and 3840 rounds up to 4k).

When looking for a monitor:

> 1k = 1920x1080

> 2k = 2560x1440

> 4k = 3840x2160

[even though it's not usually referred to as 1k, but rather 1080p directly]

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#828

Post by Dylan16807 »

the_real_sparky wrote: post #475
Dylan16807 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rounding 1920 to 2k and 3840 to 4k is not too bad. And yes it's marketing to switch from height to width, but whatever. Rounding 2560 to 2k is massively confusing. Don't do it. 2.5k or don't use "k" at all. And when I go look at a couple torrent sites and scroll through movies and tv shows, I'm not seeing a single 1440p in the first couple pages. Some searches show barely anything at all.

I have a proposal for you: Take back the k from the marketers. Define: k = multiple of 1920x1080 pixel count 1920x1080 ~= 2M pixels = 1k 2560x1440 ~= 4M pixels = 2k 3840x2160 ~= 8M pixels = 4k So now 1440p = 2k, and k becomes meaningful. Problem solved! It also gives a solution for ultrawides like 7680 x 2160p, which are 8k. More interestingly, “8K” TVs now become 16k TVs, which marketers should like. We’ve come full…

A number that scales with pixel count is even more markety. Pixel width or height is a much better metric for quality.

But if you want to go down that path, instead of trying to redefine k just use megapixels.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#829

Post by jszymborski »

mkl wrote: post #579
jszymborski wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Netflix and co. won't stream 4K at all to Linux devices, and they often don't serve 4K if they deem your internet connection to be too slow. For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.

1080p = 2k; both are 1920x1080p. p is rows in the vertical dimension (p for progressive, as opposed to i for interlaced; e.g. NZ terrestrial TV is 1080i). k is columns in the horizontal direction, and comes from film making and visual effects (1920 rounds up to 2k and 3840 rounds up to 4k).

Wow, I didn't know this! I mistook it for 1440p (that's what my monitor is). I figure that it might be between 1080p and 4k that it was synonymous with 2k, but I'm mistaken.

Re: Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly

#830

Post by larodi »

izacus wrote: post #495
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #9

Streaming became popular because it was easier than piracy and better than TV (watch anywhere, on demand, pickup where you left off etc). Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof. The services have taken the piss and now they'll get…

Yeah, also pirated content has: - 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers. - Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo). - Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german aud…

You actually make a very fair point, the only downside of pirated comment is that it comes from a very dubious sources, and sites that are loaded with spyware and whatnot.

Then perhaps s.o. would argue that these all are much harder to get done with free tools or by oneself, but I can definitely argue that having a nice personal cloud which allows video streaming is more than enough for most occasions.

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