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The case for physical media ownership

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Re: The case for physical media ownership

#141

Post by cassianoleal »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #7

Unfortunately many game disks only contain a downloader nowadays and you often need to bind them to an account to play. Plus the version on disk without updates is probably buggy. Baldur's Gate 3 Collector's edition is an example that has a disk, but isn't really any better than a Steam key. On the other hand you can back up a DRM free download, like the games on GOG, despite these being a purely digital download. So…

I'm not sure how BG3 Collector's Edition might be different, but the game is DRM-free on Steam.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#142

Post by locao »

xandrius wrote: post #121
locao wrote: post #113

I'm curious what would take for regular people (i.e. people off HN) to realize what is pointed in the article is a real problem. In my experience, every time I mention this I'm labeled as: nostalgic old guy, Don Quixote wannabe, tinfoil hat supporter, pirate nerd who doesn't understand people just want convenience. I've seen people bit by losing access to purchased content shrug and say "yeah, that's bad isn't it? at…

The battle is alive and well, pirating has never been easier and of this high quality. Support the creators however you want but go foster an environment around your friends and family that there are alternatives to paying evil companies who will remove your access to content willy nilly.

The problem today it's hard to convince even myself to pay the storage premium, but I 100% agree with you.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#143

Post by lukan »

ryandrake wrote: post #82
blfr wrote: post #3

Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use. There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline. These rips can be…

Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of…

There used to be this funny anti pirate advertisement, that tried to raise awareness in people to check if they maybe have a pirated DVD and not the original.

Somehing like, make sure your DVD

- has unskippable advertisment - long intro, also unskippable - ...

If you don't have all that, but just a video that just plays the movie, you got to rush to the store and buy the legal obstructed version.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#144

Post by titzer »

doctorwho42 wrote: post #96
clates wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then again, many people don’t want the burden of caring for bytes for the rest of their lives and prefer to download on demand. Agree that people want this - but this is an undue burden on the provider side. You have to perpetually maintain and provide access to content FOREVER including all the systems and support staff to auth.

In a world of monopolization, where there become fewer and fewer companies because they buy out their competition... If they can't pay for basic storage and delivery of goods, then who can? If I can individually pay for and maintain an NAS with TB's of data on it, I think these multinational megacorps can afford to do the same. Maybe scale for delivery will cost them a bit of profit, but really it's a shame how indiv…

I have a fantasy of an alternate history where we as a society got our shit together and subsidized local libraries and ISPs so that they could offer cheap and even free NAS for everyone. Economies of scale and all that. It would have been a worthwhile public investment, but it's hard to justify spending public money on that and our politicians are so blinkered that cannot comprehend what "investment" means. Like...making it easier for kids to get smart? Why would we want that?

Instead we have the private marketplace fulfill all those needs for the low low price of ad infestation. Imagine how smart our kids would be if instead of 20 minutes of unsolicited ads a day, they saw 20 minutes of educational content and were required to pass a math quiz to access YouTube?

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#145

Post by 627467 »

If you can't play it you don't own it either. Support of playback of physical media is not guaranteed by the industry.

Regardless, I definitely think the all-u-can-eat, 24-7-365, instant, ephemeral media has run its course and has become... tiring?

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#146

Post by lukan »

xgulfie wrote: post #129
blfr wrote: post #3

Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use. There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline. These rips can be…

Remember the story of the man who died at Disneyworld, and Disney said his wife couldn't sue them because he agreed to the Disney+ TOS? I think about that every time I open up Jellyfin

No, but I found a link for it

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#147

Post by rhinoceraptor »

threetonesun wrote: post #15

Physical things take up space and degrade over time. In a world where operating systems and software control licensing owning physical media is barely better than digital except for potentially reselling it. Enjoy something when you enjoy it, however you enjoy it. In the end you can’t keep anything but that.

Discs can rot, but I would still take a large blu-ray collection over a large MKV collection stored digitally. The odds that your entire blu-ray collection will all rot are much lower than a catastrophic data loss.

And most people are not good enough sysadmins to keep a collection of digital files from being lost over decades. And even more so when the digital files are pirated, which makes them more or less fungible, they can be redownloaded so investing in backups is not a priority.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#148

Post by nik282000 »

altern8 wrote: post #134
ryandrake wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of…

This is so true, I pirated movies that I was ready to pay for so many times, just because they weren't available in my area, or there were no subtitles, or they only offered 720p. You can download a MTK file at 4K with multiple audio tracks and subtitles and more often than not there are enough seeders to just start watching it while it downloads in the background. They need to wake up.

Despite paying for Netflix and Disney+ and Prime and etc, I have pirtated 1080 copies, with subtitles, of all our favorites because network access is unreliable and service provides add and remove media without warning.

As has been said before, the pirated copies are frequently a higher quality product than is available for purchase or rent.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#149

Post by mnahkies »

jchw wrote: post #123
jrm4 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would emphatically not do this, because you're confusing legal ownership with physical ownership and only one can be guaranteed with reasonable certainty. Honestly, I'm continually surprised at how badly people miss this even as, e.g. Sony et al just take away stuff you "bought." So, to put directly. Do not reword it, you will screw it up. You must be able to hold it in your hand.

Sony can only take it away because you didn't own it. I digitally own SimCity 3000 Unlimited from Gog. The copy lives on my NAS. The NAS could break, sure, but so can a CD. Can I hold it? Well, sort of. The same way I can back up my physical CDs to a hard disk, I can also back up digital things I truly own to a CD/DVD/BD or other media. As long as the thing I'm holding in my hand is all I need to be able to make use…

When I brought half life 2 there was a lag of about 2-4 years before I could play it for the first time - I didn't read the fine print, and on a dial up connection I couldn't get past the steam client updating in a reasonable amount of time, mind you I was able to download much larger Linux ISOs over time frames of a month+ through resumable downloads.

Not really an issue these days but it certainly was back in the day

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#150

Post by lIl-IIIl »

Good examples, but this one didn't make sense to me:

>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game disappeared from Xbox and PlayStation stores in December 2014 when a license expired. Players campaigned for years before a remastered edition arrived in 2021.

I mean, physical stores can also stop selling a certain game. Existing sold games were unaffected. Why does this matter?

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