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The case for physical media ownership

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Re: The case for physical media ownership

#261

Post by dd8601fn »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #147
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…

Seems to me you could own the disc and rip them to tick all the boxes.

You bought it. You can lend it to someone. You can easily pull it up in the living room. Etc

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#262

Post by ssl-3 »

Touche wrote: post #217
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…

Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive). You need to keep your NAS up to date. You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now, uninstall that and get Jellyfin. Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over. Even for technical people this is a pain over time. Nothi…

Naw.

> Then you need a NAS, a backup process (backing up large collections of movies to S3 is actually pretty expensive).

I have bandwidth, and I also have automation. If my collection of pirated movies takes a dive tomorrow due to some failure or other, then I can just instruct the machine to download it all again.

Backing up the automation bits and the list of films is inexpensive -- that data is small enough that it can even happen for free. The movies themselves are huge, but that big data is completely replaceable; losing it only represents an inconvenience. The Internet is my backup.

> You need to keep your NAS up to date.

My "NAS" is the same desktop machine that I'm writing this comment with -- and that's perfectly OK. It's a multitasking, multi-user system; it can do more than one thing at once.

I don't need yet-another system to keep updated.

> You need to install / configure Plex, oops that's closed source now

I don't need to do that. I can just watch films locally, or over my LAN. (But if/when I decide that I do want to do that, then: Plex is not particularly arduous to set up.)

> Eventually your NAS hardware will be outdated and you'll have to get a new one and migrate your files over.

Will it? The same hardware that transcodes to h.264 and h.265 today will still do so tomorrow. If that's good enough for today, then it will still be good enough tomorrow.

I suppose that I might outgrow a hard drive or decide to trim back power consumption, or something. But I won't have to get a new box for movie duties just because time has passed.

And as a realistic construct: I'll be updating my desktop rig because of things like GUI frameworks becoming intolerably huge and inefficient, not because its paltry few server-roles have grown untenable.

> Even for technical people this is a pain over time.

Is it? I think I've probably spent more time writing this comment than I have on maintaining this stuff over the past couple of years. Keeping it up and running is a pretty lazy thing.

> Nothing like just having a disc that can last 50+ years if properly stored.

We don't know if any of these optical formats will last 50+ years, even with the best of storage. We haven't yet had consumer optical media for films for 50 years (though laserdisc is getting very close).

On one hand: We had marketing promises of perfection that would last forever, and some of those promises were even backed by sciencey-data like results from accelerated aging.

On the other hand: Even though it sure would be nice if it didn't exist, we do have disc rot. It takes different forms and each of those forms are real. Disc rot can affect things even if they've been stored properly.

And if I buy a Blu-Ray disc today and it does last for 50 years, will I still be able to buy a player for it that works in 2076?

Meanwhile: It sure is easier to space-shift the contents of some hard drives than it is a few thousand optical disks. One of these is just a well-structured command that takes as long as it takes to complete, and the other is Real Work -- even if "space shifting" means just boxing them up and loading them onto a truck.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#263

Post by II2II »

wilg wrote: post #158
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…

Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.

> The problem is that its unethical

The article is basically a list of examples of how companies that offer legal options often use unethical business practices (sometimes to the point where they should be illegal).

I don't agree with all of their examples, such as conflating removing access to a purchased title with removing a title from a streaming service, but I can certainly understand why people are frustrated.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#265

Post by hananova »

wilg wrote: post #234
athrowaway3z wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate the ethnical argument because It's so much weaker than people who use it imagine it to be. As a very flattened retelling of history, it was only with the boomers that we reached the tipping point on how people started to think about copyright (Copyright != Attributed Authorship). With them, a majority started to believe in a world where the human history they consumed was a gift from the past, and that…

This is word salad. People are making things that you want so they can make a living and you can have something you want. This is a win-win. The only problem is you have to pay for things which people only offer in exchange for money. You can cheat them, but it's not cool to pretend you're doing it for some big amorphous moral fight.

Except, in many cases, they will not sell you the superior product, for any amount of money.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#266

Post by autoexec »

arkaic wrote: post #226
autoexec wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pirated media also can't be silently and remotely censored or edited. It's also increasingly the only way to consume media where somewhere somebody isn't keeping a highly detailed record of every time you access it (when, where, how long, how often, etc.). You can't even watch a DVD or bluray these days without a record of what you're watching and when being stored and sent over the internet. Companies like Roku are…

Can't you use bluray players without a network connection?

Not really. If the discs you have play today, they may or may not continue to work offline depending on the player, but every so often discs are released your player won't have the right keys for and those won't play until you connect your player to the internet so it can download the newest set of keys. Some keys will expire after a certain amount of time (for example the PS3 warned they'll only last 12 to 18 months https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/vide...) and you'll have to connect the player to the internet to watch content that used to work. The manufacturer of your player could also shut down their server and stop providing updated keys and then you'd have to buy a new player to play any new discs. New discs can also break your old players (https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/vcaniv/help_wi...). The capability is also there for them to revoke keys entirely which will stop your old discs from working even if you connect to the internet and you'll be forced to repurchase your movies, but I haven't seen that used so far.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#267

Post by autoexec »

galleywest200 wrote: post #206
autoexec wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam's DRM is still an issue today and it means that you have to get cracked copies of most of the games you paid for in your library if you expect to ever own them. I spent some months without an internet connection only to find the steam games I'd been playing offline just fine suddenly refused to launch until I allowed steam to phone home to grant me permission to play the games I paid for. Steam could go out of…

Steam's DRM is entirely optional. It is up to the game publishers to use it.

> Steam's DRM is entirely optional.

Not to the user it isn't.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#268

Post by autoexec »

jchw wrote: post #230
galleywest200 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam's DRM is entirely optional. It is up to the game publishers to use it.

AFAIK Steam really has three things you could consider part of the DRM strategy. - The Steamworks DRM, which is a lightweight EXE packer. Seems about as simple as UPX. Presumably it goes and checks that you own the app ID via Steam RPC on startup. - Checking that the user owns the app ID via the API. A simple check that's pretty simple to bypass using a Steam emulator. - And then finally the ticketing system, which a…

ultimately it means that all of the games in your library will stop working as soon as your computer has been offline for whatever length of time steam feels is "too long". I recommend getting a cracked copy of every game in your library to make sure that you will still have access to what you paid for if steam shuts down or you lose your internet connection.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#269

Post by autoexec »

mnahkies wrote: post #197
autoexec wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam's DRM is still an issue today and it means that you have to get cracked copies of most of the games you paid for in your library if you expect to ever own them. I spent some months without an internet connection only to find the steam games I'd been playing offline just fine suddenly refused to launch until I allowed steam to phone home to grant me permission to play the games I paid for. Steam could go out of…

I'm aware, and I'm choosing GOG when I can now, though even then I see phoning home (or attempts to) happening (opensnitch is useful for that https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch ) - I've paid for some titles 2-3x over which is frustrating, admittedly I don't have the physical media from the first time which is on me, but it's frustrating seeing single player games wanting to phone home

Is the GOG client the thing phoning home? I've refused to install it so far and I've just been downloading the installers directly.

Re: The case for physical media ownership

#270

Post by zdc1 »

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…

Piracy also acts as a decentralised archive/backup of most stuff people care about. It's important we have this since mainstream media sources can be memory-holed at any moment.

Maybe the legal side will be solved one day, maybe it won't. It's not something a pirate cares about.

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