Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what happened in the VHS days?
He would have made a similar comment but instead would complains of late fees.
You’re the only one who seems to have gotten that :)
Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
191–200 of 262 posts
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when the Covenant Kodi plugin was thriving and the media companies hadn't waged legal-nuclear war against that sort of thing yet? It finally felt like the future: I could watch anything , in any language it was available in, right now, in my chosen quality, with automatic subtitle downloads if you want that sort of thing. I would pay good money for a service that could do that legitimately, but no, we can't…
Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy. It's impossible. Imagine what it'd take for them to actually offer a service that can even begin to compare with what copyright infringement makes possible. They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once. Piracy offers us all the works of humanity, everything ever created. These copyright hold…
> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once.
Reading this triggered a (for me) very interesting observation - my feelings about video streaming services are not triggered by the price, but to the scamminess of it:
I've been paying for both Apple Music and Spotify for months - and I know it - and I don't care.
Contrary I did not sign up for HBO Max even at their low offer of around $5/month for life, and it annoys me that I have two video streaming sites already.
I think it is because both Spotify and Apple Music are OK: they contain almost everything I want from commercial music, while the video streaming sites feels like an elaborate scam: pay just as much as I pay for Spotify to an increasing number of services where none of them are good.
I want creators to get paid, but I don't want to support scams, so being somewhat principled I only watch whatever I have on DVD + what is available on the services I subscribe to (and I'm planning to get rid of one) and the few that I bought from Apple.
I can clearly see why people pirate though and if I worked in law enforcement I'd probably do my best to work with something important and useful, not to support large scale scams.
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The average family paid 100 for cable and on top kept buying dvds for 10-20 a pop. Lol, no way in hell that was the average. That was the high end dream consumer that very few of the people I knew matched even back in cable’s heyday. https://www.statista.com/statistics/680645/number-of-cable-s... In my family we would rent lots of movies each week with an 2-3 times a week ritual trip to the video rental store to pi…
probably it was the average family but not the median family, which of course means that the high end dream consumer family was paying much more than that.
Man, I grew up lower/lower-middle class, about 30-40% of the median family income, and we had the $80/month cable package plus went to Blockbuster for 5+ rentals per week
I don't think that was unusual, either.
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy. It's impossible. Imagine what it'd take for them to actually offer a service that can even begin to compare with what copyright infringement makes possible. They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once. Piracy offers us all the works of humanity, everything ever created. These copyright hold…
Games and music seem to have managed to defeat piracy. And when it was just Netflix before the fragmentation and greed of the movie/tv content holders no one I knew downloaded.
They have, then came Epic Games store and we're back to exclusives.
If you want a really good example of where video games got it wrong in recent years: Metro Exodus was sold as a "pre-purchase" on Steam before it released for some time (at least a few months, could be a year). A few days before release it went exclusive on Epic Game store IIRC and you couldn't buy _or download_ it on steam anymore. After some well deserved outrage, people who pre-purchased on steam could play on steam, but you couldn't purchase it for about another year.
Metro: Exodus was the only title I pirated in the last 10 years because they took away the ability to purchase it (and I like the series and have the first two titles on steam, and I bought and read the books because of the first game).
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why do they advertise 4K as an important feature?
Because if they didn't Average Bob would feel like they're missing out. Some people don't care about 4K. Other people think they care about 4K but don't really know the difference.
"4K streaming" is such a joke
They compress and screw up the video quality so much that even calling it 1080p is a stretch in my opinion
Most people have houses/screens too small for 4K to be visible anyway, though, so I guess it's easy to get away with providing such a crappy service
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#196One of the best layman hacks to rip all these services is still using ffmpeg/sse with Xvfb. They can DRM and engineer all they want but nobody can stop me from recording what's playing on my screen :D
Recompressing an uncompressed version of a compressed video signal is hell on quaaliy
but it's more than good enough, especially for ppl that grew up with VHS/VGA
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Games and music seem to have managed to defeat piracy. And when it was just Netflix before the fragmentation and greed of the movie/tv content holders no one I knew downloaded.
They have, then came Epic Games store and we're back to exclusives. If you want a really good example of where video games got it wrong in recent years: Metro Exodus was sold as a "pre-purchase" on Steam before it released for some time (at least a few months, could be a year). A few days before release it went exclusive on Epic Game store IIRC and you couldn't buy _or download_ it on steam anymore. After some well d…
> They have, then came Epic Games store and we're back to exclusives.
And that's why I'll never buy anything from them even if it's nice. I feel morally compelled to do my tiny part to let them (and every other steam competitor) go bust, to stave off exactly the fragmentation we see in the video streaming market.
Of course, there's always the possibility of Steam becoming evil and making all of us regret propping them up, but you know what? I'll have to live with it.
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only problem is "license expire" between the labels and the streamers. My absolute favorite song suffered from this. One morning I opened Spotify, and all the songs in that album was greyed out. It returned a couple of months later, but it's an enough of a warning.
I would love to see compulsory licensing schemes for audio and video streaming like they have for radio broadcasts. Maybe allow 1 or 2 years of exclusivity, but anything else is fair game to stream by anyone as long as they pay the license fee.
We don't need compulsory licensing; we already have piracy. Everything is already available, forever, for free, without DRM.
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#199I for one thank our piracy overlords who endlessly work to make every form of content (optionally) freely available in high quality. I pay for plenty of subscription services that finally figured out how to make content as easy and accessible as piracy but there will forever exist legitimate gaps where “just pay for it” is simply insufficient (geo being #1, silly copyright owners #2, etc etc). The other article menti…
I’ll admit I don’t understand how people can ethically pirate content. I dislike a lot of business models but I just don’t feel right calling them “silly” and looking for ways to take things I know I don’t have the right to take.
For me its quite simple. Just the other day I really wanted to watch Anthony Bourdains No Reservations. Where I am right now I can't do:
1. Stream 2. Purchase 3. Rent 4. Catch on tv 5. Subscribe to an american streaming service using a vpn (requires an american credit card, and while there are services that allow to get a pseudo prepaid card the costs of it all are huge)
I can however pirate it.
Re: Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when the Covenant Kodi plugin was thriving and the media companies hadn't waged legal-nuclear war against that sort of thing yet? It finally felt like the future: I could watch anything , in any language it was available in, right now, in my chosen quality, with automatic subtitle downloads if you want that sort of thing. I would pay good money for a service that could do that legitimately, but no, we can't…
Copyright holders will never be able to compete with piracy. It's impossible. Imagine what it'd take for them to actually offer a service that can even begin to compare with what copyright infringement makes possible. They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once. Piracy offers us all the works of humanity, everything ever created. These copyright hold…
> They'd have to pool all their intellectual property into a single holding and offer access to all of it at once.
They could federate and rely on open protocols, but that might be less profitable.