Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought this form of copy protection doesn't count as DRM. Not sure on the definition of DRM though.
The Wikipedia article would tell you.
It didn't
We all took the DVD boom era for granted
321–330 of 381 posts
Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
But region coding granularity was very course, just a few big regions, unlike geofencing today. And if you travelled with your dvds, they still worked, unlike your netflix subscription today. (The need to bring your own player to match your disks doesn't change anything because your same laptop that you watch a stream with today had a dvd drive right in it before.) Region coding was a problem, but simpler and just no…
As well as DVD regions, there were/are TV encoding 'regions': NTSC, PAL, and SECAM. In practise, average-price DVD players sold in Europe were compatible with NTSC in addition to PAL, but DVD players in North America and Japan only did NTSC. We could buy DVDs on holiday in the USA and play them at home, but it was difficult to find a DVD player in the USA that would play a PAL DVD brought from Europe. Similarly, it w…
Those are simple technology differences like the power. Unrelated to either region coding or geofencing.
Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
But region coding granularity was very course, just a few big regions, unlike geofencing today. And if you travelled with your dvds, they still worked, unlike your netflix subscription today. (The need to bring your own player to match your disks doesn't change anything because your same laptop that you watch a stream with today had a dvd drive right in it before.) Region coding was a problem, but simpler and just no…
I've yet to travel to a country where I couldn't log in to Netflix. But the content change, which is both fun and annoying.
That's broken.
My wife & I were in the middle of the new dr who a few years ago, purchased on Amazon. (not rented and not prime, purchased, neither of us has prime)
Go on vacation and we could not access that show.
It doesn't matter how many other shows were available, the show I bought was artificially unavailable. Had I a dvd of the same show for the same money and the same laptop, it would have been available.
(Yes obviously I used a vpn and got around that. My awesomeness to overcome something broken does not make the thing not broken.)
Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not even close to true, WTF. YouTube 480p has criminally low bitrate, even the crappiest DVDs have better quality.
I encourage you to try it. Because I wasn't sure, I already had (using the new 28 Years Later trailer) before I posted. You can use yt-dlp to see that the 480P YouTube version is AV1 at 572 Kbps, which is notably better than a DVD Video-compliant MPEG-2 encode from the highest quality source available.
Wikipedia say that "Typically, the data rate for DVD movies ranges from 3 to 9.5 Mbit/s" [1] which is much more than 572 Kbit/s. The Youtube quality issues are easy to spot on highly dynamic clips (with fireworks, flashing lights etc).
Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on where you live. In Greece, I don't think a single movie other than kids cartoons were ever dubbed on VHS. Everything was subbed. On the other hand, in Germany or Poland, almost everything was dubbed.
>or Poland, almost everything was dubbed Animated films were usually dubbed, everything else was narrated by one monotone voice.
Still counts as dubbed for the purpose here of not being worth anything in a different country.
Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh at least on linux you could skip the ads. On windows or hardware players it was annoying. Not that VHS didn't have ads. I remember my little mermaid VHS that had a few minutes of promo for disneyland before starting.
You still had the copyright warning: "this video could be a fake, mum the quality is all fuzzy, check for the shiny sticker thing" on Disney movies. But at least you could skip past it.
It was typing the warning letter by letter, slowly.
Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm skeptical there's anyone alive who made an analog phone call over thousands of miles. Local calls yes, but even so I'm pretty old and I never made one because I had no friends on the same CO as my parents' house.
Long distance between US coasts is thousands of miles.
His point is that the long-distance connection has been digital for many decades now, even back in the 1980s according to one comment here.
He's being hyperbolic of course, since there's people in their 90s and 100s who made phone calls way back when you had to talk to the operator to place a long-distance call. But the general point is valid: how many people here actually remember the days when the connection was all-analog? You would have had to be making LD calls in the 1970s probably.
Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#328Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#329How in the world can you have a discussion about DVD packaging and special features without mentioning the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended edition box sets? Not only did the movies come in beautiful collector’s cases with two DVDs per movie, they were also completely packed with special features, the run time of which exceeded that of the movies themselves. Hours and hours of in-depth making-of documentaries. I us…
I want something that is small, May be Mini-CD size but with TeraByte of storage. That is able to fit that whole LOTR and all the Extra, in 4K Ultra High Quality in one disc.
It took a really really long time for Vinyl to make a come back. I hope we could one day innovate enough and bring physical media to the market again.
Re: We all took the DVD boom era for granted
#330I wish there were a way to just pay for a movie on a site and download it as an mp4 in 1080P or 4K. I hate streaming because I only want to watch 1-2 movies per month and they are very specific (like a specific martial arts movie or action movie). Streaming interfaces often have DRM and horrible interfaces and I don't want to pay a monthly fee for something I'll rarely use. Don't understand the DRM because pirates ge…
I wish there were ready-made hosted Plex servers that could accept a file transfer. Buy a movie online and give them your server "address" and they send the movie to your Plex server. We have been robbed of so many possibilities by copyright bullshit.
This is actually not a bad idea.