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Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

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Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#701

Post by fragmede »

jaimex2 wrote: post #511
hbn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget censorship-free I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended

This was what made me cancel Netflix 10 years ago. They decided to remove stuff that cost them nothing to have in their library like Gone with the Wind. I'd never watch it but it was clear then they had decided they would be gatekeepers of what people can and cant watch.

> cost them nothing to have in their library

I cancelled Netflix too, but it's not true that it cost them nothing to have it in their library. Everyone in the movie still needs to get paid and simply having the show in the library costs them money.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#702

Post by fragmede »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #415
chongli wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.

They release better products than trillion dollar corporations. There are piracy groups out there who are known to source frames from multiple different blu-rays in order to create the best version of a work. Imagine caring so much about something you compare different releases frame by frame in order to select the best ones so that you can splice them all together to form the highest quality ultimate version of a wo…

Eh Stremio's episode chooser leaves a bit to be desired, when jumping back into the middle of a show.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#703

Post by frm88 »

beoberha wrote: post #100
jihadjihad wrote: post #23

My thing is that we are expected to pay in perpetuity for the privilege of accessing content. It's rent, and it is just tiresome. Yes I understand that we have content available on far more devices than 30 years ago, when all we had was the TV in the living room. But should I have to pay in perpetuity to show my kids Moana?

Almost every digital movie provider has a rental option. Moana on Prime Video is 3.99 to rent.

So, I would have to subscribe to amazon prime to rent the movie. Or another digital movie provider. Now we recalculate the price...

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#704

Post by PetitPrince »

presentation wrote: post #539
Dylan16807 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.

I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful.

Anecdotally, for a long time dual French and German subtitles was the standard in Swiss cinemas when movie was shown in original language. So your usecase is not that unusual !

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#705

Post by II2II »

cyberax wrote: post #587
II2II wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a "walkable city". By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable. New parts of the city are completely unwalkable. If you came here, you would notice that massive numbers of people walk in the old parts of the city. Even the people who drive into the old parts of the city tend to walk once they are there. In the n…

> By walkable, I mean the old parts of the city that predated the automobile (and weren't destroyed in the name of modernization) are walkable. OK. Here's my question: is it possible and feasible to NOT walk? Because when the answer is "yes", people tend to not walk.

It is both possible and feasible to drive in the old parts of the city. It is a North American city, so old is not that old. It just predates the automobile. Yet virtually all of the roads are plenty wide for two lane traffic, on street parking and sidewalks. What differs most significantly is land use patterns. More stuff (homes, businesses, schools, parks, etc.) are within walking distance. One could argue that parking is problematic, but that is true of the core of every city I've been in. Even the modern car-centric ones. It should also be noted that plenty of people drive in the old parts of the city, it's just that people have an opportunity not to and plenty of people choose not to.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#706

Post by ysavir »

aceazzameen wrote: post #496
janalsncm wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the production quality of Netflix was close to HBO it would be nice. HBO has some absolute classics: The Wire, The Sopranos, GoT, White Lotus, The Last of Us, Alaskan Killer Bigfoot. Almost all bangers.

I'd argue Netflix productions started out almost as great as HBO, but quickly took a dive when they started pushing quantity over quality. Now finding a quality Netflix production is about once a year. Maybe that's the same rate as it use to be?

I agree that the quality went down, but I think it might be part of their strategy.

I think when they first started, they tried the HBO strategy of putting big money into big shows that try to win over broad audiences. But over time shifted to focusing on low budget shows that appeal to specific, smaller audiences. Which makes sense, if your goal isn't to have 70% of the total market as paying users but rather 90% of the market as paying users.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#707

Post by defrost »

alkonaut wrote: post #688
defrost wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curation tends to be better with private sites and their trackers than with public trackers. It's a point of member pride to assemble complete seasons with consistent quality, sizing, subtitles, and audio, etc.

Yes but pirate site 1 does that for shows A, B, and C while pirate site 2 does it for show B, C, and D now you have rivaling versions of B and C etc, and worst case one of them did a poor job. If you just choose one source you have decent curation but not all the content. If you choose both you get duplication. I don't get how it solves the fundamental problem of getting everything curated with good content and no du…

I guess the best answer to that is it requires a touch of "smart customer" insight, they kind that people develop food shopping, buying hardware, etc.

Scene files are named to rules that name the content, the source, the video and audio encoding, and the release group.

  SeriesName S03E12 EpisodeName 1080p AMZN WEB-DL DDP5 1 H264-NTb
  SeriesName S03E12 EpisodeName 1080p HEVC x265-MeGusta
The first is by a group -NTB that are known for 'direct copies' (by various indicated methods) of streaming sources; here it's episode 12, season 3 of SeriesName as a WEB-DL copy and sourced from AMZN, video encoded with H264 and DDP5.1 audio.

That'll be a larger file and an "as viewed" copy.

The second is probably derived from the first, re-encoded using HEVC H265 to create a smaller file. The audio stream may also be transformed to be smaller in size, perhaps fewer channels. The compression may have introduced jagged chunky artifacts in fast moving scenes, or moire patterns in panning shots across chain link mesh basketball court fences.

So, it's a "solved problem" in the sense of it's not hard to learn to read the labels and understand different brand strategies.

Again, good private trackers that have been about for a good while now typically have complete seasons in a fully consistent form as a single multi episode torrent- all the same source (eg: BluRay release, or DVD, or from digital channel, or upscaled reconstruct, etc) all by the same release group.

Good private trackers also tend to have request forums, anything sought and not held can be requested and admins or users with multiple accounts tend to fill requests and often like the challenge of a hard to source rarity.

From the end user PoV they can also join multiple private trackers and use tools (-arr suite, etc) that can search across multiple trackers and present sorted and grouped results with easy selection of some or many for download.

My personal solution is I've pretty much always "curated as I go", making notes or filing stuff as I consume it - books, film, TV, papers, things built or designed.. anything I circle back on may or may not be worth chasing up a better version, I'd have to have liked it and want to share it or experience it again in better form- I'm happy buying digital media that I can own if it's available for things I enjoy, for things not available over the counter I can search for the best version available ATM by polling trackers .. failing that by joining forums and asking about.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#708

Post by PetitPrince »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #332
chongli wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. Arguably higher. For example, fans of Star Wars have scanned the original 1977 theatrical release with very high quality film scanners and created a 4K release complete with film grain and the original scenes intact which is not available through approved channels.

There’s also a number of movies where the best quality publicly available is a pirated rip of an HDTV broadcast from a Malaysian TV network or something similarly odd because the rights holders never released a BD and the official DVD release was a transfer from a crappy VHS or similar. In cases of TV shows, fans have gone to the lengths of producing the best quality release possible by patching together video, audio…

> In cases of TV shows

Can you give me some examples of those guerilla remaster ? I know of the various Star Wars projects (Harmy and the likes) and the remaster from "La Classe Américaine", but I don't know any others.

A French movie that bungle together several excerpt from classic Warner movie to tell its own humorous story. A cult classic for French millennials. The director later on went on to make The Artist to universal acclaim.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#709

Post by efilife »

Dwedit wrote: post #482
efilife wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression?

It's not the same thing. Normalization is scanning to see what the highest volume scale you can use without introducing clipping, then multiplying every sample by that scale. Compression is very different. The volume scale isn't constant, and the original sound is distorted significantly. I often use a compressor to listen to video game streams because they tend to have the game audio be way too quiet. Having the com…

I know about this. This is why I asked

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#710

Post by sotix »

One minor issue I've noticed with streaming is the quality. I went to watch A Bridge on the River Kwai the other day. I could borrow it from my library on Kanopy for free, but the audio was only in stereo. The $4 iTunes rental supported Dolby Atmos, which took advantage of my speaker system, and the video quality was comparably better. I ended up paying despite the library having it because iTunes offered a better experience that was easy to access.

iTunes movie rentals seem to almost always win out when it comes to streaming specifically. I don't know why I would want to watch something on Prime Video at a lower quality and sit through ads. I've also encountered a number of services such as Peacock that absolutely refused to run on my Linux laptop even though I was a paying customer.

Further, the iTunes versions of movies often come with special features (e.g. The making of the Lord of the Rings). They also earned a lot of goodwill from me when they upgraded a number of my HD movies to 4k for free.

I do maintain a Jellyfin server with movies and shows I have legally purchased because I didn't like how the digital version of my James Bond movies had the final movie on a different streaming app. It's really hard to beat that setup if you know how to configure it. My Jellyfin server contains an episode of community from the DVD I own that was removed from streaming services, and that's where it really shines. I also have higher quality versions of Star Wars than the VHS copies I own.

Nonetheless, I think iTunes proves what an effective model is in a similar vain as Steam is to gaming. Shame that unlike Steam's relationship with Linux, iTunes is much more tied to Apple. At least the Apple TV is genuinely a good streaming box.

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