> Some drives need to have their firmware flashed in order to enable ripping of UHD discs
I love their summary of what the patched firmware does:
'A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself “revoked”.
(...) Change the optical drive embedded software in a way that the drive becomes a “primitive” device - one that just positions a laser, reads and decodes the data. Make a drive free from “policing” functionality, a drive that just passes all data from the disc to the user.'
Probably pretty hard. It's not a transparent patch to the drive's normal read routines but a parallel low-level API. Then they wrap that in their own high-level userspace API libdriveio (which you'd have to patch dd to use).
And once you've pried the data out of the drive's hands you still have to decrypt it.
Very easy but my understanding is you’d end up with an unplayable disc still because you need to perform decryption to get a file ffmpeg can play. That said makemkv does work on ISOs of discs made with a libredrive
I believe any DVD drive made in recent years won't support it. Some drives had bugs in their old firmware so that the drives can be used with makemkv, but it doesn't mean it is usual. They can fix the bugs. They can stop making problematic hardware. Even if you can find such a hardware, it might be more expensive than your CPU. Normally people won't invest much on it.
And, like what SGX is providing, if the film industry really want to stop pirating, they can. Then makemkv will be a history.
> if the film industry really want to stop pirating, they can.
I doubt that, if for nothing else the Analog Hole[0]. At some point in the chain, the video data has to be turned into usable information for a display panel and speakers.
They keep adding steps to the chain, moving the final step closer and closer to the end, but it is still possible to bypass. In the ultimate case, you could probe the display board directly and convert the raw panel voltages, but in practice there are many earlier opportunities.
This probably counts as "circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work" under the DMCA and is thus illegal.
Morally and ethically there's no issue though, and the risk of prosecution seems incredibly low if you're just ripping your own discs for private use, so I don't think this really matters.
True in many parts of the world. U.S. copyright law makes no exception for copying content you own, though I do agree it may be hard for media companies to prosecute so you'll probably get away with it. The Betamax Supreme Court case was won -- 5-4 -- because the court found a single, very narrow, noninfringing use for a VCR: recording a television program that will air only once and never again after that single airing, and you cannot be around to view said television program at its scheduled time, and you intend to destroy the recording after viewing it once. The ruling does NOT cover recording off the TV willy-nilly, or copying things you own; there is a dicta in Justice Blackmun's dissent stating these things to be explicitly illegal.
But I'm not talking about doing the copying itself. I'm talking about circumventing DRM which is a separate offense from copyright infringement. That is illegal in the USA, with certain specific, narrow exceptions, whether you use such circumvention to infringe copyright or not. Trafficking in circumvention devices, including publishing or downloading firmware that disables access protection measures, is illegal full stop.
(Remember DeCSS? Yeah, hosting that is still a federal crime, irrespective of what you or your audience intends to do with it. The irony is, that means the Feds have every right to take Eric S. Raymond's guns away and bar him from owning a gun for life: http://www.catb.org/esr/netfreedom/)
I'm not sure that the modded firmware even includes the actual low-level read routines. Isn't the whole thing split up to load them into the drive's RAM after every power cycle? If that's the case then the modded firmware alone is arguably not a circumvention device, and neither is the drive once it's powered down. :P
LibreDrive disables the "policing", i.e., the software that makes the drive refuse to read due to a wrong region code, revoked key, etc. This counts as an "effective technological measure" separate from any decryption, etc. the drive performs and LibreDrive is thus likely a circumvention device under the DMCA. Publishing it would therefore be a felony, punishable by up to five years in federal prison, in addition to civil penalties.
Agreed but LibreDrive is the system as a whole (before decryption, sure). I was curious about the persistent component of that system, the modded firmware.
I understand, and I assume you're probably right. What I'm saying is that it's ok to commit this crime. You're not harming anyone, and in the particular scenario we're talking about, there's no chance that you'll face any consequences.
It is a grey area. Right to repair has had success without legislation for abandonware. The rights of the copyright holder generally don't actually extend to blocking your access.
Now whether "latest Intel chips don't support playback" is sufficient to fall under this flag is obviously a complex topic but I think it is certainly not cut and dry.
> The rights of the copyright holder generally don't actually extend to blocking your access.
The issue here is that the DMCA makes bypassing copy protection illegal regardless of whether or not the actual use of the media infringes on copyright, and exceptions are only added every 3 years[1] and are generally very specific in scope.
From my understanding it's less of a gray area and more of a dithered black and white area that can look gray from afar.
Agreed. If you want to (physically) own a movie or TV show, use MakeMKV, or just torrent/IRC/usenet it. It really seems the rights owners want you to go that route.
Otherwise if you just want to watch a movie and don't care that it might not be available at a later time, use a streaming service, it's by far the most convenient.
> If you want to (physically) own a movie or TV show
I find this phrasing quite fascinating. What does it even mean to "own" a movie? If you torrent or rip it, you now simply possess a copy and with the ability to watch it without any artificial restrictions, but I'd hardly say that you "own" it at that point.
I find it so depressing that our legal system does not even have the concept of an individual having access to a movie such that they can play it for themselves conveniently without restrictions. Even when you physically own a DVD there is no "sanctioned" way to watch it without being forced to watch the commercials and legal disclaimers at the beginning.
Which reminds me of the irony always repeated in these threads, that the folks who rip or torrent the film never see these legal disclaimers and only the folks who obey all the "rules" and don't need to see the disclaimer are constantly exposed to it.
Why can't we have nice things? This world is so distopian.
> Why can't we have nice things? This world is so distopian.
Bonus: As technologists and developers, we are actively creating this dystopia! I'm sure a non-zero portion of HN's audience is hard at work implementing DRM, locking users out of products they own, and coming up with new roadblocks for users. Perhaps someone reading this very comment implemented this exact Blu-Ray DRM in a devices's firmware. To the rest of us, it's dystopia, but to that person, it's just another JIRA ticket Boss says they need to implement, so they do.
Blame the evil managers all you want, but you, dear reader, are the one writing the code and hitting Commit.
While I acknowledge the irony you are pointing out, even that is a feature of the world we live in, where humans are unable to coordinate. Eliminating DRM is just one of the many wonders we could accomplish if we could "simply" coordinate the efforts of all software engineers on the planet.
Because if you don't implement DRM, then you simply raise the marginal price that it costs a company to do so, and you make another engineer – who is willing to implement it – marginally richer, thus indirectly rewarding behavior you despised in the first place!
The only ways to eliminate things like DRM are to either globally coordinate all software engineers' efforts (probably impossible), or somehow... socially change the incentives such that DRM is a net-loss for content producers? Also seems probably impossible.
I realized the futility of taking an ethical stand in software, early in my career. I was a junior developer, and my next project was to write code to cheat a benchmark. I managed to work up the courage to tell my boss I had a problem with doing that, and he said "Hey, fine, no problem. We treat our developers well here" and was totally cool about it. I got another ticket to work on instead. Bill, two cubicles down, was happy to go and write the benchmark-cheating code.
I still refuse projects and jobs I consider unethical, but realize it's pissing in the wind until there is some larger coordinated framework (like a Hippocratic Oath for developers).
Honestly, putting aside the philosophical debate, I own something I have access to without limitation and without the ability of a third party to take it away from me. I own a book I can read whenever, wherever and however I want. I don't own a book I have to give back to the library. I own blu rays I ripped in a similar way.
Yes you own the blu ray, but you don't actually own _the movie_. Despite owning the disc, your legal rights to how you can view the content on it are quite specific, and I believe that circumventing the DRM on it is illegal. So the fact that you have physical ownership of the disk is almost tangential to the discussion.
And of course there's always the whole, "Well actually the government has the final say in everything so does it count that you 'own' something if the government can simply take it away from you." but that's a whole other can of worms!
What more can I do if I own _the movie_ that I am not able to do after ripping the blu ray?
DRM is as anti-consumer as Apple and Tesla's policy saying the owner of a product can't repair their own product. Having physical ownership and removing drm is the only meaningful way to take ownership of a movie that doesn't rely on the good grace of an outside party. The US has laws against unrightful search and seizure and due process. The government can't "simply" take things away from me, at least in the US. True digital ownership of media requires the ability to playback things without relying on a third party. That's only possible having a dedrmed rip/reencoded copy. In practical terms, my legal rights on how I can view content is tangential to owning media, what matters is my actual ability to view it.
> The government can't "simply" take things away from me, at least in the US.
Yeah, maybe calling it "simple" was a mistake, but here I'm thinking about exactly such things as search & seizure and eminent domain where you can be legally deposessed of literally anything that you "own".
You're correct in this subtle distinction, but I still mourn the fact that – for all intents and purposes – we live in a world that looks nearly the same as the one where the concept literally does not exist.
Although what is the alternative in a world where producing digital copies is a matter of pressing a button?
The whole idea of IP is to protect content creators. Those content creators sell their IP to large corporates to maximise their earning potential. Corporates subsequently take steps to protect those rights. Taking the ability to take those steps away from corporates by extension means taking those rights away from content creators. Is that what you're advocating for?
I don't actually know if my desired end-state is practical or even possible, but I can at least describe what it looks like:
* I pay $10-25 for a movie
* I can then personally view that movie with myself and my family on the display I want (the last hotel I stayed at didn't have a HDCP compatible TV so I couldn't display my purchased film on the TV)
* I am not forced to watch advertisements or piracy warnings before the film
* I can put the film on other devices I own to watch via more convenient methods (my phone, tablet, home theater setup)
Are those requirements fundamental to having a legal system that protects the rights of copyright owners? Honestly I don't think they are! Because the DRM schemes that enable the above situation clearly aren't stopping pirates in the first place. But who knows, maybe there's an alternate universe where content creators allow all the above bullet points and – as a consequence – very few entities invest in creating art! In the end if I had to choose between that universe and the one we have today, I'd still take the one we have today where art is legally well protected enough that we have a plethora of it.
The obvious solution to creating digital scarcity is putting the ownership into an NFT. That way you can still “own” a copy of a movie exactly in the same way DVDs used to be owned. NFTs aren’t ready for that yet, but one day when there is a centralized platform that becomes the YouTube of NFTs then it may be large enough. None of this will happen without regulation in the space though because right now owning an NFT is no different than say having the movie on Comcast’s website, but being unable to play it from any other application. When regulations making NFTs standard across multimedia occur then there will be true use of NFTs, meaning the websites just become the DVD player, and once you own an NFT of a movie you can play it on any website you link your wallet to so it knows you own that specific NFT. I’d guess that’s at least 20 years away though.
They don't want you to own anything. The industry has collectively decided we should move to an "AAS" model for everything and everyone is just playing the long game now. I hate it...
I use put.io. It's a web service which downloads, seeds and stores your torrents. It also converts, streams, finds subtitles for movies and similar stuff. Also allows for you to download the file if you want.
Moreover, it can follow RSS feeds for automated downloads, and has plethora of other features.
Not very wise to export your (assumed) copyright-infringing activity over to a third party that has complete records of who you are. Folks have been sued for less.
They're an old company (probably more than a decade old), and I'm using them since they started. I didn't download much and honestly used them for distribution .ISO files 99% of the time.
However, they're still operating, they only know my e-mail, nothing else, and they honor DMCA take down notices.
If a company takes legal action against you or other users, they will subpoena the card processor, too; the fact that the first company doesn't hold your personal details is irrelevant.
Plenty of individuals have had significant penalty for torrenting, including settlements [1] (search for singapore), and being blocked from accessing the internet [2]. The RIAA also sued a large number of individuals in the US [3]. And that's apart from the large number of companies that have been sued for supporting torrents.
So, yes, people easily could be sued for torrenting and plenty of people have suffered significant penalty.
> I liked buying the blu ray because my internet speed isn't great
This is mostly an issue when streaming, which I prefer not to do for that reason. When I've had slow connections, torrenting a movie has generally been fine as I just let it run overnight.
Even if they aren't doing it today, if the policy allows it you can guarantee they're at minimum collecting the data. Perhaps for "improved suggestions" now, but could just as easily be sold to a third party later should the financial incentives be high enough.
Honestly if it’s like the viewing data I saw when I worked in cable, your watching habits are not remotely unique and you can be more effectively targeted using the data pulled from a credit check.
Viewing data is largely used in aggregate to make decisions about content. They’ll collect demographic data because it’s useful to know, but by and large it’s all used in aggregate or as cohorts because there really aren’t enough permutations. On a streaming service like Netflix or Disney there just isn’t enough content for people to look all that different at an individual level.
- while being gouged for double the BR-retail price PER person PLUS overpriced amenities,
- with no option for original audio but only trash-tier dubs (in Germany you'd have to go to one the bigger cities like Berlin for the option)
- while sitting together in a hot and stuffy room with a bunch of other (noisy) people
- not to mention the time investment of going to the city, standing in line for tickets, waiting for the movie to start and going back home, not even being able to have a beer unless you can/want to take the bus (slightly more money if it's even still running at that time) or a taxi home (considerably more money).
In all this makes it:
- ~5-15€ per BR, rip it to external drive, watch what I want when I want anywhere in my local network with Jellyfin or on that connected computer with mpv in full quality, with any of the available audio tracks (though usually original audio), in multiple different playback speeds with no extra time and/or money investment
OR
- 15-20€ per cinema ticket, for any of the small collection of German dubbed they have at what times they decide to show them, ~30-45 minutes of going to the cinema (plus costs thereof), ~20 minutes wait till the ads stop and the movie starts, "enjoy" the full length of poorly dubbed movie in an uncomfortable environment, ~30-45 minutes of going back home (plus costs thereof).
Sounds awful! In our city movies are $5/person on Tuesdays (any movie, including brand new releases) and is only a few minutes drive. So just wanted to say this is not the same everywhere :)
Personally I find the quality of the cinema projectors to be lacking, but I still enjoy going.
I'm pretty sure the last time I went to a cinema was ~2013 and I haven't looked back since the experience is just all around awful and expensive to add insult to injury.
Yeah not trying to convince you to go, because I go pretty rarely myself. I will say they have recliner chairs here with lots of spacing between chairs (and we are a smaller city, so we are the last to get things), pre-assigned seating, food & beer/wine/etc. It's really a decent experience, like I said the only thing I find lacking is the actual picture quality itself now that I have a 4k TV at home.
I presume you're in Germany? Where do they make you pay 15-20€ per ticket? I just bought a cinema ticket today. The sticker price was 10€, and I got it for 6.60€ with a loyalty card (Cineplex High Five, completely tracking-free since I bought it with cash).
Mind you, this was almost 10 years ago but I could swear it was something like 16 or 17€ per ticket.
I just looked it up though and apparently it's 7-8€/adult now depending on the day.
I can order practically any movie DVD/BR I want from reBuy or momox via Amazon including shipping for less than just the ticket price, not to mention time investment etc.
Torrents have one crucial disadvantage: they require you to make the content publicly available in the process, which is illegal in many countries. It is much better to download it, which is not illegal in most jurisdictions, with one notable exception of proprietary software.
The current ecosystem dealt with the problem of hammering by using various filehosters and most of them are DMCA-compliant. But the window between the release and the file being DMCAed is large enough for this business to thrive. This whole system works by providing value to 3 key parties:
* filehosters - they get money from subscribers (some offer a free crippled options just to frustrate users into buying the subscription)
* uploaders - they got money from filehosters
* downloaders - they got the content they need
The better trackers are invite only. If you are found to be selling invites your entire invite tree will be banned. You have to be recruited or personally know a member to get in.
Take for example PTP. It is one of the best movie trackers. It recently exceeded 250,000 unique titles available in many different formats. Netflix in contrast only has 15,000 unique titles and their library is shrinking not growing.
E.g. iptorrents.com. You pay for access (or have to be invited) to a catalog of torrents that are not publicly-available. You must disable the DHT and peer discovery features of your bittorrent client so that the file content is only seeded back to other members
So, how does it work now? Last time I checked this was called "leeching" and fought against. Also, if everyone is doing that, it makes the whole protocol meaningless.
I mean, when its an option (being in a big city means this actually is a thing quite often) its kinda cool. Especially if its a good cinema. Bloody expensive though and not the kind of thing you can do on a lazy Sunday afternoon cause you're bored.
You live in the US ? So sorry for you guys :/ I live in France and go to the cinema pretty often. I have an unlimited card (yes, a real unlimited, sometimes i can watch 5 movies in one day) and it's only 20€/month
They're referring to watching Lord of The Rings in cinemas, since it's over 20 years old. Though if you have weekly LOTR showings in cinemas I'd strongly consider moving to France ;p
We also have unlimited cards here, they're tied to each movie chain. So if you have the AMC unlimited thing it only works at AMC owned theaters etc. It's a great deal. I canceled mine in early 2020 for obvious reasons though.
For the first time in about 10 years, I recently found myself with some physical DVDs I wanted to format-shift (show the kids some old movies on an iPad).
It was surprisingly hard to do the homework on the "best" way to do this on a Mac -- I ended up using MakeMKV to rip + Handbrake to encode, but it was hard to find a robust recent technical discussion of what the pros do.
At one point in this process I was looking at the Internet Archive's copy of http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/ which has just quietly disappeared from the Web? It was a bizarre experience.
No annoying upsells, no subscriptions and you can use the officially provided beta key (valid until the end of a month, a new key gets released every month) to check it out.
This is also the *secure* way to continue playing Ultra HD Blu-ray movies - run away from anyone's advice when they include the phrase "don't update Windows" (paraphrased). Haven't we learned to patch our system yet?
Anyone reading this, I'd recommend the Pioneer Drive if you can swing it. It does not support UHD decryption (yet) but the reliability is so much better than the LG drives and the other drives (which I think are just rebadged LG). I got a LG drive manufactured in June 2021 and by September it was dead. Got a second drive from a different vendor (mfg July 2021) and it also started to falter. (returned it while I still could). There are tons of complaints on the makemkv forums but it is still a popular drive for the price(if you wanna risk it).
My flashed LG drive, the slim laptop case size one, had been working fine for me. I sometimes don't feel like streaming or want storage space temporarily and playback using VLC. Mine is an older manufacturing date though.
Agreed. I also got the Laptop drive and the Laptop one works better than the desktop ones and supports 4K UHD, however it is slow and the Pioneer is even more reliable (again does not support 4K yet)
It is not necessarily illegal in the USA. It's not necessarily legal either. Pasted from Wikipedia:
U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices. For example, space shifting, by making a copy of a personally owned audio CD for transfer to an MP3 player for that person's personal use, is not explicitly allowed or forbidden.
Existing copyright statutes may apply to specific acts of personal copying, as determined in cases in the civil or criminal court systems, building up a body of case law. Consumer copyright infringement cases in this area, to date, have only focused on issues related to consumer rights and the applicability of the law to the sharing of ripped files, not to the act of ripping, per se.
Isn't the act of bypassing DRM itself some violation of DMCA and related laws (however unlikely any enforcement may be) ? Which is also why you can't play commercial DVDs and blu-rays out of the box on Fedora because they won't ship any code that can circumvent DRM.
Yes. Section 1201 says “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
The reason you can’t find a commercial vendor that will directly ship something to bypass the DRM is because it also says “No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”
This is also why for a while the t-shirts with the dvd decss key were popular among nerds, because they are illegal.
Bypassing the DRM is acceptable for certain use cases, with DVD's it's OK for using clips as a critic or adding additional accessibility features. So something like makemkv is legal while in practice almost every user is breaking the law.
I don't think that's how the law works. There's a fair use exemption for using copyrighted material, however you're still not allowed to bypass DRM to get at the data.
> The 2021 exemptions, issued in October 2021, are for:[15]
> Motion pictures (including television shows and videos), as defined in 17 U.S.C. 101, where circumvention is undertaken solely in order to make use of short portions of the motion pictures for the purpose of criticism or comment, for supervised educational purposes, to accommodate for accessibility for disabled students in educational institutions, for preservation of the motion picture by a library, archive, or museum, or for research purposes at educational institutions;
No, a version of that exemption was first added in 2010. Each exemption has to be readded every new listing.
And that exemption only adds cases in which stripping DRM from a DVD becomes legal. It's still generally illegal, and most people using makemkv are likely using it illegally.
> however you're still not allowed to bypass DRM to get at the data.
I'm not sure this has ever been tested in court, though. And even the DMCA itself does provide for a rather clunky system of "exemptions" to the no-circumvention provision.
That's my take for the UK. This is not legal advice. It seems the tech is fine as circumvention for accessibility is allowed (eg under three Marrakesh Treaty); most users probably aren't doing it for accessibility.
Copyright kinda flips this around by saying that copying is (with some exceptions) the exclusive right of the rightsholder. I don't see how this is murky.
The "exceptions" part is pretty significant there. Copying that you do for your own personal use (e.g. format shifting) is especially likely to fall under the "Fair Use"/"Fair Dealing" provisions of copyright law. This was the basis of the Sony vs. Betamax case, which involved home videotaping for format shifting purposes.
MakeMKV even has an integration with VLC that lets you just play Blu-ray discs without ripping them first. I don't know if that works for the UHD ones.
It works well but the more annoying issue is that UHD has hdr built in and tone mapping is still very much under development. It looks fine but, for example, can't use Dolby Vision directly. To get a complete experience, you need to rip first.
That looks very much like an old DVD ripper (even the site) that was a joy to use. I don't remember the name, but if MakeMKV is as good as that, it'll be great.
Basically, though EAC had a harder job because AFAIK reading audio CDs isn't as exact as reading from a filesystem, so it had to do a ton of tricks to get accurate reads.
The stupid thing is that this might be illegal in some jurisdictions. With any DRM scheme you'll end up having to break the law at some point in time to consume the content you legally purchased.
No, because the prohibition is on acquisition of the software. Though if you brought the software to do so with you you'd be in breach.
But it's worth noting that virtually every country in the world has a prohibition on acquiring software to bypass DRM. In the UK for example it's a criminal offense with potential jail time attached to import it (i.e. download it from a foreign server) or sell it.
Could you cite that law please? I don't doubt it, UK copyright law in my personal opinion is overly beholden to USA (eg entertaining extradition for hosting links which are allegedly to material acquired through infringement).
Format shifting à la iTunes CD rips is tortuous in the UK, AFAICS, making iTunes unlawful as it's produced in order to enable infringing behaviour.
Section 296ZB of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) as modified by the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations (2003).
iTunes isn't unlawful in the UK, as there's no prohibition on making software to format shift. It's just using it to format shift that's unlawful. But software to bypass technical protection measures is prohibited, and similar laws exist in almost all countries because having them is a requirement for WTO membership.
Considering the size of bluray rips, let alone UHD ones, TPB downloads are usually a significant step down in terms of quality vs directly ripping a disk.
This is legitimately the stance I take on audio quality, video quality above 1080p (although I do notice the difference in bitrate between streams), cars, video games, and a lot of other things.
I've been spoiling myself and forced Netflix to 1080p (due to Linux, by default it won't go over 720) and I'm starting to slowly agree higher bitrates do look nicer.
It's just that I come from VCD rips and still think that anything better than DVD is fantasticly detailed. Just never had the urge to let myself get used to better, but I'm starting to with 1080p.
I think you need enough pixels to convey the story / vision of the artist. More is better but there are diminishing returns above 1080p and most of us just don't care lol
Sell it to me! Seriously, I'd love to hear how much better the quality could be. I miss 35 mm and spot (and hear) digital artifacts often and it drives me crazy.
High quality torrents exist? I could download this right now: BD66 / m2ts / Blu-ray / 2160p / Scene / Dolby Atmos / Dolby Vision / HDR10. It's a 64GB file.
I bought a copy of planet earth / blue planet II to test out my new fancy oled this year. It's a damned near religious experience watching those series in 4k.
Blu-ray 1080p movies tend to be around 35-45GB per title. 4k movies tend to be around 70-100GB per title.
The disc capacity contributes a lot to disc authors tweaking codec settings to value quality above file size. Visible artifacts are fairly rare even on complex scenes. You could practically believe you're watching a lossless source.
i don't use TPB, so I don't know if they are there as well, but elsewhere on torrents you can find both full blu-ray disc copies and "remuxes", which are just directly ripped from blu-ray to mkv without any loss of audio/video quality.
Even on a good 4K TV, 2GB rips (and definitely the 4-6GB rips you can often also find) are really quite adequate for a lot of movies if it's a modern codec and the rip has been done well. Some movies are a bit more challenging than others, of course.
Not really. Even though you can get excellent quality h.265 encodes, it seems the MP3 generation's hearing is so impaired that compressing the hell out of audio and losing tons of audio quality is too common.
What's the point of a beautiful 2500 kbps h.265 video if they're going to kill the audio quality by squashing it to 128 kbps?
I bought a flashable drive specifically for this reason. I both love having physical releases and the convenience of a Plex server when I just want to throw something on.
As an alternative, AnyDVD HD can trasparently strip the encryption off a Blu-Ray disc. I haven't tried it with any Ultra HD discs but it works extremely well for traditional Blu-Ray.
Why bother? I did the whole shebang, bought a reader, a new processor, a compatible OLED tv and everything, I could only read a UHD bluray at 30fps if I used the integrated intel card, so had to do crazy config changes to boot correctly without my nvidia, with no HDR and that worked only with an expensive PowerDVD software.
So I gave up, googled rarbg and can get the same stuff in perfect quality in a few minutes. UHD killed legal "dvds" for me, it's so stupid.
I have used this software and it is great. You don't really have to register for the software you can find the "beta/trial" key on their forum and keep on reinstalling and reusing makemkv.
*clap* thanks for the pointer on IINA. I'm a long-time user of MPV (that's prob what I'll stick with on Windows…) it's good to have all these super useful interface improvements~
> For users who use an older compatible platform and want to keep the Ultra HD Blu-ray playback compatibility on the PC and with PowerDVD, we suggest you continue using the 7th - 10th generation Core i series of Intel CPUs and motherboards that support the Intel SGX feature. You should also consider not updating the OS (e.g., upgrading to Windows 11) and related Intel drivers to the latest versions in order to keep the Intel SGX feature from being removed from your PC. You should also ensure your platform meets all the other playback requirements of Ultra HD Blu-ray as the playback solution:
https://www.cyberlink.com/support/faq-content.do?id=19144
Wow, the official solution is to use old hardware and software. I'm sure that's a great idea :)
Sarcasm aside, I wonder when corporations will realize that until they offer proper easy and affordable solutions, people have little incentives to actually jump through the official loops and simply not pirate content. I hope to see this realization sometime in my life, but maybe I'm too optimistic.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
Exactly; Steam is so successful because they make it easier and quicker to buy games than it is to pirate them, and reward you with features for doing so (achievements, playtime on your profile, screenshot storage). Also, piracy of games specifically is less appealing when you might just download a free crypto miner or custom RAT on the side (remote administration tool).
Indeed. It's a great service even though it suffers from the same problems as everything based on licensing. People who don't like it must not remember the days where you had to download and apply 5 incremental patches to video games before you could play online. I would buy games on Steam just to get the library management and automatic updates.
The truth is most copyright holders offer absolute garbage service to consumers and the only reason they're still in the market is it's illegal to compete with them.
Streaming services, especially in Europe, have already shown this.
First there was Netflix, and everything was on Netflix. Then a few publishers decided they didn't want to share their pie with Netflix, so they started their own streaming service and pulled their content from Netflix.
Next, you have multiple streaming services and surely, piracy goes up and the pirate just throws the pie out the window. Nobody wins.
You know, I've heard Gabe's comment several times and part of my earlier comment was based off it. But I actually disagree with the
> not a pricing problem
part. Probably because I come from a third world country (India), I am extremely sensitive to avoidable costs. If you can get something for free, you can be sure that the average Indian is going to spend effort for it, me included. (This makes more sense in context to how weak the rupee is which can likely be extended to other 3rd world countries but that's another topic.)
For example - I have never purchased a music subscription even though I spend a much larger amount on food/rent and could comfortably afford one. Why? Because YouTube is free.
I think the big problem is that there are so many different forms of DRM, content media/formats, and playback devices that even a fairly educated and highly technically literate user can't be sure when they buy something about exactly when or how the DRM will rear its ugly head and bite them.
Yes! A friend of mine has an HDTV that simply won't work with any newer device. When I investigated the issue, I found out it was due to HDCP! Infuriating.
If they had wanted to show to everyone how futile the whole idea of DRM is, this would have been a great way to do it. However, I don't think Intel management is quite so self-aware.
IDK about that. They were certainly upset about VCRs back in the day.
It's been covered ad nauseam at this point: content owners want to be able to dictate the who, what, when, where, and how of content consumption. They have enough money to get taken seriously, and know how to use it; ideally, consumers would push back by not watching movies, but that isn't happening. So here we are. It's disappointing.
I'll never understand the stupidity of studios/streaming platforms (DRM/Widevine). DRM only hurts legit customers, period. Any TV Show or Movie you want to watch is going to be on Torrents/Usenet within hours at most of release, their DRM has completely and utterly failed to stop piracy, instead it punishes paying users.
I still remember a good decade ago getting a DVD from Redbox and trying to watch it with some friends. Tons of unskippable ads, FBI warnings, etc. Partway through the hell of enforced watching I started a torrent, before we got to the title screen it was done and we watched the downloaded version instead.
Furthermore, look at the state of TV today with all the streaming platforms. I'm excluding "live" TV because I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that cesspool. Having to jump between streaming services/UIs/UX/etc is terrible. "What platform was that show on?", "Wait, weren't we watching this on service X? That's why it lost our place in the season", "Oh, did they remove Y show?", and the list goes on.
It's incredibly sad the the best TV experience is some combo of Plex/Jellyfin+*arr-type software. Music piracy is practically non-existent in my friend groups (the same could not be said 10+ years ago), Spotify and friends did that. Not any laws, not any enforcement, not any crackdowns, etc, no a /paid/ service beat music piracy. Why? Because it was better, it was easier, and it had everything. As long as we only have a choice of disjointed services and platforms TV/Movies will never be better than piracy.
Things like Amazon Channels and Apple TV (yes the app, not the device, not the service, come on Apple...) are somewhat of a step in a better direction but Plex is still bar none. No ads, instant playback, no BS.
Sometimes it really is easier to torrent a show and know you will see it ad free and without buffering than to find it on any given streaming service and suffer the ads.
Recently I've seen even ad free, paid or unpaid, streaming options that still force ads into their shows at the beginning or the end. There is a new Nerdwallet ad that says, "Enjoy this ad free break before getting back to your show - brought to you by nerdwallet" I almost screamed at my tv when I saw that. If your name is plastered on the screen and the show/movie I'm watching is disputed to display it its an ad...
I literally took a screenshot of the top banner of Imgur the other day (I tried turning off all my blockers because it kept failing to upload images in an album, it didn't end up helping) that said "Enjoy an Ad Free Day brought to you by the Toyota Corolla Cross". Similarly I wanted to scream "That's not what that means!". Not that I'd be caught dead listening to the radio but from other's or from a long time ago I remember "enjoy this ad-free hour provided by X", if I have to hear your name then it's not ad-free.
Even that might not be worth it. Most major league sports in the US are subject to blackouts (which I think is utterly ridiculous when the venues were closed due to COVID: it's not like I could go see the game live if I wanted to). Worse, and insanely, the major league sports apps I've used enforce blackouts even when you're streaming over the Internet.[0] That's right: for $122 per season, you can't watch all your own baseball team's home games. I can imagine the content licensing contracts they have which prevent them from allowing it, but as an end user, I couldn't care less. The outcome is that it's a terrible deal for the people who'd otherwise be their best customers.
Sports are conundrum for sure and one of the only valid reasons to watch "live tv". Personally I don't care for sports but my parents do. The landscape there is pretty terrible as well IMHO. Cable or Satellite are probably the best picture while something like YouTubeTV is probably the best experience (but damn that picture is not good, at least to me it looks blocky often and there are a ton of artifacts on the picture). Game blackouts are something that I just don't understand to this day, like I understand them but how are we still living in the dark ages (pun intended)? IPTV is another option but it's temperamental and has similar picture issues to YTTV in my experience.
TV/Movies can be solved with piracy. Sports can't be solved with money or piracy.
Cable and Satellite really don't have better picture than YouTube TV, in my unscientific yet somewhat curious opinion. I compared YouTube TV to DirecTV as well as FIOS. I felt FIOS had the best picture quality out of all the services prior to YouTube TV, but YouTube TV seemed "crisper", even for sports and other high motion content.
Interesting. I've never done a head-to-head so I'm working off memory but I just never felt like there were so many artifacts/blocking on cable/satellite but I'm far from the best person to ask. I still watch old episodes of things that never were released in HD so I'm fine with bad quality for some stuff but when I tried to watch football when I was home for the holidays I kept getting distracted by the image quality. It's more jarring to go from "clear" to "blocky" than to just stay blocky.
I'm convinced the inability to easily play Blu-Rays and similar on computers is a major contributor as to why the format hasn't had the same traction as DVDs and may have accelerated the removal of disc drives from devices. Such a self-defeating move.
And I'm convinced the hassle of Blu-Ray DRM or any kind of modern DRM is why I, and many others, still pirate movies and TV shows despite being able to afford to pay for them.
And Blu-Ray Live which makes your player yet another surveillance tool, if it has internet access. And if it doesn't you lose some of the features of the disc advertised on the box.
Well, except for bitrate. I like my audio lossless 7.1 24/96 or better. I'm seriously thinking about a https://www.kaleidescape.com so I don't have to buy disks, but get the full bitrate.
I disagree. Streaming killed the disc. High speed internet facilitating digital downloads, alongside a desire to make laptops smaller and lighter, killed the disc drive.
I own a 3D Blu-ray player. I haven’t used it in about two years, since the nearest Redbox went away. I only used Redbox because it was cheap and more convenient than waiting for streaming releases. Now that many movies are released in theaters and on streaming at the same time, I don’t know if I’ll ever use it again.
Physical media is on the way out. Records continue to be manufactured for nostalgia (and better audio quality, for those that care), but that’s about it.
I can say that I have never bought into BluRay, I don’t own a BluRay compatible optical drive to play them, and as far as I know we do not own any BluRay discs. I have mountains of DVDs and still prefer it in terms of purchasing movies. Bandwidth and access to other forms of digital media has allowed me to skip BluRay. I understand the resolution is better but it’s not a strong selling point for me.
As a side note with the original DeCSS DVD code now considered a virus by many antivirus vendors I basically reject DRM technology everywhere I can.
I pay for Netflix, but that’s a recent thing. The kids watch YouTube. That’s it for my household. No local news, no over the air free HD TV. We cut the cord and never looked back. If its not on Netflix I guess we just wait or go to a theater (rarely) or don’t watch it.
I ripped my first DVD in college approximately two decades ago. I’m not oblivious to new technology nor am I some type of techno-Luddite; the selling points of BluRay are just weak imho.
I buy BDs so that kids can watch long form kids movies without needing to know about YouTube or Netflix or Prime (I mean they do, but they are now allowed there yet). I understand this will not last, but as far as I am concerned, longer they are away from total junk that Youtube offers, and from curated crap available via Netflix and such - the better.
If someone from netflix is reading: I would very much like to self curate (e.g. whitelist) which movies are are available when signed in via kids profile. Not blacklist, whitelist. Only show series and movies that are allowed.
We basically fill a NAS running Plex with stuff we like for the kids, YouTube-dl helps a lot with this. You can access that via a raspi or similar running a Plex client. Big fan of this approach, there’s a lot of great educational stuff on YouTube.
Yeah, Blu-Ray is pretty much PS3-PS5 and XboxOne/Series or you're old/"untechnical" enough to think that you need a standalone disc player to watch movies (but heck I've overheard grannies talk about Netflix,etc so even the old gen is starting to catch on).
That said, I'm not entirely sure that cord-cutting overall is a good thing. For my kids we've practically always had Netflix (and Youtube) and almost ignored regular channels with me consuming news mostly via online newspaper articles.
This really hit me when I separated and ended up living at my brothers for a short while a couple of years ago. Their family had a far bigger presence of news in their house due to watching linear TV news every day.
See here in Sweden we have fairly decent tax-funded public broadcast news (even if it's under attack and hated on by some parties), while much of it is fluff (and most of which I'd personally grasp with reading a couple of articles far quicker) it did strike me as something that I might leave as a dis-service to my kids in not providing an environment of learning about the outside world.
Cord cutting refers to removing the tv channel provider middleman from the equation, such as the company that owns the coaxial cable going into your home or satellite TV providers.
I do not see why the Swedish public broadcast news could not be available via a website and app, nor why the internet would not be able to offer far more access to information about the outside world than Swedish broadcast news.
Sort of. Xbox One X has Dolby Atmos/Vision but the PS5 does not. The highest quality players are still stand alone and have all the features if you are into that. But for most people you are absolutely right.
Most people don't watch TV or movies on their computers. They watch them on big-screen TVs with streaming built-in (or attached to streaming devices like Rokus, Fire Sticks, or Apple TVs) in their living rooms, or on mobile devices like tablets and phones.
My guess is that the movie industry is purposefully killing off PC viewing. Bluray players and TVs are much easier to assure content control on. I'd also guess that in general they don't care about bluray, period. They want everyone to stream, where there's no "ownership."
It's difficult to even play on your TV at times. I had rented a Blu-Ray from the library, popped it into my standalone player, connected to my TV, and recieved a message that my player wouldn't play it because it was out of date. What.
I can agree with this. I got a bluray burner and I could rarely get blurays to actually play properly or at all. Somewhere between software, licensing and drm , I now have basically a paperweight. An old ps3 does the trick though
I only buy Blu-ray that come with a digital code. I activate the code, it shows up in iTunes, and I give or throw away the Blu-ray. Although this is usually around Black Friday where you can get Blu-ray for $5-$10.
It's same reason you don't see DVD-A or SACD discs around. Who would buy such things when you need an expensive standalone player, especially in the age of streaming? They didn't learn.
I honestly don't get it, everyone knows that this will not stop piracy, there's no benefit whatsoever to it yet it has significant disadvantages for paying customers.
That's because piracy is the excuse, not the reason. DRM is very successful at what it should do: Protect the content middleman from the device makers (not the end users).
They can, for example, enforce market segmentation: You bought the DVD in the USA and play it in the EU. Legal, but DRM stops you. Wait for the EU release and pay the different price.
If the content middleman screams piracy, react as if a politician screams child porn. They want something else, but cant' get it without invoking the bogeyman. Hordes of (starving artists/concerned parents) will provide the necessary rope to hang themselves on command.
> If the content middleman screams piracy, react as if a politician screams child porn. They want something else, but cant' get it without invoking the bogeyman. Hordes of (starving artists/concerned parents) will provide the necessary rope to hang themselves on command.
I never made the connection between these two ideas before. Now I am wiser. Thanks for this.
> They can, for example, enforce market segmentation: You bought the DVD in the USA and play it in the EU. Legal, but DRM stops you. Wait for the EU release and pay the different price.
Ok, but don't they risk discouraging people from buying disks? Who buys disks nowadays anyway?
I buy disks all the time. Do not think streaming is going to make things better. That market is segmenting like crazy. They will enforce region boundaries and re-edit a movie if it suits them. Make no mistake they will edit movies to add pepsi/coke products all over the place. Then it will get very interesting and someone will pop off a hot take on twitter and they will be edited out of the movie. One of the 'uses' of VPN is to see movies in a different region that your service is not offering in yours. DVD DRM was designed for it (with its 7 regions). Bluray seems to be a bit more lax on it. That comes down to how a movie is budget is done and how the pricing split of who gets the money depending on where it is played.
The real problem with computers and disks is these days most computers do not come with any sort of DVD/BR/UHD drive. You can find the odd one here and there and sometimes in desktop format. But in the mobile space they have pretty much disappeared, except as USB addon. Once apple ditched them everyone else did too.
I had one of the cyberlink bits of software. It worked just fine for 6 years. The drive is fine. The certs on the software however expired. Once that happened no bluray would play at all. They wanted a decent amount to 'upgrade' so I could watch my movies again on my computer.
So I used that money and bought some ripping software. So I rip and use things like VLC and KODI to play them now. Which is kind of 'meh' as the java emu layer is not there yet. Most of the time you can pick the right title out of the list. But sometimes (usually sony) they will throw several thousand titles on the disk that are not quite right but have the right size.
These companies have not totally worked it out yet (they are well on their way though). With 100% streaming digital they have a decent amount of physical control, probably prefect pricing, and re-editorial control.
The limitations enforced by the DRM are rarely disclosed upfront. "DRM" to non-technical people simply means anti-piracy protection which they don't mind because they don't see themselves as pirates, having just bought the media.
Disney CEO: "We want a DRM system that will make piracy impossible. Can you do it?"
Developer: "That's impossible, it can't be done."
Disney CEO: "My son is constantly asking for $70 games for his playstation/xbox, so I'm not convinced DRM is impossible. Could you do it if we paid you $300,000 per year? Or do you have nothing to offer the company?"
Developer: "Well, when you put it like that, I'm happy to try. We can certainly make something that doesn't have the holes previous systems had, and that will slow down piracy, initially."
Disney CEO: "Ah, so it might be possible after all...."
1. Stopping "casual" piracy, that is, stopping a tech illiterate person (most of the population) from simply copying it to another tech illiterate friend (they don't want a repetition of the K7 mixtape era).
2. Create a walled garden were you have a monopoly that you can abuse to extract better deals from other stakeholders.
Widespread piracy is a function of access to user-friendly pirating services like torrents or warez sites, not the ability to generate a pirated copy. I'd wager that the number of people in the world who bypass Bluray DRM for non-personal use is in the hunderds, maybe thousands.
> Widespread piracy is a function of access to user-friendly pirating services like torrents or warez sites, not the ability to generate a pirated copy.
It's both. Easy generation of pirated copies also vastly increases the number of sources and the speed of propagation.
It doesn't outright stop piracy, but making it more uncomfortable to play back on PC means people would either switch to streaming or buy set-top players.
Big tech long ago decided that the PC is a problem to them and they want to move to locked-down gadgets.
DRM has nothing to do with piracy of even control over end-user. It's all about media companies having leverage over hardware manufacturers of TVs, computers, game consoles, etc.
So media companies want extort money from hardware manufacturers. Manufacturer might choose not to pay, but then most of movies and Netflix (FullHD, 4K) wouldn't play on their devices.
Once in a while, some DRM does work in buying some time for the copyright holder. Denuvo has sometimes led to games taking longer to be cracked, in some cases for a few weeks or even months, enough to perhaps capture some of the initial rush of purchases for a video game. Of course, there will be consumers who don't want to buy games with DRM as well.
The currently model for digital media (film, music, etc) just doesn't work. Instead of preventing piracy, figure out a new way of making money for artists (not the organisations and administrators). Artists ought to be rewarded not the organisation and admin.
Thing is the organizations and administrators around artists are huge.
In the current world, they are no longer needed, and they know it. But they still have power. So they are doing everything they can to keep up their revenue streams. If they admit to progress, if they try and make a working ecosystems, they are working on something which, at best, requires massive downsizing for them.
So instead they are flailing about looking to construct ecosystems that still have a place for them.
Most customers don't know what DRM is, how it works and how/when it fails.
It's reasonable for a non-technical person to agree with a solution that claims to prevent piracy because they have no idea how these things work and their trade-offs. They don't mind it because they don't see themselves as pirates given that they just bought the media and are unaware of how the DRM scheme can backfire on them despite not being a pirate.
Very few people would agree to DRM if the DRM scheme explicitly had a disclaimer "we can, for any reason, prevent you from playing this in the future even on the same hardware that successfully plays it today".
The desire to support the unreasonable demands of the film industry here has led to the perversion of the x86 architecture to add all sorts of peculiar DRM functionalities, and has precluded firmware components from being made open source; as I have previously written about here [1], which links to forum posts by an AMD engineer:
I'm sure I don't have to explain to you that the essense of DRM requirements in the OEM PC market is that the owner must NOT have full control of the machine if that includes being able to tamper with or disable any of the DRM mechanisms.
At the end of the day if Intel was going to support this kind of thing AMD also was pretty much going to be required to make such a deal with the devil, or have a product that can't compete with Intel. If Intel is losing interest in supporting video DRM, perhaps due to shifts away from physical media, it's likely to have a positive effect on both Intel's platform as well as other platforms which feel the need to support the same DRM platforms.
I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? Ideally I'd like to see reform of copyright law to favour corporate giants a bit less, but given how much of a hand those same giants seem to have in the laws that get written I'm not hopeful of that any time soon.
I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.
> I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged.
In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising).
Which also explains why the studios insist on ridiculously bullshit in terms of DRM - the banks backing these enormous loans want their money back.
With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low and so there is no incentive for studios to invest in DRM, it's simply not worth it any more. The real money for musicians is tour tickets and merch... CD/vinyl sales and streaming income isn't much.
>In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising).
I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue.
>With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low
Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.
>> In the end, people want high quality entertainment
> I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time
I wouldn’t read that as the quality of the movie itself, but the technical quality of the production. You can have movies that are technically great, but that lack a story. But I don’t think we’ll see many more movies that have a good story with low video quality. When you can get a good 4K video from an iPhone, something like “Clerks” isn’t going to work nearly as well as when we had to use physical film and you could only afford to use so much of it.
> Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents.
Meh. Similar to music production, filmmaking itself has become ever more affordable on the technical and on the software side, DaVinci Resolve is available for free (and the Adobe suite for ~60€ a month), and thanks to digitalization distribution is relatively painless too (since you don't have to produce and copy literal reels of physical film, but can ship around Blu-rays or SSDs).
A feature-length film however will always need many hundreds to thousands of hours worth of work for everything from planning over shoots to post-production, there isn't much that can be cut there.
I would say most indie movies should be shot like theatre plays. Focus on acting and telling the story, rather than physically recreating every detail. Thinking about it, they already do that sort of...
Animated video is probably a good middle-ground, where crowdfunded content (e.g. the Blender-funded movies) has been successful. Live-action film is incredibly expensive to create if you're expecting any real quality, and doesn't get much traction when all the costs are made transparent, as with crowdfunding.
> I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world?
It's worth considering there's one tech company that makes its own chips, integrated hardware, operating system, software, and is now also a media studio.
As owners of the content, and the entire tech stack, they don't appear to be opposed to DRM.
And to think that Sony was once on the good side, even going to the Supreme Court to defend the VCR. But once they bought a studio, the Hollywood goons took over.
They were always on their own side, not the "good" one. They defended VCRs because they were a major producer of VHS home equipment, and the ability to record TV shows helped selling said equipment. The fact that they also held the moral high ground is little more than a happy accident.
In general, for corporations of then & now, "being good" only matters as long as it aligns, or at least does not interfere with, their sources of income.
The owner should still have full control and be able to disable DRM support. If that means you can't play certain movies afterwards that is fine, but the control should be there.
Having full control means that you could also partially disable DRM support. Say, perhaps, by enabling the part that determines an encryption key and decrypts the video, but disabling the part that checks whether the video is being sent to a compliant display rather than to an unencrypted file.
You cannot have effective DRM without taking away full control from the user.
What source of information could the application possibly use to check that? Everything the application does is solely by the will of the system's owner. If the application checks a hardware parameter, the result it receives may have been altered by the system's owner. If the application checks its binary for validity, that binary could have been altered since the program started. If the application computes a checksum of its own memory state, the system's owner can alter that checksum after it has been computed. If the application tries to compute 2+2, it will only receive 4 if the system's owner allows it.
This is the true definition of the system's owner. The system's owner is whoever must be trusted in order to trust computations on that system. If the application doesn't trust the person who bought the computer, but still wishes to trust computations done on the system, the only solution is to change the system's owner. That is why DRM must either be utterly useless, because I still own my computer and can do as I will on it, or utterly tyrannical, because it asserts ownership over something that I have purchased.
It's only hard if an adversarial relationship is making it hard, which is exactly the case for DRM implementations. If you're writing code that runs in a trusted environment, then it is as simple as enabling decryption conditional on checking the display. That's only appears because trusted environments are nice simple places where code, file checks, system calls, CPU instructions, and all the other niceties work as intended.
It's the same problem I was facing trying to play Netflix Ultra HD on my AMD CPU. Fortunately Netflix now also works without Intel SGX so I can watch my stuff on my PCs now.
On the other hand: It is still not possible to play Amazon Prime Ultra HD on AMD CPUs and probably also on the new Intel 12th gen as of now.
The one thing I hate about these limitations is the amount of detailed knowledge that is required to know what is happening. As an average consumer I would have never thought of such bullshit. I only read about the problem wehn I had already bought my CPU...
If you torrent the content directly, it plays on all hardware and can be used offline or easily shared to friends via USB/AirDrop/etc. You also get a wide choice of players.
Everything good on the streaming sites is quickly available via torrent, and VPNs are like $5. Don't continue paying the media cartels for abuse.
WebTorrent + RarBg is where things are at now. Hopefully we will see more and more descentralized or anonymous search databases with Tor, Freenet, IPFS or similar technology to finally end the "Piracy Wars".
For a while I was running my second monitor over DVI. And putting Amazon prime on it cause the video to go blank.
I know why (I think there's some bs about not running HDCP over DVI even though it's basically HDMI in most Configs)
But it was bizzare to actually see it.
According to [1] Netflix supports "Safari up to 4K on macOS 11.0 or later"
Of course, you also need to be on the 'premium' plan, have a fast-enough internet connection, be watching 4K content, have the T2 security chip, have an HDCP display, and so on.
On Windows, you can, with a giant gotcha. Netflix need you to have all connect screen 4k to play ultra hd on Windows. I don't know if it is different if the screen is buildin.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: DRM only hurts your legitimate customers. Anyone who had any interest in pirating your content will find a way around DRM -- whether that's a technical solution or whether it's just downloading a copy from someone else who has the technical knowhow to bypass DRM.
However it's your legitimate customers, the ones who actually paid for your product, who suffer.
Can someone explain why PowerDVD needs the SGX feature? Intel clearly doesn't see it as being useful, or did they replace it with something better and Cyberlink just doesn't want to upgrade?
I mean it's reasonable that Cyberlink shaw the SGX as a way of implementing DRM, but I don't believe it's the only way they could possibly do so.
Slight clarification. This is primarily a limitation specifically for software
like Cyberlink’s PowerDVD because Cyberlink is one of the very few officially
authorized software vendors for encrypted UHD disc playback.
Intel SGX is not a requirement for playback in the UHD Blu-ray spec. PowerDVD
just happens to make use of Intel SGX for their decryption implementation /
HDCP handshake enforcement. Other software players that don’t make use of Intel
SGX can play UHD discs just fine, so AMD CPU owners need not worry.
Just use MPC-HC or JRiver Media Center, etc. Of course, you may need to use
“alternate” decryption options like AnyDVD or DVDFab, and naturally you also
need a UHD capable disc drive with compatible firmware. like the Asus BC-
12D2HT. Many sellers will flash the stock firmware with UHD-capable firmware
for drives sold as “UHD ready”.
When Blu-ray came out, it came with all sorts of DRM madness (AACS, BD+, etc.) which persists to this day. However playback on PCs still ultimately involved some kind of proprietary player software which contains keys to decrypt the content. Obviously, these keys could be extracted from the player software to decrypt DVDs. In other words, it's the flaw with all DRM schemes.
For UHD/4K Blu-rays, the DRM scheme was renewed (AACSv2). As far as I can tell, studios seemed to decide that the above model was too insecure and to require something more for PC playback of UHD Blu-rays. The requirement seems to basically be that some kind of platform-integrated hardware DRM is involved so that the CPU never sees the decrypted video (or equivalent; presumably SGX is used to lock the decrypted content inside an enclave which is remotely attested and then securely transported to the GPU somehow. GPUs also have had this kind of hardware DRM functionality added to support this use case but I don't have the details to hand as they're not to my knowledge public.)
Cyberlink doesn't control anything in this. Studios, Microsoft, Intel, etc. decided all this. Cyberlink was just providing a service atop all this nonsense.
Similar thing happened with DVDs long time ago, when newer DVD drives could not be used to decode older DVD disks, due to incompatibility with early CSS systems.
Meanwhile, the torrents, with Dolby Vision or HDR10, play just fine everywhere, without any hardware restrictions, any software arbitrary nonsense restrictions, etc. I’ll continue buying those at the torrent tracker shop.
And shit like this is why everything I have is the video and audio ripped from the Blu-ray and stored on my own Plex server.
The original blu-ray video and audio that I can stream anywhere in my home or even over the net should I wish (although for internet streaming I use a smaller encoded version obviously).
Honestly it is like the movie studios want you to pirate their content by making it so difficult to watch what you legally own.
Steve Jobs: "Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace."
Didn't realize that cyberlink was still around. Their market share must be minuscule these days. No laptops ship with optical drives and it would be rare to add one to a desktop build these days too.
It looks like they also have a video editing program that they sell.
I would think that not only is the market for playing discs on a computer small but the market for playing 4k discs on a computer is even smaller.
I'm glad my naive self learnt this more than 20 years ago when it was apparently normal to apply DRM to ripped CDs on windows. I vaguely remembered that it would allow you to copy it up to three times, but I don't remember the details. I think it ripped to a windows audio format.
A few years later I upgraded my machine and lost access to these files. I guess these days I understand more about keys and how they work, but back then I was just someone who had paid rightfully for my music and as a result losing the collection a few years later.
I am curious about the current state of playback of Dolby vision files. I know that the Nvidia shield tv can playback videos and there is the movies and tv windows app that can tone map to SDR if you download the Dolby experience app. But has there been meaningful progress for vlc mpv potplayer or direct playback from pc to tv? It seems like Dolby Vision has won over HDR10+ in the HDR video format war.
There’s good recent progress in that Matroska (mkv) can now contain Dolby Vision metadata. There’s also progress with public tools that can process some of this metadata and convert between Dolby Vision profiles, say from profile 5 (hardcoded bitstream) to profile 8 (enhancement bitstream) so that you can have HDR10 fallback for scenarios where Dolby Vision won’t work.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any PC playback progress yet. However in addition to the Nvidia Shield there are Chinese devices like the Zidoo Z9X [1] which show that the work can be done. The PC space is still waiting for a champion though.
>and there is the movies and tv windows app that can tone map to SDR if you download the Dolby experience app
There is? I searched around and couldn't find it. As for tonemapping on open source players, there's madvr, but it's imperfect compared to the official SDR release.
I might be remembering wrong, it might also need the HEVC windows 10 app. It is a paid app but mine came free with my laptop. I know the main thing is using the Movies and TV app. The DV app is called Dolby Vision Extensions app. https://thewincentral.com/microsofts-new-app-dolby-vision-ex... Indirect link because the windows store link looked horrible when I tired copy pasting. You might be able to get the HEVC app free if you Google, but I haven't tried it myself.
Unless you can link to the specific "HEVC windows 10 app", I'm pretty sure you're referring to "HEVC Video Extensions", which is just a codec pack for decoding HEVC files.
>DV app is called Dolby Vision Extensions app
The linked article says that you need a "Dolby Vision licensed device"? That suggests it might need some sort of calibration for it to work?
I haven’t verified this myself, but I’ve seen a bunch of people on reddit claim success with the following combo:
* Movies and TV player
* HEVC extension
* Dolby Access app
* Dolby Vision extension
Additionally Dolby Vision works on Windows with a few big budget games. Thus the pipeline exists and can be used. It’s just obscured by proprietary secrets.
Over the past many years, the "record" button was disappearing, and now the "play" button is taking a hit!
I'm still holding on to an old Asus USB blu ray drive, although I haven't used it much lately, and I got an old NAD C715 receiver, that has USB recording, so I can record my FM radio shows, or anything really being input (streaming audio), straight to MP3 so I can keep the shows. (yes, I know about podcasts, but not all of them are available).
Of course, the NAD was limited to 117 minutes per mp3, and when I contact them, they said it was due to memory issues, but I think it was due to people wanting to burn it on a CD.
Either way, the analog world is still so much easier to play and record anything for audio at least, and it looks like the video world is moving away from physical media. Is 8K blu ray even going to happen? If not, it's all digital streams from this point on.
SGX seems to have pivoted from DRM use cases (in consumer CPUs) to confidential computing (in server CPUs) [0]. Is that so? Or is the Intel server product line just lagging behind and it will be removed from those too? Will Intel replace it fully with something like AMD SEV?
As a technology, SGX became interesting the moment Intel added the ability for anybody to launch enclaves (and not only the anointed companies that signed NDAs with Intel) and especially when support for it landed in Linux.
Assuming Intel somehow manages to fix its security problem to a decent level, is SGX as a technology worth learning still?
Intel's equivalent of SEV-ES and SEV-SNP is called TDX: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t... . While you could probably put both under the "confidential computing" umbrella, they do really different things well. As far as I know, SGX and TDX will both be around on the same hardware.
Also, just to be explicit about it: I work on Linux at Intel, including on SGX.
The DRM isn't there just for end-user piracy, it's to enforce contractual obligation on middle-men distributors and for those middle-men distributors to be able to enforce exclusivity onto users (e.g. pay rights for a certain region, to dubbing and then prevent people from watching that content in the same region elsewhere to maximise the moneyed return).
It also allows distributors and content houses to repeatably charge for same content as it goes through media conversions (pay once for DVD rights, pay again for BR, pay again for localized BR, pay again for UHD-BR, pay again for iPhone Apple TV version, pay again for version with extras and special edition)... it's a legal hammer that enforces each middle man to stand in the line and to make sure each piece of content extracts as much money as the overextended copyright system allows.
And if anyone DOES pirate the content, it's used to cover the middlemen asses by being able to show the abusive DRM practices and saying "we did all we could, YOU ceritified this DRM as good you see!"
Secure enclaves aren't necessarily a bad idea but SGX always seemed like a bad design.
This follows a long term trend of decoupling between the consumer electronics and the computer industry.
For instance CD-ROM and DVD drives were ubiquitous for personal computers but Blu-Ray never really caught on. For a long time Windows came with DVD players but Blu-Ray was always a third-party option.
Today there is a divergence between video codecs used for consumer electronics (HEVC) and computers (AV1, etc.) Some of it is fighting over royalties, some of it is the industries having different visions.
There was a radio segment last week on boston public radio where Andy Ihnatko explained as stuff floats into the public domain, some of our new media only comes out on digital streaming formats and without piracy copies would probably would never become public domain. This a future problem but potentially a real one.
I have UHD rips from blue-rays that I own made with makemkv. As far as I can tell, doing the rips for personal use is 100% allowed in my jurisdiction. If anything the fact that newer machines can't play them back would strengthen my fair-use case. These are personal-use copies of physical media that I own, which does not fall under most peoples definition of piracy.
It's such a shame paying customers get shafted over and over and over again.
I went through the whole piracy gamut including torrents, usenet, radarr, sonarr, plex, emby, jellyfin - you name it I tried it. The best solution I'm using today and try to keep it hush is Stremio + RealDebrid.
No piracy ISP letter risk, no torrenting, just a direct download from one single server that keeps you private. Like having a Plex with _everything_ on it.
The only reason Hollywood has power is because you buy DVDs and go to movies.
If you stopped, Hollywood would go broke.
Quibbling about Intel or legislation is pointless. Just don't buy their product and you'll bring them to their knees.
"Ultra HD Blu-ray" ... There is so much marketing BS in that phrase. The brain washing goes deep. Pick up a book. Get a hobby. Go outside. Put down the passive entertainment. Send a real message if you don't like all this DRM shit. You don't NEED to park your ass on a couch and be entertained.
Do you know what streaming platform demonstrated since long ago? When you give an easier access to people to consume media legally, people do it that way. This is the complete opposite.
I buy them. Streaming services encode streams using lossy compression for both sound and video, and the difference is noticeable, especially for 4k movies with HDR and TrueHD/Atmos. If you have a decent home theater setup, the discs are worth it.
Streaming services' bitrates top out around 40 Mbps (4k UHD on Apple TV), and most services are actually closer to 20 for 4k, often even lower. 4k UHD Blu-Rays have up to 128 Mbps bitrate. The quality difference is evident, including in the sound. You can see compression artifacts in dark scenes on streaming, and jagged lines in color gradients. The simulataneous dynamic range of sound (some things being loud while other, quieter things are audible on other speakers at the same time) is lower on streaming. And on top of all that, the quality is inconsistent, and the stream will drop into a lower resolution for no apparent reason.
I get the sense that the market is drying up, but I hope it doesn't, because the quality of streaming is legitimately worse. The discs are currently the only way to get uncompressed quality, unless I guess if you find a torrent with a rip. But that would be a 50-100 GB download, for one movie.
Also, when I buy the disc, I own it. It's mine forever, in its definitive edition. No scene cuts/edits for political or monetary reasons are possible, and streaming services cannot yank the movie and prevent me from watching it.
I also buy mine for mostly the reasons you outlined above. Plus because of the kids, I got tired of renting Lion King or 101 Dalmatians etc. for the 11th time. It is actually cheaper to pay ~10-20USD for a BD and be done with it.
It is worth noting though that the content on BD/UDH-BD is not uncompressed. They're still compressed using h.264/h.265/VC1/.. for video and DTS, AC3 and various other codes for audio. It's just that you get a much higher bitrate from the BD compared to streaming. This does make a difference on bigger TV, especially since our internet connection is not as good as it should.
As for the future, when world eventually transitions to H.266 or some other next gen codecs, and at the same time internet speeds keep increasing, this whole debate is largely theoretical. You will be able to stream UHD movie at half or less of of bits that it would take today when compressed using h.265, using internet connections that are n times faster than those we're using today.
Call me old school, I still like owning those BDs. But it's hard to imagine future where they would age very well (compared to quality you are likely to get from streaming services).
I do! Since I got a 1080p projector, DVDs of recent releases are often noticeable fuzzy, while the Blu-Rays look great.
Plus a Blu-Ray off eBay or CeX is usually half the price of 'buying' a film to stream, can be lent to friends and family, and is something that I meaningfully own into the future (not only until the service I bought it from goes bust, locks me out of my account, etc). The fact I can rip them with MakeMKV if necessary is handy too.
I torrent everything and then buy BR's of small movies that I loved. I don't know any other way to support indie-ish film makers. It's not like a band where you can listen to them on Spotify (which is basically like pirating it, given the pay structure for the band there) and then buy a teeshirt or whatever from their website. I honestly don't know if it actually helps anything at all, but I don't have a lot of other ideas about how to let companies know what sorts of things I think they should be making.
Why? I'm fortunate enough to have gigabit symmetrical fiber, so streaming isn't an issue. That said, when viewing content on higher quality TVs and sound systems, there's a very perceptible improvement in both video and audio quality compared to streaming. For example, on my 65" LG C9 OLED with a Klipsch Atmos system, the difference is immediately noticeable.
Even with dedicated streaming hardware like new generation Apple TVs, which offer 4K streaming with Dolby Vision/Atmos, it still doesn't quite compare to physical media. Ditto for the native LG apps with identical options.
Of course, there are downsides. Good luck finding UHD content on physical media. Redbox doesn't offer 4K discs in my area, and local stores rarely have physical media in stock. Even with physical media, there's other annoyances--e.g. the Xbox One X produces a loud hum as the disc spins, not to mention the delay when seeking/skipping around.
That said, for rarified material such as Blue Planet (or anything by Attenborough)--or movies known for their sound quality like Mad Max--physical media can be sublime.
Sometimes I find alternate sources for things I can otherwise stream on services I pay for. The encoding and bitrate can be truly awful on a commercial streaming platform. Worst example I've seen of this recently is _Wheel of Time_ on Amazon. Completely unwatchable streaming.
Except that when you buy something with DRM included, you aren't "owning" anything but the physical disc it comes on. You're still "renting" the content.
A gentle reminder to people that work at companies that produce/implement DRM:
We live at a time with high demand for developers. Wouldn't your talents be of better use at some other company - working on something not ultimately hindering your users?
It's OK to quit your job on moral grounds, and now is the best time ever to do so.
Not to contradict the individual side of your statement, but the high demand for developers in our time is closely related to the financial success of morally questionable practices.
Data harvesting, monopolisation of bottlenecks, the whole advertising ecosystem, DRM and systems of IP/copyright domination, etc. These are the unbelievably profitable industries generating the current demand.
Demand is fungible, so this doesn't mean you can't go find a job working on something else. It does however, put some perspective on it. Developers, via the current labour market, are major beneficiaries of said practices.
I work at a company which main product is a co2 emissions management software. It is in dire need of software developers. It is hosted in Brazil, so probably not competitive in terms of salary, but that goes to say that you can find good jobs that won't hurt you morally. The alternative to making DRM is not necessarily working for Amazon or Google.
I very much don’t mean to single you out, and I also have deep reservations about user data collection/management, dubious labor practices in e-commerce fulfillment, gamification of options trading, etc.
But to the extent that there seems to be any orthodoxy on HN around what is more and less ethical, there’s a lot of emphasis around the “unbelievably profitable” part.
In my personal experience there is a world of difference between “all your data belong to us” and “pay for content by seeing this ad” which are far from joined at the hip, and to the extent that cryptocurrency has any demonstrated utility it’s pulling in yet a third direction and yet all three are often lumped together into the “trivially unethical” bucket, whereas having deep structural advantages before you’ve written much code via the YC old-boys network is not just “how the game is played”, but maybe even “living the dream”.
I know I’ve personally been guilty of letting my righteous ethical indignation at X or Y get a little blurry with “it’s not right that so many programmers make xMM/year”.
I don’t mean to say that you’re guilty of this (and I know you didn’t mention cryptocurrency or being a YC founder), but it is something I’m still trying to figure out a way to diplomatically add to the discussion and your comment felt like a not-insane place to do so.
working on something not ultimately hindering your users
People who make DRM are paid by content producers, not content viewers. They're not hindering their users. They're doing what their users ask them to do. It's just that we aren't their users. If you want to influence DRM developers to stop making DRM, refuse to buy/view/stream DRM-protected media. Then they'll have to find new jobs because their customers will stop paying them.
Just to state the obvious: I've done this for all of my adult life. It's difficult, but possible. I buy my games on gog.com, mp3s (or flaacs) from hyperion-records.co.uk and I read either pdf or dead-tree media. I listen to the radio a lot and support my state-sponsored broadcasters in the two countries I split my time between, both of which are paid for by a license fee and produce material without DRM at all. I have a raspberry-pi based content box in my bedroom that will record legally free over-the-air digital TV (at 720p) and let me watch it later. I periodically write letters of complaint to broadcasters that provide online offerings only with Widevine.
I haven't bought a Sony product since their rootkit fiasco in about 2004. I remove the Widevine library from Chrome when I'm forced to use it, unclick the box that says "Play DRM" in Firefox, and don't really use Safari. At work, I challenge suppliers who use activation to provide us software without it, and I run entirely Linux-boxes.
Yes, I am one of those zealots. Yes, it makes life harder at times. Would I change it? No.
DRM screws over content producers just as much as users, if not more so. It creates a 'tragedy of the commons' situation throughout the content industries that ultimately hinders creators. Content creation benefits from openness as much as anything else, and DRM platforms are the opposite extreme to openness.
DRM is paid for the content distributors not content producers. The rent collectors who profit from the labour of others by manipulating the market to create an artificial scarcity of supply in the marketplace. It's a grift and those who develop the DRM software are in on the scam.
The same can be said about any technology any of us have hesitation working on: advertising, addiction-style IAP gaming, advertising masquerading as a blue social site for human connection, publishing censorship ("content moderation"), military weapons and adjacent AI targeting, etc...
If you don't think doing your job every day is making the world better, please remember that what the parent comment says is true: it's never been a better time to make the switch!
Your work matters, and we can all work to make the world better, or worse, a little bit every day.
In the first line I was constantly thinking: "So close, yet so far" since I expected you to come to "see it's not as bad". Not sure whether my expectation of the HN crowd is too low...
> If you don't think doing your job every day is making the world better
Actually, content moderation does make the world better. No one except Nazis will say that the presence of Holocaust denial on the Internet is a good thing. No one except pedophiles wants to see naked genitalia of children.
For what it's worth, even this forum is moderated (pretty strongly, one might add) to keep discussions somewhat relevant and from devolving into endless threads of flame-warring.
It depends on the form of content moderation. There is a risk in automated moderating being too stifling. There is also a risk of moderation pushing people on the fence into a victim role. Similarly, content moderation past the excesses becomes close to editatorialzing. That is a difficult and very subjective job not generally suited for tech companies.
> That is a difficult and very subjective job not generally suited for tech companies.
It is, but given the scale these tech companies can reach we have seen way too much evidence that moderation is required for a stable society. People have been literally lynched because of viral fake postings [1] on messengers, not to mention the entire clusterfuck that is the coronavirus pandemic and the influence of propaganda peddlers and profiteers.
Pop the stack. Social media doesn't cause lynchings, society does. Social media amplifies society's existing social habits.
Censorship is not how you fix a society's bad habits. Correspondingly, censoring social media is not how you fix society's amplified bad habits.
You can actually make a cohesive argument that algorithmic, "if it bleeds, it
leads" timelines are in fact censorship (as they push down more recent, but less titillating/outrageous content), and that this algorithmic censorship of less outrageous but more recent/potentially balancing content is the basis for increased social fervor.
Ultimately, the solution to speech you don't like is more speech. When that additional speech is deprioritized to the point where no one sees it in practice, or is hard censored outright, the societal balancing functions can't work.
Social media causes lynchings and worse when it algorithmically amplifies the most outrageous, divisive and controversial content in a bid to maximize "engagement". "Moderation" and "healthy community" policies are the band-aid. There's no such thing as "neutral" social media when these algorithms are used, it's an oxymoron.
> Social media amplifies society's existing social habits.
No. Social media, particularly ones where algorithms determine which content is shown to users, amplifies the content that is most likely to see more eyeballs or maximize other arbitrary metrics of engagement. And that means content that drives outrage of any form.
> Censorship is not how you fix a society's bad habits.
If I go on the city plaza and deny the Holocaust, I will probably get Spencer'd in the face and then dragged away by police for causing mischief (or in Europe, for Holocaust denial which is a crime here). Will you call that censorship, too? I guess not.
But on most social media, I can deny the Holocaust, call for the murder of politicians or virologists all day long without moderation or any consequences - and any calls on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram or whatever to put a stop to this hate get decried as "censorship".
> Ultimately, the solution to speech you don't like is more speech.
It should not be the job of unpaid individual citizens to do the job of the government which we pay taxes for. We citizens pay taxes so that police keeps the physical city plaza clean of crime and nutjobs, why should a digital city plaza like Facebook be exempt of the rules?
This divergence between the realities of the digital and the analog worlds is what is the problem.
> No one except Nazis will say that the presence of Holocaust denial on the Internet is a good thing.
I am not a Nazi and I think it is bad when people deny facts (like the holocaust happening, and being a bad thing).
I think it is a good thing that people are able to reliably publish falsehoods freely on the internet, if they so choose. There is at least one other YC company that I know embodies similar philosophical beliefs.
Your claim is false.
You don't need to be a Nazi to support the ability for people to practically exercise their rights to free and unrestricted publishing. It is a good thing to have that in a society, even if some people use it to say false things.
That said, as you accurately noted, this forum is moderated and I don't wish to participate further in what is now an offtopic discussion, so I will not reply further in this thread. Feel free to email
me if you'd like to discuss further.
It’s tiresome to see the DRM argument portrayed over and over again as a moral slam dunk.
Anything consequential enough to make an impact is a trade off, with winners and losers. If all the employees listened and there was a universal collapse of DRM, I really highly doubt people who make content would be better off. Maybe some of these devs feel good about helping make sure people who make movies get paid. Maybe they feel like they are part of the moviemaking process (which they are!).
It’s not as though it’s difficult for people who want to make their content free to do so. Why should someone who wishes to make content under a DRM model not be free to do so? It’s entertainment, you are not forced to consume it.
Oh please, get off your preachy high horse, and stop trying to guild trip devs into thinking that developing DRM solutions is like developing WMD or something. This is not some NSO-level spyware that can be used to spy and target people.
Plus, some devs enjoy this kind work and some companies working on DRM are in areas that are not as hot as the Bay Area (small cities in Europe) so they might not have that many lucrative options you assume.
Sure, no consumer enjoys DRM, like how no driver likes police officers issuing speeding fines, but demonizing devs working on such solutions is something I did not expect from the supposedly enlightened HN reader base.
How about you target your disapproval at the Bay Area devs whos' generous compensation packages plastered around here depend on them building nefarious ways of siphoning and data-mining peoples' private data to get them addicted to consuming content and click on ads.
Hey, not trying to make you or anyone else feel guilty. In fact I specifically chose my words to not do so. I just think developer talent is wasted on stuff that is ultimately useless at best, and making life harder for legal users at worst.
Your argument is predicated on the assumption that all DRM is bad, which is just simply not reality.
Many companies implement DRM in ways that are poor, excessive, overreaching, needlessly restrictive, etc. .. and yes, while poor implementations are frequent, it does not mean that DRM itself is worthless or an enemy of society.
In fact, good implementations of DRM are exactly what is needed in order to prevent hackers from stealing your most valuable digital assets.
The issue is that in conversation DRM is used as a perjorative, whereas terms like data loss prevention are somehow seen as non-malicious, even though it is the same core idea.
We use Microsoft Information Protection solutions for all of our important documents which includes things like sensitivity labels which ensure only the users that have been appropriate clearance can view them.
People can e-mail the documents or do whatever they want with them, and Microsoft's DRM ensures that only the users that have access are able to view them.
The whole thing is totally seamless and requires no extra effort on the part of the users.
Our corporate documents can't be stolen without comprimising both someone's account and two-factor authentication.
I don’t know, probably an unpopular opinion, but I feel like working on a technology that wastes peoples time through un-skippable ads is akin to a small murder. You’re taking tiny chunks of many peoples lives. On a popular film, it almost certainly adds up to more than a lifetime.
Unskippable ads are just one of the things that ultimately have dropped my enthusiasm for movies to zero. I've never once bought a Blu-Ray of any sort. It's not that a boycott of one is going to make a bit of difference, it's that I'd rather spend my time and money on things that aren't hostile to me.
> Oh please, get off your preachy high horse, and stop trying to guild trip devs into thinking that developing DRM solutions is like developing WMD or something.
The OP didn't make any such comparison; yet you make such a comparison, a few sentences later:
> Sure, no consumer enjoys DRM, like how no driver likes police officers issuing speeding fines
DRM props-up uncompetitive business models, to the detriment of customers and society at-large. It is in no way comparable to speed limits, which have literally saved millions of lives over the years (random Google link: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/reducing-s... ).
https://www.makemkv.com/buy/
Some drives need to have their firmware flashed in order to enable ripping of UHD discs:
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19113
I'm not affiliated with the product other than having used it to rip my entire disc library. It can also rip DVDs and regular blu-rays.
Once ripped, they can be played back with VLC, mpv, or derivatives. (On Macs, IINA is very good.)