[HN Gopher] Why can't I play Ultra HD Blu-ray movies on my new I...
___________________________________________________________________
Why can't I play Ultra HD Blu-ray movies on my new Intel CPU
platform?
Author : freemint
Score : 568 points
Date : 2022-01-14 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cyberlink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cyberlink.com)
| Havoc wrote:
| DRM - broken by design
| skinkestek wrote:
| Defective by Design sounds even better.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
| jankal wrote:
| 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...
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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".
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Everything good on the streaming sites is quickly available
| via torrent
|
| This isn't as true as it used to be. The torrent scene seems
| a fraction of what it used to be.
|
| Presumably it's still fine in private sites but I wouldn't
| know.
| gruez wrote:
| I don't have any trouble finding 4K remixes of movies, even
| ones from a decade ago. This is on public trackers.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| You can play Netflix in HD on a computer? I'm watching animated
| gif video quality on safari, and how do I change it?
| mmis1000 wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764
| https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
| trissylegs wrote:
| 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.
| bubblethink wrote:
| 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.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Bought one with M-Disc for backup last year or the year before.
|
| Feels nice to be able to watch old movies that I bought back in
| the day that aren't available on streaming - at least around
| here :-/
| jccalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| You know who can stop this?
|
| You.
|
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Ah, 2004 with libdvdcss again.
|
| Thanks, companies. Thanks, companies. You are the perfect P2P
| marketing advisors.
| dtx1 wrote:
| Anyone interested in an invite to torrentleech.org? No DRM
| there...
| [deleted]
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Very much so! Thanks:)
| noyesno wrote:
| _o/
| dtx1 wrote:
| please give me a way to contact you
| ohcomments wrote:
| That's against TL rules... However... French trackers interest
| me so if any invite available for those... Lemme know!
| dtx1 wrote:
| Yeah, but who cares? Not like torrentleech is very picky when
| it comes to their users, sign ups are open so often it barely
| matters.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Sure, email in profile!
| drumhead wrote:
| lol, yeah why not..
| dtx1 wrote:
| please give me a way to contact you
| [deleted]
| DanAtC wrote:
| Sure! Email in profile
| dtx1 wrote:
| out of invites
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's almost as if piracy is to only way to not constantly be
| messed with.
| perakojotgenije wrote:
| A gentle XKCD reminder that you can only be sure that you'll be
| able to play your media in the future if you pirate it.
|
| https://xkcd.com/488/
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Or you could buy physical media.
| jaywalk wrote:
| This article is literally about being unable to play your
| physical media because your computer is too new.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| acomjean wrote:
| 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.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://i.ibb.co/Mn6VSvq/image.png
|
| 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.
| carlycue wrote:
| Tim Cook: "This is how I win"
| dschuetz wrote:
| Whoever still buys Blu-rays anyway? Isn't it a dead market
| already?
| no_time wrote:
| I sure hope not. BDrips, especially if done properly by a good
| scenegroup have an unparalleled bitrate.
|
| Unless streaming sites up their game, we'll see a drop in movie
| image quality everywhere except cinemas.
| arbitrage wrote:
| 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.
| onychomys wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I do because I prefer owning to renting.
| blooalien wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| See my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937249
|
| Note that in the US at least, owning a physical item can be
| legally important due to things like the first sale
| doctrine.
| gmac wrote:
| 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.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| 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.
| rixrax wrote:
| 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).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Money
| knaik94 wrote:
| 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.
| Strom wrote:
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| [1]
| https://www.zidoo.tv/Product/index/model/Z9X/target/VEMg6VRC...
| gruez wrote:
| >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.
| knaik94 wrote:
| 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.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think such appeals are futule, they are not gonna run out of
| employees.
|
| We created a system where employees have zero say in what a
| company does, so the rest of society has not deal with this
| issue.
| netcan wrote:
| 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.
|
| Again, this does not contradict your comment.
| asimpletune wrote:
| > the high demand for developers in our time is closely
| related to the financial success of morally questionable
| practices.
|
| I think it's more because the computer does most of the work,
| and that just has really good economy of scale.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| 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.
| benreesman wrote:
| 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.
| netcan wrote:
| I agree. What is/isn't ethical isn't a trivial question,
| and the shades are even less trivial.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| 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.
| onion2k wrote:
| _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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| netcan wrote:
| He said "users," not clients or customers. You can say that
| users aren't DRM a coders' concern, but you can't say they
| aren't their users.
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Thanks for the guide!
| bregma wrote:
| 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.
| beebmam wrote:
| It's the same for anyone who sells software, or access to
| ANY data whatsoever.
| yokto wrote:
| Why are you advocating for boycott on the product market, but
| not on the labour market?
| alliao wrote:
| if for some reason you had to be where you are, you could
| otherwise aimed at their feet...
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| 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.
| iqanq wrote:
| DRM is very hard to get right, it's some sort of challenge.
| It's no wonder it attracts very bright minds and they
| probably are happy working on it.
| ratg13 wrote:
| 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.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Could you tell us digital assets have been successfully
| protected by DRM?
| beebmam wrote:
| Bitlocker. Or most other software that interfaces with a
| TPM to protect your secrets
| ratg13 wrote:
| 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.
|
| It's a great example of DRM done well.
| savolai wrote:
| What does it do to prevent taking a photo of a screen?
| ratg13 wrote:
| Fair point, I should not have said can't.
|
| No DRM is a perfect solution, my only point is that DRM
| itself isn't inherently evil.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| > How about you target your disapproval at the Bay Area devs
| whos'
|
| Whataboutism...
| DocTomoe wrote:
| > This is not some NSO-level spyware that can be used to spy
| and target people.
|
| It isn't, until it is:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/adobe-spyware-
| reveals-...
| donatj wrote:
| 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.
|
| It's the cigarettes of modern technology.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| 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.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > 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... ).
| fnord123 wrote:
| > no driver likes police officers issuing speeding fines
|
| When will the US join the 2000s and get cameras so police can
| do actual work?
| MMS21 wrote:
| Top Gear on Speed Cameras
|
| https://youtu.be/ZwEGlzGms4o
| tehbeard wrote:
| > This is not some NSO-level spyware that can be used to spy
| and target people.
|
| Not exactly NSO level, but this certainly caused issues at
| the time.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_pr
| otection_roo...
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Pointing out an infamous example of invasive DRM(trojan)
| that has nothing to do with the DRM in this topic is just
| whataboutism.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| What do you mean by "has nothing to do with the DRM"?
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| 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...
|
| Thanks for proofing me wrong :)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > publishing censorship ("content moderation")
|
| > 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44897714
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Social media doesn't cause lynchings
|
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| > _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.
| sundvor wrote:
| "Dear latest gen Intel users, please upgrade from Cyberlink to
| BitTorrent".
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| 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.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I forgot how bad the physical media world is. I gave up ages ago
| and found alternative ways to view media and it just works.
| mavhc wrote:
| At least all this investment in DRM was worth it and it stopped
| movies and tv shows and games and music and books being available
| on pirate websites
| ohcomments wrote:
| I see what you did there! Haha
| Nextgrid wrote:
| As usual, legitimate customers get shafted while piracy thrives.
| theplumber wrote:
| I believe it's a good thing considering that "ligitimate
| customers" means customes supporting DRM.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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_ ".
| theplumber wrote:
| As can be seen in this case ignorace does not help much.
| It's a lesseon that all of us have to learn from time to
| time.
| deepstack wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| henryackerman wrote:
| "Piracy will continue as scheduled."
| gedy wrote:
| I think they don't want people buying movies at all anymore,
| just to subscribe forever
| ttyprintk wrote:
| To prove you wrong, one would have to take the position that
| those industries are making more and better content.
| sersi wrote:
| 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.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| There are two benefits in DRM:
|
| 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.
| activitypea wrote:
| 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.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > 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.
| pradn wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo
| michaelt wrote:
| _> everyone knows that this will not stop piracy_
|
| 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...."
| scotty79 wrote:
| The benefit is that pirates won't buy the content either way,
| but legit uses locked out of the content they bought might
| buy it the second time.
| iSnow wrote:
| 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.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| 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.
| SXX wrote:
| As was said by other smart person who is not me:
|
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| As streaming becomes more common, the number of seeders seems
| to be steadily dropping.
| bserge wrote:
| And as streaming becomes more fragmented, it steadily goes up
| :D
| satysin wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| If you keep paying them for the discs they will keep paying the
| engineers to implement this stuff.
| post_break wrote:
| If you don't pay for discs eventually those will go away and
| suddenly everything must be low quality streaming.
| ohcomments wrote:
| Because AMD is life! (Joke)
| dm319 wrote:
| 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.
| crtasm wrote:
| What happened to the original CDs?
| miohtama wrote:
| Is there any background information anywhere why SGX is being
| phased out?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| MakeMKV (US$60 for Windows, Mac, or Linux) can rip UHD Blu-Ray
| discs with the appropriate drive, removing the encryption in the
| process:
|
| 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.)
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| newsclues wrote:
| The video equivalent of exact audio copy?
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| AnyDVD & CloneDVD?
| stavros wrote:
| No, although those were good too. I think it may have been
| called DVD decrypt?
|
| EDIT: DVD Decrypter!
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter
| secondcoming wrote:
| I used DVD Shrink!
| stavros wrote:
| Man, everything back then looked so fast, light, and
| consistent...
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Nowadays, it would be a 100MB Electron application that
| needs 300MB ram and an 4 core cpu to display a single
| window. Progress!
| ycombinete wrote:
| One of the reasons I love using Bvckup for my backups. It
| has this same style of interface.
| anthk wrote:
| Heh, I used dvdextract on Linux or something like that with
| mencoder.
| donatj wrote:
| 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.
| xwolfi wrote:
| 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.
| brian_herman wrote:
| 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.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| 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).
| knaik94 wrote:
| 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.
| flotzam wrote:
| > 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.'
|
| - from What is LibreDrive? at
| https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=18856
| bitwize wrote:
| This probably counts as "circumventing a technological
| measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted
| work" under the DMCA and is thus illegal.
| flotzam wrote:
| There are plenty of use cases qualifying for an exception.
| The list is getting longer with every ruling, here's a link
| to the whole unwieldy mess: https://public-
| inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-23311.pdf... (SS
| 201.40)
| tablespoon wrote:
| tl;dr: literally the first exception allows circumvention
| of DVD and Blu-ray encryption for various fair use
| purposes.
| Guvante wrote:
| 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.
| datagram wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.copyright.gov/1201/
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| some things are worth it.
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| Trafficking in circumvention devices is a crime,
| regardless of what you intend to do with them.
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| fisf wrote:
| In many countries around the globe this is absolutely not
| a crime, copying content that you own is perfectly legal
| and not even a grey area.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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/)
| flotzam wrote:
| 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
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| flotzam wrote:
| 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.
| antihero wrote:
| How easy would it be to use libredrive, dd and ffmpeg to rip?
| flotzam wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&p=96988
| https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=24312
| edude03 wrote:
| 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
| snnn wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| 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.
| knaik94 wrote:
| 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.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| dang now that's a selling point!
| henryackerman wrote:
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| What happens if you rip out side the USA and bring those rips
| to the USA. Did you circumvent under DMCA?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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 a la iTunes CD rips is tortuous in the
| UK, AFAICS, making iTunes unlawful as it's produced in
| order to enable infringing behaviour.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Isn't there a DMCA exemption for instances where you need to
| break DRM for compatibility with your hardware?
| technothrasher wrote:
| This is what I thought as well. But looking at the latest
| ruling by the Copyright Office, I don't see one. Maybe I'm
| missing it?
|
| https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-10-28/pdf/2021-
| 2...
| renzo88 wrote:
| This is illegal in the US, which means it's rad as hell.
| gsich wrote:
| Who cares. If it's your stuff, do whatever you want with it.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
| bubblethink wrote:
| 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Can anyone cite law and/or caselaw on that?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| They're wrong, the relevant part of the DMCA is
| http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap12.html#1201 and
| the most recent list of exemptions is https://public-
| inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-23311.pdf
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Thanks.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| You are, the DMCA tasked the Library of Congress with
| approving exceptions to the anti-circumvention provision.
| Here's the list of when it's acceptable. https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.
| Joeri wrote:
| 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.
| abecedarius wrote:
| https://cyber.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/dvd-discuss-
| faq.html#s...
|
| Are you saying this is incorrect?
| pmontra wrote:
| Everything that is not explicitly forbidden is allowed,
| right? At worst some of it is murky waters.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Everything not forbidden is mandatory
| foxfluff wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| But to copy one must circumvent DRM, itself an illegal
| act (in the US).
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| I'll second the recommendation for MakeMKV.
|
| 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.
| smoyer wrote:
| 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?
| _zooted wrote:
| ThePirateBay is free and easier.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| 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.
| Mashimo wrote:
| You can download UHD disks if you want. I only have a 7
| year old 1080p projector @ 100", so for me a 10 - 20 GB rip
| is fine.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I also only have a 1080p projector, no TV... 2 GB rips
| (not 20 GB) at 1080p are totally fine (and way, way, way
| better than any streaming service).
| Bud wrote:
| 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.
| black3r wrote:
| 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.
| tjpnz wrote:
| With modern codecs you're unlikely to notice much
| difference between a 20GB download and a rip you did
| yourself.
| chungy wrote:
| The words of somebody that's never witnessed the quality
| of a UHD disc :)
| brnt wrote:
| Ignorance is bliss, and I prefer bliss ;)
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| 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.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| It's wild to me that in 2022 people still aren't used to
| consuming HD media.
| majewsky wrote:
| 720p does in fact count as HD. Either that or you don't
| remember SD content. :)
| [deleted]
| dotancohen wrote:
| 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.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| Get a blu ray (not even UHD) of Matrix (the 1999 one,
| there were never any sequels) and compare the lobby
| explosion scene with any torrent or stream.
|
| Mind, it's not worth it for most movies. However, those
| flames are a good example of why bandwidth can matter.
| oauea wrote:
| 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.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Yeah, at that point you're basically just downloading a
| bluray rip.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Yep, just search for "FraMeSToR" releases.
| dx034 wrote:
| But even a 20GB file? Streams are much more compressed,
| but I found files >20GB or so to be pretty much the same
| quality.
|
| Which doesn't really matter though, you can also find
| 40GB files of most movies, they should (if encoded well)
| definitely match the quality.
| cbg0 wrote:
| It varies quite a bit, I see a lot of banding in various
| scenes on my TV with 20GB WEB-DLs compared to an actual
| 4K BR rip.
| rosndo wrote:
| In most cases that is to be expected because WEB-DLs tend
| to be poorly encoded. You should be looking for a remux.
| chungy wrote:
| 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.
| johnklos wrote:
| 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?
| knaik94 wrote:
| I do appreciate the Dolby digital 5.1 that have become more
| common as a standard release and don't require a remux
| download.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| 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.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| 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.
| asiachick wrote:
| streaming services build a profile of me based on what I
| watch and share with with other companies. No thanks
| chuckSu wrote:
| vanviegen wrote:
| > and share with with other companies
|
| Is there any evidence to suggest that the likes of Netflix
| and Disney+ are doing this?
| [deleted]
| dotancohen wrote:
| I would check their privacy policies if this is allowed,
| regardless if it is happening.
|
| Of course, if the privacy policies do not include a data
| sharing provision, then evidence of the sharing would be
| interesting.
| mysterydip wrote:
| 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.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| 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.
| malf wrote:
| "User X watched Y minutes of movie Z at time W at
| location V using device T"
|
| You might not care about Z, but the rest of those
| variables could be sensitive.
| zerorally wrote:
| Ty
| knaik94 wrote:
| Torrenting a reencode seems reasonable but for some releases
| I liked buying the blu ray because my internet speed isn't
| great.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://put.io
| creamytaco wrote:
| 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.
| rosndo wrote:
| Except, realistically, nobody actually gets sued for
| torrenting.
| Operyl wrote:
| Only takes a few to make an example.
| ghusbands wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTo
| rrent
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-39961502
|
| [3] https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
|
| Oh, and the company is local to me.
| rictic wrote:
| how do you pay them?
| bayindirh wrote:
| They use an external card processor which stores your
| details. They only store my card details there. No
| address, no name, nothing.
|
| They don't access to your card details. Just an API
| integration, that's all.
| ghusbands wrote:
| 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.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > 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.
| coryfklein wrote:
| > 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.
| smaryjerry wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 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.
| coryfklein wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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).
| sgc wrote:
| By far the easiest way to change incentives is with
| legislation and a 'right to access'. Of course easiest !=
| easy.
| pipodeclown wrote:
| There is such a concept, rights owners just choose not to
| offer that option, which they're not obliged to.
|
| This works for them as most people do not how the technical
| know-how to break through the DRM and most people are
| therefore discouraged by it.
| coryfklein wrote:
| 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.
| knaik94 wrote:
| 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.
| coryfklein wrote:
| 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!
| unethical_ban wrote:
| What drive is recommended? I have considered acquiring some
| UHD movies on physical media and would want to rip them for
| backup.
| jjgreen wrote:
| ... or go to the cinema
| Lev1a wrote:
| > go to the cinema
|
| - to watch things I don't wanna watch,
|
| - 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:
|
| - ~5-15EUR 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
|
| - 15-20EUR 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).
|
| So WHY would I EVER choose to go to the cinema?
| nightski wrote:
| 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.
| Lev1a wrote:
| 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.
| nightski wrote:
| 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.
| majewsky wrote:
| I presume you're in Germany? Where do they make you pay
| 15-20EUR per ticket? I just bought a cinema ticket today.
| The sticker price was 10EUR, and I got it for 6.60EUR
| with a loyalty card (Cineplex High Five, completely
| tracking-free since I bought it with cash).
| Lev1a wrote:
| Mind you, this was almost 10 years ago but I could swear
| it was something like 16 or 17EUR per ticket. I just
| looked it up though and _apparently_ it 's 7-8EUR/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.
| genghizkhan wrote:
| To rewatch Lord of the Rings? I think not.
| moffkalast wrote:
| The age of cinema is over. The time of the torrents has
| come.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| 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.
| sodality2 wrote:
| The alternative is servers that get hammered during
| downloads, as opposed to swarms where the download health
| improves when more people use it.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| 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
| Bud wrote:
| Not true; you can disable uploading in various torrent
| clients.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| 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.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| There are private trackers.
| oAlbe wrote:
| What's a private tracker?
| ebb_earl_co wrote:
| 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
| mrec wrote:
| Why not?
|
| https://princecharlescinema.com/PrinceCharlesCinema.dll/W
| hat...
| Milner08 wrote:
| 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.
| nandicre wrote:
| 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 20EUR/month
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| 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.
| jjgreen wrote:
| I go to the cinema on a lazy Sunday afternoon, possibly
| that makes an oddity; whatever, horses for courses I
| guess ...
| benjamir wrote:
| To get tinnitus?
|
| The last time we tried (again), the sound was overdriven
| (again) to the point we had all go to the toilet and muffle
| our ears with toilet paper.
|
| Except for small, independent cinemas it has been the same
| crappy experience for me: expensive, bad sound quality
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| As someone who suffers from sensitivity to sound, I
| always carry around foam plugs. I need them for about
| every second cinema visit.
| deelowe wrote:
| 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...
| mherdeg wrote:
| 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.
| halo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| 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.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| 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.
| whizzter wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Don't feel bad, we don't show fluff news in our house and
| clearly the kids are better for it since they aren't fed a
| background of fear daily.
|
| It does however take some effort to say, 'okay let us learn
| about this topic now' and then put in a documentary note
| and then.
| nightski wrote:
| 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.
| Aloha wrote:
| I buy blue ray discs, when they're in the discount bin at
| the drug store. 5.99 for a movie I own and can watch when
| the bet is down isn't a bad deal.
| rixrax wrote:
| 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.
| digisign wrote:
| I wanted that very much when the kid was younger. However
| it took them ten years to add profiles so wouldn't hold
| your breath.
| ericd wrote:
| 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.
| clintonb wrote:
| 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.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| In 2003 I had a 40GB hard drive and dialup. The 4GB of a DVD
| was nothing to sneeze at.
|
| In 2010 I had several 1TB HDDs, fast broadband, and a 32GB USB
| stick. Getting a blue ray drive for my PC wasn't worth the
| hassle.
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| They were also stupidly priced in 2010 still. The cheapest
| drives that could do blu-ray were still $100+ and a CD/DVD
| was maybe $30.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| CraneWorm wrote:
| DRM and the unskippable ads that make you aware that you
| payed to've become a product.
|
| The pirates offer superior product, every time.
| ballenf wrote:
| 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.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| No?
|
| 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."
| atrus wrote:
| 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.
| dTal wrote:
| 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.
| relaxing wrote:
| Audiophiles would, and they still do, and the discs and
| players are still being produced.
| dpark wrote:
| I thought audiophiles were all buying vinyl and pretending
| they can "hear" the digitization of non-analog formats.
| petee wrote:
| 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
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| 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...
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Anti ads must be the new ads. At least its better than my
| TV screaming at me about competing car insurance ads for
| minutes at a time.
| nihilist_t21 wrote:
| > I'm excluding "live" TV because I can't imagine why anyone
| would subject themselves to that cesspool.
|
| Live sports.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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.
| nihilist_t21 wrote:
| I just watch the NFL, but I get the majority of games each
| season for free over-the-air in HD with a $20 antenna.
| op00to wrote:
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.mlb.com/live-stream-games/subscribe/offseason
| FalconSensei wrote:
| as always, if you want to watch something it's easier when you
| torrent it than when you pay for it
| zimmerfrei wrote:
| 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?
|
| [0]
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security/confidentia...
| hansendc wrote:
| I sure hope it stays around in servers for a long time. Some of
| us at Intel are actively working on expanding the existing
| kernel support:
| https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1638381245.git.reinette.c...
|
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Remember how Stallman et al complained loudly about "Trusted
| Computing" technology like SGX, and everyone ignored them and
| accepted it anyway?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. Stallman is absolutely right about everything concerning
| computer freedom. He saw pretty far into the future.
| m_eiman wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-14-steve-jobs-calls-blu-ray...
| activitypea wrote:
| I don't understand why the film industry bothers with DRM. Their
| product is fundementally easy to pirate, and always will be.
| sneak wrote:
| It's not about piracy, it's so they can segment the market and
| charge different amounts in rich and poor countries based on
| region-locked media.
|
| Otherwise first sale doctrine would allow people to sell
| mountains of imported cheap discs from poor countries in the
| USA legally.
|
| It's to protect the margins in places where $5 isn't much
| money. Vastly more units are sold in places where $5 is a lot.
| izacus wrote:
| 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!"
| jmrm wrote:
| 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.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > 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.
| saxonww wrote:
| Honestly no, the official solution is to buy a dedicated UHD
| Blu-ray player. I think that's what they really want.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Make general purpose computing illegal, and only pirates will
| have general purpose computers...
| saxonww wrote:
| 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.
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| As long as people reward these ridiculous solutions by paying
| for them, the corporations will continue deploying them.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| Cort3z wrote:
| Isn't this move by Intel almost a counter attack on this drm
| situation. Essentially bricking all drm software.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Well, Gabe Newell at least already realized it:
|
| "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."
| pea wrote:
| The most insane strategy (which got everyone I know pirating
| content) is:
|
| 1. Create incredibly addictive tv shows
|
| 2. Release episodes once a week, with a huge cliffhanger
|
| 3. Release in Europe/UK one week behind the US
|
| A growth hacker couldn't create a better incentive for piracy
| if they tried. Anyone know why this is a thing?
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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).
| sebazzz wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| You should also consider not updating the OS
|
| just wow...
| Ratiofarmings wrote:
| It's like they're asking us to pirate everything.
| hlandau wrote:
| Good.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.devever.net/~hl/intelme
| hulitu wrote:
| IMHO blaming the film industry is a bit much. Intel has the ME
| since some time and coupled with secure boot is a MPAA or RIAA
| manager's wet dream.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| "Film industry" stands here for "Hollywood" ?
|
| And isn't the IME only a few decades old ?
|
| (Of course Microsoft with its "trusted computing" and the NSA
| with its job to backdoor everything that can be likely had a
| hand in that too...)
| DrBazza wrote:
| Don't forget about this abomination:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
|
| "Why has my playback gone silent?"
| [deleted]
| bserge wrote:
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It doesn't make sense though, unless Intel is replacing its SGX
| feature by a similar one (that new Microsoft chip ??).
|
| Also I don't think that this has an effect on Intel's
| Management Engine ?
|
| BTW, older AMD CPUs (of the Bulldozer line) are still
| performant enough, and don't come with a likely backdoor in the
| form of IME / AMD PSP.
|
| P.S.: It does really suck the effect that this has on GPU's
| openness... (and so performance for very specific use cases)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| That quote is amazing. An AMD engineer publicly stating that
| our machines are owned.
| tjoff wrote:
| Strongly disagree with the quote.
|
| 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.
| azalemeth wrote:
| If you're interested, the original forum post (2018) is here:
| https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-
| me...
|
| I totally agree with you, for what it is worth.
| MereInterest wrote:
| 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.
| ballenf wrote:
| Being willing and able to lie for the owner is the ultimate
| test of ownership.
| tjoff wrote:
| Of course it would be possible for the application to
| verify that and disable decryption.
| MereInterest wrote:
| 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.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Film Industry => in about half the time, Sony Entertainment, by
| far the most aggressive company when it comes to copyrights.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| 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.
| lou1306 wrote:
| 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.
| ticklemyelmo wrote:
| Here's a friendly reminder that _Sony put a rootkit on their
| audio CDs_ to enforce copyright. They brought the term
| "rootkit" into public awareness.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >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 cliched 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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 ~60EUR 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.
| Asooka wrote:
| 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...
| mbreese wrote:
| _> > In the end, people want high quality entertainment
|
| > I know this sounds cliched 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Are you talking about Sony or Apple?
| alliao wrote:
| increased vertical integration should be taken into account
| together with market share
|
| because ultimately it destroys competition by holding
| vantage points to suffocate competition
|
| in this instance, producers of distribution should not be
| content holders let creative be creative, let supply chains
| be supply chains etc etc
|
| i guess one can always add a clause, exemption applies
| below a certain size etc.
| unfocused wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| bubblethink wrote:
| Cyberlink doesn't control anything in this. Studios, Microsoft,
| Intel, etc. decided all this. Cyberlink was just providing a
| service atop all this nonsense.
| hlandau wrote:
| 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.)
| zuminator wrote:
| beemeup5 at ghacks.net wrote [0]: 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".
|
| [0]https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/14/intels-dropping-of-sgx-
| pre....
| heisenbit wrote:
| > Cyberlink's PowerDVD because Cyberlink is one of the very
| few officially authorized software vendors for encrypted UHD
| disc playback
|
| The only way to win in this game is not to play it.
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