If Big Media is so dogged on not letting me watch something then fine, I’ll exercise my freedom of association and boycott it if they want it so much.
yar har har, bottle of rum for me thx
Therein lies the issue I have with modern streaming. When Netflix was the only game in town, things were mostly fine. Then I saw content I was actively watching disappear from the service, and research showed that this was due to licensing issues.
I saw the writing on the wall. Copyright holders were gearing up to make their own Netflix competitor streaming service. Which is exactly what they did.
When it all started, I dusted off my tri-point hat and got to work building “my own Netflix” and honestly, it’s been amazing. A royal pain in my arse sometimes, but mostly amazing.
I have had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with some of the more recent streaming services, shortly before everyone started cracking down on “asking sharing” bullshit. I live in the same house as one subscriber, but I run my own network, and have my own Internet IP address, so I’m not in their “home” and can no longer use the service because of account sharing restrictions and related bullshit. Anyways…
One thing that always grabbed me is that my own service puts all my recently watched shows that have new episodes front and center as soon as I open it up… New streaming services either have that info halfway down the page, with the top of the page dominated by ads for new shows to watch, or whatever popular… Meanwhile, I mainly just care about the show I’ve been watching and I want to watch what’s new… What a pain in the ass.
On top of that, I would have to memorize what service has what shows/movies, and if it’s anything pre-streaming that’s not part of a large franchise, like Star wars or Star Trek, or whatever, I usually have to look it up, or bounce between different services frantically searching for what I want.
No thanks.
The MPAA needs to take notes from the RIAA… I subscribe to one music service and I never have any trouble finding what I want to listen to. … Key takeaway: I subscribe to a music service.
I do not subscribe to any video streaming services.
Pretty much every film with the smallest amount of popularity can be easily, freely torrented in high definition. Netflix has good OG anime, not worth the price of subscription but still, whilst other platforms don’t even offer that. Why give them money? Learn to use the interwebs!
Reminder that your local library likely has many great DVDs. Not just the classics either. I was surprised to see my library had Dune part 1&2 and many others.
On your 13 PAID streaming services.
Nah you shouldn’t pay for 13 at once.
DVDs are dirt cheap, plentiful as fuck, don’t have DRM bullshit to have to deal with, last for decades when stored properly, and still look pretty damn good with deinterlacing. Plus, they don’t run any of the risks associated with piracy. Am I allowed to copy my DVDs onto my hard drive? That may be a legal gray area. But can they see that I copied my DVDs to my hard drive? Of course not. And I’m not making my ISOs and MKVs available to the world for download.
Spend 4 bucks on a used DVD. Give her the ol’
dd if=sr0 of=~/Videos/Movies/Title.isoAnd keep the disc for basically forever. Copy it again if something happens to your file. EZPZ. Plus, it’s cool to own a physical thing imo.
One last thing: DVDs come with subtitles. I have a hard time understanding spoken words. I like to read my movies as I watch them. Makes it easier to know what’s going on without cranking the volume to 11. Speaking of which, the menu for the Spinal Tap DVD is excellent.
I believe DVDs do have DRM actually but it has been broken so long ago as to be a non-issue
Plus they have extras which if you really like a movie could be a lot of fun
I miss director’s commentary tracks sometimes.
It would be awesome to have a service that releases those commentaries as podcasts you can sync up with the content. I’ll never forget the BSG director’s cut podcasts by Ronald D. Moore. They’d come out about a week after the show and he’d sip a whiskey and smoke some cigarettes and it felt like we were just chilling together.
even DVDs have ads tho
You can rip just the part that’s the movie. Most DVDs have the ads before the menu, so on the disk it’s a separate file. There are probably better alternatives, but I use a program called MakeMKV that lets you open a disk and only save the videos you’re interested in. IIRC there’s a free version that lets you rip DVDs and a paid version that also does BluRays (assuming you have an optical drive that can read them,of course). I bought it probably about a decade ago and was still able to recently activate a new copy using my old activation code.
If you burn your own they don’t
Premiumize, Torrentio, Stremio.
The Holy Trinity.
Arrr, me hearty! Batten down the hatches and prepare to set sail, ye scallywags!
You can get it for free in your local public library.
No, you can’t. It’s $14.99 and in a few years you’re going to lose access to it. Fuck you. Give us money.
…fuck you.
Or the youtube route. You van buy the movie in sd or hd, but also, if you don’t watch it on our cancer app on your phone, it’s like 480p, sorry not sorry
Arr matey. Easier now than ever.
I pirate everything, but i don’t know how to pirate things in german for my nephew and niece.
I think we should be able to co-op a digital library… Say, the Internet archive seems to be just that!
Why is it under constant attack? Oh yeah, greed.
Why aren’t we able to digitally host a communal library where each owner can “buy in” access by contributing a library?
Like a digital replication of each piece of physical media owned by a person?
You mean private trackers? Fr those who are against piracy seem to be missing the point. For me it’s about refusing to pay into a corrupt system where the creators get very little of what they make. The agencies get the majority. Which is why I pirate from Ubisoft, buy from Humble Bundle, steal from the corporations, purchase from the independents, donate to charities and exploit the greedy.
You mean as in everyone who owns a book could digitize it and contribute it to the library to be lent out one at a time?
Technically that’s possible, but the real argument being made by rightsholders (such as the publishers suing the Internet Archive) is that they don’t have the right to digitize it and lend it out, because that would be them replicating the work, and thus not just lending out the same copy, even if it’s identical in practice in terms of how many people can access it, and what its content is.
Under current copyright law, you’re going to be sued into oblivion if you try that.
Though to be fair, the main case being made in court that really holds water is that the Internet Archive lent out unlimited copies of digitized copyrighted works during the pandemic when many libraries where physically shut down and unable to offer books. Practically speaking, they did the morally correct thing by providing access to materials that would otherwise have been available, barring the extreme circumstances of the pandemic, but since the publishers thought they deserved to profit from that by selling every student who needed reading material in closed libraries a fresh copy of the book for $20, the Archive is now facing legal consequences, because that’s technically still illegal.
However, if you want a communal library, you kind of get that with things like Little Free Libraries, where you can contribute any book, and books regularly cycle through the neighborhood over time, groups like BuyNothing, where you can very easily have people request and hand off things they no longer want themselves, including books, and you can always technically just start a local group that gets books and lends them like a traditional library would, although some libraries just accept donations of your used books and can lend them out without any additional administrative effort or separate entity set up in your community. That depends on your local library though, if you have one at all.
I’ve been out of school since 2017 so I don’t know for sure, did publisher really drop textbook prices to around $20 during the pandemic? None of the books I needed to buy were under $100.
Sorry, I wasn’t referencing textbooks specifically. I was moreso referencing the reading materials a lot of kids would want for things like ELA classes in middle/high school, many of which are often lent by larger libraries, since many schools can’t afford to maintain 30+ copies of individual books for each class, especially if that class is reading multiple books per semester, and changing books entirely every year.
Most schools now rely on digital interfaces for their local library like Libby, but of course, when physical branches are shutting down, you end up shifting all physical demand to digital demand as well, which exceeded most libraries’ capacities, since they could only afford to buy (on a subscription basis only) some of the ebook licenses that publishers sell in the quantities required.
I believe textbooks may have been implicated, but I don’t believe it was the bulk of the books that the Archive made available.
Yo ho! Yo ho!
Yarrtt.
I pay for a VPN once a year and then everything is free. Ahoy mateys!
