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Putting Kodi under "Streaming Piracy" is pretty inflamitory. Kodi isn't there to enable streaming piracy. (There are non-offical plugins that do that, but they'
by monksy 9y ago
Putting Kodi under "Streaming Piracy" is pretty inflamitory. Kodi isn't there to enable streaming piracy. (There are non-offical plugins that do that, but they've made many announcements about Kodi's stance on Piracy)
- jjeaff 9y agoBut let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content. Otherwise, I'm not sure where everyone is getting all these non DRM digital downloads. And most aren't using special plugins with Kodi, they just use Kodi to play their content they get from torrents and Usenet.
- empthought 9y agoI can't speak for anyone else, but I only use Plex for format-shifting DVDs I've purchased. While this may be a violation of the DMCA's prohibition against breaking copy protection, it is not piracy or even actionable copyright infringement.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoIn UK this is tortuous again, having been made specifically allowed. Apparently people watching DVDs they've purchased somehow harms the public good. Yay, go Tories!
- twothamendment 9y agoI knew I wasn't the only one. Once I have a disc in hand I'm going to handle it once, get it on the NAS and watch it on any device in my house without thinking about the media that it was purchased on. Throw an old laptop SSD, a raspberry pi and a USB wifi into the mix and you can stream your collection while driving across the country.
- empthought 9y agoI have little kids who can't be trusted to keep physical media from being damaged. :-D
- dasil003 9y agoRipping physical media for personal use is not piracy despite what the MPAA would have you believe.
- rhino369 9y agoYea but who goes through the trouble of ripping blu-rays to put them on plex?
- metalliqaz 9y agoMy home setup is entirely digital. Just a Shield Android TV attached to the back of a TV. I don't have any spinning disc players anymore. All discs are ripped, put on my NAS, and served with Plex.
- __x0x__ 9y ago<chimes in> Same here. I still have all my physical CDs from the past 25-odd years but they are in sitting in boxes after being ripped. 99% my "TV watching" is time-shifted using the Shield, with a combination of streaming and downloaded stuff. I have weaned myself off of all physical media except for vinyl records (don't ask - it's a hobby). I wired my house with Cat5e and everything lives on a fat XFS formatted RAID array. Now that I have a streaming subscription to Tidal (CD quality) I find very little reason to look to alternative music sources. With Amazon Prime the same goes for a lot of TV and movies. But for niche stuff there will always be torrent sites. Speaking only for myself, blocking commercials is probably the biggest motivator for myself in seeking DVD sets and/or series of TV shows. Once you have stopped watching "live TV" you'd be surprised how sensitive you become commercials blasting every 10 minutes. Kind of like turning off your ad blocker (I honestly don't know how people survive the web without those things). I'm willing to pay for the "privilege" of not being yelled at every 10 minutes...
- keypress 9y agoIn the UK, we get three or four per hour on the most popular commercial networks. We record everything we want to watch on a Humax just so we don't have to suffer the ads, and pause for a piss, drink, or surf as and when. Or rewind parts we didn't pay enough attention to. Or skip bad segments. I wouldn't bother otherwise. I'm sure it's provider dependent, but US shows appear to have ads every 5mins, and that looks like torture.
- beart 9y agoI'm not sure how you can claim honesty and then immediately pull that statistic out of thin air.
- bane 9y agoA few people I know just check out movie from the local Library on DVD and Blueray, rip them and then watch them from Plex.
- Spivak 9y agoWhich does fall under the umbrella of piracy.
- keypress 9y agoYep, but the motivation may be simply one of convenience. My DVD player loops the menu all night long if you happen to dose off - and it's a struggle to get up and stop it. Even selecting and starting a movie on a DVD can be a trial.
- justrobert 9y agoIf that is illegal, then I am breaking the law when I modify a computer program for personal use. As far as I am aware, if they are not distributing their changes, there is no copyright violation. I'd be interested to see what laws they are violating.
- Spivak 9y agoI'm reading a tiny bit into the comment so let me state it plainly: > A few people I know just check out movie from the local Library on DVD or Bluray, rip them and then watch them from Plex, [and then return the DVD or Bluray without deleting the ripped copy]. This is textbook piracy.
- justrobert 9y agoAgain when it comes to the USA copyright law, it is about distribution. A person who copies a specific work and does not distribute it is not breaking the law as far as I am aware. That is why I'd be interested in seeing what laws have been broken.
- cheeze 9y agoI use plex to share home movies which were ripped from DVD (and converted earlier from VHS) 100% legally (although the MPAA is probably trying to make it illegal to record home movies these days too /s)
- jjeaff 9y agoHome videos is an edge case use for Kodi and Plex. They have built in integration with services like IMDb for goodness sake. They don't even have good interfaces for namings and cataloging home videos. Getting custom stuff into Plex is basically kind of hacky. Not nearly as easy as dropping in a movie and letting it sync all the info from imdb automatically.
- kop316 9y agoI would ask that unless you have solid statistics, please do not assume this. I feel it is incredibly disrespectful to the developers who put out a great product that is legal and people legally use. Like other comments, I use Plex to format shift my legally purchased DVDs and CDs onto a media server. I also use it to legally DVR OTA TV. There are also countries outside of the USA in which format shifting DVDs is explicitly legal (France for example).
- jjeaff 9y agoGranted, it's a guess. And 99.99 is hyperbole. But if I had to make a real guess, I'd say more than 90% of kodi installs are used for piracy. Sure, there is a contingent of people using it to rip their own movies, but if that was really a core usage of Kodi, it would be a core feature. But it isn't. If you rip DVDs or bluerays, you have to integrate third party software. What is a core feature of Kodi? Grokking large numbers of video files that use usenet/torrent naming standards as well as a nice API that virtually all torrent clients integrate with.
- ythn 9y ago> But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content. Otherwise, I'm not sure where everyone is getting all these non DRM digital downloads. Do you count digitizing my existing DVD collection with Handbrake "piracy"? I don't.
- Spivak 9y agoNobody does (or should)-- it's not copyright infringement.
- ythn 9y agoSometimes people group it with piracy since technically it's a DCMA/DRM violation
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoIt is in multiple jurisdictions; please be careful to be specific if you're talking about a limited geography.
- jjeaff 9y agoIn the us it is illegal. Dmca violation since virtually all DVD and Blu-ray has DRM these days.
- yardie 9y agoAs a Kodi, Plex, iTunes, Windows Media Center, etc. user I've converted hundreds of movies, CDs, and TV shows into a format and library that easily moves countries and continents. It has been that way for me since I installed XBMC on the original Xbox.
- mongol 9y agoI don't think so. Would youtube account for less than 0.01 % av Kodi use?
- jjeaff 9y agoYa, probably so. YouTube is not even an officially supported service for Kodi. You have to install a 3rd party plugin.
- millzlane 9y agoBack in my day we ripped dvds to our systems.
- erikdared 9y agoBesides ripping owned physical media, I've also used Kodi to watch OTA broadcast TV that I've recorded via software from a HDHomerun tuner.
- megaman22 9y agoKodi is the only way I've managed to get my HD HomeRun cablecard adapter to work for my local TV channels through Comcast. So it's not purely pirated content...
- monksy 9y ago> But let's be honest, 99.99% of Kodi and Plex use is purely for pirated content. While you're grouping them in that category, why not put Microsoft Windows Media Center, XBox Media Center, and Playstation Media Center, and Apple TV in that category as well.
- jjeaff 9y agoSure, but Plex and Kodi are geared for library and collection organization. They take your files and parse filenames based on common naming patterns used in Usenet and torrent sites. Then create a beautiful collection from them. The one off video players are more likely used for home videos or one off video files.
- djsumdog 9y agoThey're just players though. Are you going to get onto VLC or mpv because they majority of their users play pirated mkv files?
- jjeaff 9y agoThey aren't just players. They are way more than that. They are specifically made to organize and display large collections of movies and TV shows. VLC or wmp doesn't have an integration with IMDb to download all the titles, descriptions and cover art for movies based on their Usenet/torrent standard naming conventions. I'm not saying there aren't plenty of legal uses for Kodi and Plex, I'm just saying that people aren't paying for a Plex pass or spending countless hours on Kodi to catalog their personal home videos. Neither program is even well suited to that. There isnt even an easy to use interface on either for including custom content. But drop in a file names the.big.bang.theory.s05e11.720p.brrip.mkv and they both know exactly what to do.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoWe're using Emby to play OTA recorded (via HDHomeRun) 2018 Olympics coverage because we don't want to stay up all night to watch it. We do this for all the OTA television shows we'd like to watch. It works out really well for us.
- dundercoder 9y agoI use mine exclusively for the DVDs and BRays I've ripped from my collection. No more scratches!
- sp332 9y agoYup, a lot of piracy-oriented products use Kodi e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/five-suspects-arrested-for-sale-of-fully-loaded-kodi-streaming-boxes/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/five-suspects-ar... But putting Kodi itself on the list is like putting Xerox on a list of elementary-school textbook piracy companies.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoThe article is on a site called "Plagiarism Today," so they may not be entirely unbiased on piracy issues.