5 ms·

You Don't Really Own the Digital Movies You Buy (2021)

30 points by indigodaddy 3y ago

haunter 3y ago
I still buy DVDs but mostly old stuff. Turns out a lot of releases are flat out not available anywhere else. Especially things like documentaries, foreign language, and sports (season higlights, competition recaps etc)
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
But I do own all these MKVs I bought 100% legit pinky swear, yarr-harr-harr.
- baz00 3y ago
  Ah a fellow rum drinking parrot afficionado! I bought a movie once and the seller stole it back. So I stole another copy. Still got it. Checkmate fuckers.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  There is still not been a distribution platform better than bittorrent. Yeah, it's annoying dealing with trackers, but not half as annoying as subscribing to ten different services access everything I want.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    Soulseek is good for music!
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I also realized that giving media as gifts is dead as well. Hardly anyone that I know uses CD/DVD/Blu-Ray players any more.
- baz00 3y ago
  This is very true. Everyone always asks me to get them Netflix vouchers and stuff like that now. I'll give them the cash and they can make their own poor decisions.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I certainly watch DVDs still but I even run into people my age who think that's almost a bit weird. And I have CDs but rarely play them.
- flotzam 3y ago
  Why not use MakeMKV to remux it for them, from the fragile and DRM-infested Blu-ray into a sane .mkv on a USB drive that they can plug into the back of their TV: https://nitter.net/turtlekiosk/status/1709057325170905363 https://nitter.net/turtlekiosk/status/1709057325170905363
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    Just what I've always wanted, a USB drive of a pirated movie! I agree with your premise but it feels like something is lost here.
    - flotzam 3y ago
      No you give them the Blu-ray and the USB drive Gifting only the USB drive makes more sense for a nice movie collection like in the linked Twitter thread
- adamredwoods 3y ago
  We do rarely. Two reasons: One, because we watch Harry Potter enough and it wasn't worth buying the set on demand, and Two, I usually cannot keep track of which service we bought a particular movie on. I also have a Roku and a large USB thumb drive, so if I have time, I rip a movie onto the thumbdrive, thus, creating our own little on-demand service.
bloomingeek 3y ago
My wife and I use our travel trailer when the weather is nice. Most times we are in areas where there's no coverage. We don't want to pay for any kind of services that will add cost to our trip. So we use our DVDs and BRs, which I have ripped to hard disk. No commercials and works every time!
- LiquidPolymer 3y ago
  Completely agree. I bought the entire “Yellowstone” series on Blu-ray so my wife and I could watch in the truck camper during our West coast road trip.
LiquidPolymer 3y ago
I have great nostalgia for physical media beyond the current reemergence of vinyl records. Compact cassette, minidisc, CD, reel to reel, and digital audio tape are in my hifi system. I also love blu-ray and DVD. I just bought “Mank” on Blu-ray despite being easily seen on Netflix. Obviously I’m an outlier. Yet my 26 year-old daughter has become enamored with cassette tapes and CD’s when the used car she bought had a head unit capable of playing both. So it’s not just me being old and nostalgic. Beyond the familiar arguments about the art and extras that come with physical media - I do have a problem paying monthly for access to music or movies. Or having digital purchases disappear when formats become obsolete. I still pay for these services, but I like the idea that I can stop paying and I lose nothing I love. I’ll probably buy a copy of Wes Anderson’s Netflix short “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”. It’s utterly delightful and will look spectacular on my 12 foot projection screen - much better than the Netflix compression allows. I’m familiar with all the streaming and digital purchase arguments. But I’m curious if my daughter and her friends are a precursor to a fatigue with the ephemeral nature of digital purchases.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  I do not miss having to store physical media. It took up so much space, and would get damaged.
  - vidanay 3y ago
    Or have your car broken into and your entire collection of cassettes stolen. Thankfully, that was right around the time CDs became popular, so I replaced them all with CD's And then my car was broken into again and they were stolen too.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  It would be very interesting to hear a 26year old's comparison of compression between mp3-4, cassette (i miss my dolby expander), radio, and vinyl vs cd and also streamed audio (film or music). I once endured a shitty mp3 of AC/DC (bon version) and it made me gag. Played a vinyl version to the dude...they had no idea of what dynamic range was.
zee2345 3y ago
>You can watch the item as often as you want, but the terms specify that you can’t “sell, rent, lease, distribute, publicly perform or display, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any right to the Content to any third party.” Terms can specify what they want, but enforcement is another thing. I am pretty sure, you can resell movie DVDs in any country.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  This is talking about digitally purchased content. You would have to first remove the DRM to sell them to someone (unless you buy one movie per account)
1970-01-01 3y ago
Wait until they discover the current state of video game consoles. How can I ever own a streaming game?
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Admittedly, Weird Uncle Nintendo is still pretty good about selling game cartridges and not mandating always-online play. But they're once again the industry outlier.
sprior 3y ago
You're just figuring that out now????
password4321 3y ago
I don't buy physical media for two reasons: - kids destroy them - I watch things once Maybe there's a market for an exchange/swap service that also offers resurfacing? Shipping would have to be dirt cheap and hassle free.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  It's okay to tell your kids not to touch fragile things. I promise, you won't scar them for life. But it sounds like owning physical media isn't practical for you anyway if you just watch something once. That alone is sufficient reason, you don't need to blame the kids.
dtx1 3y ago
I do however really own the movies I pirate as long as i don't run out of disc space
mindcrash 3y ago
You technically don't really own the movies you buy on disc either, which makes this headline a bit... weird. You own the media (the physical DVD or BluRay disc), not the movie. More or less the same thing applies to books and video games too. * With some exceptions ofcourse, e.g. when the content is in the public domain or has a copyleft license.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
acidburnNSA 3y ago
Buying bluray and dvd movies and CDs on ebay or craigslist (or better yet: finding in little free libraries while walking) and ripping them to disk and then serving locally (via jellyfin and mopidy) and selectively copying onto phone/table SD cards (e.g. before traveling) has gone pretty well for me. It's pretty cheap, has the convenience of digital media, feels like I have full control, and is legal. I often bring HDMI cords with me on vacation to hook up laptop to TV for showing. Really been loving whipper for CD encoding https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper
- BeefyMcGhee 3y ago
  Ripping a movie you check out from a library is legal?? Also, you probably mean CD decoding, not encoding.
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    Little free librarys are boxes of free things (books, movies, etc.) in many neighborhoods. They aren't actual libraries. You're expected to take something and leave something else, generally. I mean encoding in the sense that it takes PCM data and uses a compression algorithm (flac) to make losslessly encoded/compressed files capturing a perfect copy of what was on the disk. So sure, there's a decoding from CD grooves step and then an encoding to flac step technically.
- passwordoops 3y ago
  >ripping them to disk... and is legal I like your system and am thinking of setting up something similar. But, correct me if I'm wrong, I thought ripping was always illegal. Or is ripping for personal use without intent to distribute ok?
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    Ripping a personal collection for personal use is legal.
nightski 3y ago
Many physical copies come with a digital copy included. It makes little sense to just buy a digital copy imho. Not only that, the digital copy is often with movies anywhere and you can watch on any video streaming service (amazon, vudu, etc...)
- dieselgate 3y ago
  Indeed, even some new vinyl records come with download codes which is neat
- m348e912 3y ago
  >>It makes little sense to just buy a digital copy imho. Maybe to you. Some people don't own digital media players anymore. There are many titles that have to be rented or bought digitally and are not available on streaming services. Case and point: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/national-lampoons-christmas-vacation https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/national-lampoons-christm... Maybe you and I live in alternate universes, idk.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Movies? Absolutely the thing I care the least about owning. Little things take up so much space for something that I at most want to watch again every three years.
- cafeinux 3y ago
  If I look at my (now old) DVD collection, I realise I've not watched them for... 10 years at least. There's only one movie that I get the urge to watch at least once a year, if not more, and for some unknown reason, it's Shrek. And I don't even own the DVD. I guess that one I should buy.
andrewstuart 3y ago
I buy DVDs from ebay from a couple of bucks. Mainly because when I want to watch a specific movie it's not on the one streaming service that I pay for.
crooked-v 3y ago
Companies even using the word "Buy" for situations like this should be illegal.
- rpdillon 3y ago
  I rarely agree with "make it illegal" solutions, but in this case, I think you're exactly right. Slapping a "Buy" button on something that is ultimately a rental seems like a deceptive practice. Too bad it's industry standard.
spandextwins 3y ago
Doesn’t matter. In a few years I’ll use AI to generate any movie I want. Shit like this makes me look forward to that time. Oh, and seeing all those Los Angeles mansions they live in.
knallfrosch 3y ago
People have such short memories. Amazon once even remotely deleted Orwell's 1984 - of all books - straight from users' devices. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
aeturnum 3y ago
One of my great frustrations with the industry is that they've reduced us to this. It did not have to be this way. They could have built a system that allowed people to move media around on home servers, keep offline copies, effectively treated the customer like an adult who understands they paid for one copy of the movie and the reality of digital systems means that movie might actually exist at several places at once. Yet here we are. I spend a lot of money on media. I go to the movies regularly, I "purchase" movies on digital services, I buy physical media when I can. I think it's important to try to support the things you enjoy in the ways they want you to support them. I also do not believe there's a morally conscionable way to engage with media completely within the law. These villains are happy to make it legally impossible to view a series if it gives them a financial boost. It's just another way in which our legal system clearly departs from the lived experience of "what makes sense. I understand and respect people who have a more anti-copyright take on our media ecosystem. I get where they are coming from and I support them. I also think it's really important to keep in focus what an unreasonable and imbalanced and a-historical arrangement media companies are insisting on. It's perfectly possible to create a legal system of digital ownership that is in line with physical ownership. There are no boundaries - it could even involve drm! But they absolutely refuse to create one.
indigodaddy 3y ago
Wow the HN algorithm buried this one. In the 200’s currently..

30 points by indigodaddy 3y ago

I still buy DVDs but mostly old stuff. Turns out a lot of releases are flat out not available anywhere else. Especially things like documentaries, foreign language, and sports (season higlights, competition recaps etc)

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

But I do own all these MKVs I bought 100% legit pinky swear, yarr-harr-harr.

baz00 3y ago
Ah a fellow rum drinking parrot afficionado! I bought a movie once and the seller stole it back. So I stole another copy. Still got it. Checkmate fuckers.
karaterobot 3y ago
There is still not been a distribution platform better than bittorrent. Yeah, it's annoying dealing with trackers, but not half as annoying as subscribing to ten different services access everything I want.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Soulseek is good for music!

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

I also realized that giving media as gifts is dead as well. Hardly anyone that I know uses CD/DVD/Blu-Ray players any more.

baz00 3y ago
This is very true. Everyone always asks me to get them Netflix vouchers and stuff like that now. I'll give them the cash and they can make their own poor decisions.
ghaff 3y ago
I certainly watch DVDs still but I even run into people my age who think that's almost a bit weird. And I have CDs but rarely play them.
flotzam 3y ago
Why not use MakeMKV to remux it for them, from the fragile and DRM-infested Blu-ray into a sane .mkv on a USB drive that they can plug into the back of their TV: https://nitter.net/turtlekiosk/status/1709057325170905363 https://nitter.net/turtlekiosk/status/1709057325170905363
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  Just what I've always wanted, a USB drive of a pirated movie! I agree with your premise but it feels like something is lost here.
  - flotzam 3y ago
    No you give them the Blu-ray and the USB drive Gifting only the USB drive makes more sense for a nice movie collection like in the linked Twitter thread
adamredwoods 3y ago
We do rarely. Two reasons: One, because we watch Harry Potter enough and it wasn't worth buying the set on demand, and Two, I usually cannot keep track of which service we bought a particular movie on. I also have a Roku and a large USB thumb drive, so if I have time, I rip a movie onto the thumbdrive, thus, creating our own little on-demand service.

bloomingeek 3y ago

My wife and I use our travel trailer when the weather is nice. Most times we are in areas where there's no coverage. We don't want to pay for any kind of services that will add cost to our trip. So we use our DVDs and BRs, which I have ripped to hard disk. No commercials and works every time!

LiquidPolymer 3y ago
Completely agree. I bought the entire “Yellowstone” series on Blu-ray so my wife and I could watch in the truck camper during our West coast road trip.

LiquidPolymer 3y ago

I have great nostalgia for physical media beyond the current reemergence of vinyl records. Compact cassette, minidisc, CD, reel to reel, and digital audio tape are in my hifi system. I also love blu-ray and DVD. I just bought “Mank” on Blu-ray despite being easily seen on Netflix. Obviously I’m an outlier. Yet my 26 year-old daughter has become enamored with cassette tapes and CD’s when the used car she bought had a head unit capable of playing both. So it’s not just me being old and nostalgic. Beyond the familiar arguments about the art and extras that come with physical media - I do have a problem paying monthly for access to music or movies. Or having digital purchases disappear when formats become obsolete. I still pay for these services, but I like the idea that I can stop paying and I lose nothing I love. I’ll probably buy a copy of Wes Anderson’s Netflix short “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”. It’s utterly delightful and will look spectacular on my 12 foot projection screen - much better than the Netflix compression allows. I’m familiar with all the streaming and digital purchase arguments. But I’m curious if my daughter and her friends are a precursor to a fatigue with the ephemeral nature of digital purchases.

cortesoft 3y ago
I do not miss having to store physical media. It took up so much space, and would get damaged.
- vidanay 3y ago
  Or have your car broken into and your entire collection of cassettes stolen. Thankfully, that was right around the time CDs became popular, so I replaced them all with CD's And then my car was broken into again and they were stolen too.
Ylpertnodi 3y ago
It would be very interesting to hear a 26year old's comparison of compression between mp3-4, cassette (i miss my dolby expander), radio, and vinyl vs cd and also streamed audio (film or music). I once endured a shitty mp3 of AC/DC (bon version) and it made me gag. Played a vinyl version to the dude...they had no idea of what dynamic range was.

zee2345 3y ago

>You can watch the item as often as you want, but the terms specify that you can’t “sell, rent, lease, distribute, publicly perform or display, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any right to the Content to any third party.” Terms can specify what they want, but enforcement is another thing. I am pretty sure, you can resell movie DVDs in any country.

_aavaa_ 3y ago
This is talking about digitally purchased content. You would have to first remove the DRM to sell them to someone (unless you buy one movie per account)

1970-01-01 3y ago

Wait until they discover the current state of video game consoles. How can I ever own a streaming game?

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Admittedly, Weird Uncle Nintendo is still pretty good about selling game cartridges and not mandating always-online play. But they're once again the industry outlier.

sprior 3y ago

You're just figuring that out now????

password4321 3y ago

I don't buy physical media for two reasons: - kids destroy them - I watch things once Maybe there's a market for an exchange/swap service that also offers resurfacing? Shipping would have to be dirt cheap and hassle free.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
It's okay to tell your kids not to touch fragile things. I promise, you won't scar them for life. But it sounds like owning physical media isn't practical for you anyway if you just watch something once. That alone is sufficient reason, you don't need to blame the kids.

dtx1 3y ago

I do however really own the movies I pirate as long as i don't run out of disc space

mindcrash 3y ago

You technically don't really own the movies you buy on disc either, which makes this headline a bit... weird. You own the media (the physical DVD or BluRay disc), not the movie. More or less the same thing applies to books and video games too. * With some exceptions ofcourse, e.g. when the content is in the public domain or has a copyleft license.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

acidburnNSA 3y ago

Buying bluray and dvd movies and CDs on ebay or craigslist (or better yet: finding in little free libraries while walking) and ripping them to disk and then serving locally (via jellyfin and mopidy) and selectively copying onto phone/table SD cards (e.g. before traveling) has gone pretty well for me. It's pretty cheap, has the convenience of digital media, feels like I have full control, and is legal. I often bring HDMI cords with me on vacation to hook up laptop to TV for showing. Really been loving whipper for CD encoding https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

BeefyMcGhee 3y ago
Ripping a movie you check out from a library is legal?? Also, you probably mean CD decoding, not encoding.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Little free librarys are boxes of free things (books, movies, etc.) in many neighborhoods. They aren't actual libraries. You're expected to take something and leave something else, generally. I mean encoding in the sense that it takes PCM data and uses a compression algorithm (flac) to make losslessly encoded/compressed files capturing a perfect copy of what was on the disk. So sure, there's a decoding from CD grooves step and then an encoding to flac step technically.
passwordoops 3y ago
>ripping them to disk... and is legal I like your system and am thinking of setting up something similar. But, correct me if I'm wrong, I thought ripping was always illegal. Or is ripping for personal use without intent to distribute ok?
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Ripping a personal collection for personal use is legal.

nightski 3y ago

Many physical copies come with a digital copy included. It makes little sense to just buy a digital copy imho. Not only that, the digital copy is often with movies anywhere and you can watch on any video streaming service (amazon, vudu, etc...)

dieselgate 3y ago
Indeed, even some new vinyl records come with download codes which is neat
m348e912 3y ago
>>It makes little sense to just buy a digital copy imho. Maybe to you. Some people don't own digital media players anymore. There are many titles that have to be rented or bought digitally and are not available on streaming services. Case and point: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/national-lampoons-christmas-vacation https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/national-lampoons-christm... Maybe you and I live in alternate universes, idk.

avgcorrection 3y ago

Movies? Absolutely the thing I care the least about owning. Little things take up so much space for something that I at most want to watch again every three years.

cafeinux 3y ago
If I look at my (now old) DVD collection, I realise I've not watched them for... 10 years at least. There's only one movie that I get the urge to watch at least once a year, if not more, and for some unknown reason, it's Shrek. And I don't even own the DVD. I guess that one I should buy.

andrewstuart 3y ago

I buy DVDs from ebay from a couple of bucks. Mainly because when I want to watch a specific movie it's not on the one streaming service that I pay for.

crooked-v 3y ago

Companies even using the word "Buy" for situations like this should be illegal.

rpdillon 3y ago
I rarely agree with "make it illegal" solutions, but in this case, I think you're exactly right. Slapping a "Buy" button on something that is ultimately a rental seems like a deceptive practice. Too bad it's industry standard.

spandextwins 3y ago

Doesn’t matter. In a few years I’ll use AI to generate any movie I want. Shit like this makes me look forward to that time. Oh, and seeing all those Los Angeles mansions they live in.

knallfrosch 3y ago

People have such short memories. Amazon once even remotely deleted Orwell's 1984 - of all books - straight from users' devices. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

aeturnum 3y ago

One of my great frustrations with the industry is that they've reduced us to this. It did not have to be this way. They could have built a system that allowed people to move media around on home servers, keep offline copies, effectively treated the customer like an adult who understands they paid for one copy of the movie and the reality of digital systems means that movie might actually exist at several places at once. Yet here we are. I spend a lot of money on media. I go to the movies regularly, I "purchase" movies on digital services, I buy physical media when I can. I think it's important to try to support the things you enjoy in the ways they want you to support them. I also do not believe there's a morally conscionable way to engage with media completely within the law. These villains are happy to make it legally impossible to view a series if it gives them a financial boost. It's just another way in which our legal system clearly departs from the lived experience of "what makes sense. I understand and respect people who have a more anti-copyright take on our media ecosystem. I get where they are coming from and I support them. I also think it's really important to keep in focus what an unreasonable and imbalanced and a-historical arrangement media companies are insisting on. It's perfectly possible to create a legal system of digital ownership that is in line with physical ownership. There are no boundaries - it could even involve drm! But they absolutely refuse to create one.

indigodaddy 3y ago

Wow the HN algorithm buried this one. In the 200’s currently..