8 ms·

Yeah, also pirated content has: - 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers. - Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever

by izacus 3y ago

Yeah, also pirated content has: - 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers. - Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo). - Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles. - Properly functioning offline playback for when I'm traveling, not randomly broken and disappearing offline mode (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights). - Works on all my devices not a random subset independent on which way greedy execs tried to extract "ecosystem" money from my playback device manufacturer. Looking at you ATV+. - Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off. - Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired. As you can see, I really tried to pay to get content from these people. And all I got was bunch of frustration. F'em, they brought this upon themselves for being user hostile arseholes. Again.

rekoil 3y ago
I personally find that Spotifys offline content has worked reliably over the years. You just gotta remember that when you get a new device you have to go to library and click download and then leave Spotify open for a few hours. Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near enough to the truth for this argument. They made it so simple and convenient to pay for access to music that I've had zero reasons to even consider piracy. They have everything (well, enough that I've never felt something was missing anyway), they have clients for everything, the pricing is reasonable, and they have great value-add in the form of playlist generation. As for the rest, full agreement, the low bitrate of streaming services is the big one for me as I'm a film enthusiast with great gear that definitely doesn't reach its potential using any streaming services. Now that it looks like physical media is going the way of the Dodo I'm wondering where I'm gonna get actually high bitrate content from in the future.
- mgoetzke 3y ago
  Apple Music and Youtube Music both suffer from the issue of vanishing content. I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now. Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?
  - take-five 3y ago
    Spotify does this too, at least in my region (Estonia). It's frustrating, but not that frustrating to go back to downloading MP3.
  - rekoil 3y ago
    It happens, but pretty rarely in my experience, though I'm probably not the most avid consumer of music so other people might have a better grasp of the extent of this issue on Spotify.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - superhuzza 3y ago
    It does indeed happen. There seems to be a few different types of it. Sometimes a whole band will just disappear off the platform - chalk it up to contractual disagreement. Sometimes a particular album will not be available on Spotify, but other albums from the same band will be - likely some issue with the label that produced the album. Finally, sometimes the particular version of the song you like (e.g. a certain live version, acoustic version, whatever) will disappear but others will remain (e.g. studio version). However, it really doesn't happen that often. I probably have a few thousand songs save on Spotify and perhaps a dozen have been taken off after many years of using the platform.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    Spotify has left me doubting my sanity a couple of times by removing albums I could have sworn I had listened to before in the platform. And I had, but they removed them since, listing nothing in their place.
mgoetzke 3y ago
They cannot help themselves. Just like buying and watching a DVD/bluray was much worse than a pirated copy, as the DVD/bluray made you sit through an increasing amount of unskippable content. From "do not steal this" to "not for kids" or, worst of all, "did you see this other content?". Btw. Ads in front of streaming content I just selected, to tell me about other streaming content on the same service I did NOT select should also be on the NO list.
- offices 3y ago
  Your second paragraph is why BBC radio is unlistenable to me. The source of the advertising is only a minor piece of the irritation - it's still painful to listen to the same ads and jingles multiple times in an hour.
- dathinab 3y ago
  Wait there was unskippable content on DVD/Bluray?? What nonsense is that. That makes no sense at all.
  - mi_z 3y ago
    The person is acting like it's several minutes. It's maybe 20 seconds at most. A studio logo or some piracy warning. You can buy Blu Ray players that let you skip it though. Much worse is minutes of ads throughout what you watch.
    - dathinab 3y ago
      it's still not okay on a bluray you bought the thing, you should be able to use it however you want and putting ads into a bluray you already bought for a probably not so small price is ridiculous And if you skip some epilepsy warning then that is your responsibility, same with when you pirated it and get caught. Also why force me to see anti-piracy propaganda (and that's what it is, nothing else, sometime also legally misinforming) when I already DIDN'T pirate it or a logo I already know from the packaging of the bluray (because if I did pirate it I already would have skipped it). it's just a ridiculous dictation of behavior in context of a bought physical product
rrr_oh_man 3y ago
> - Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles. > - Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off. This was the dealbreaker for me.
crashingintoyou 3y ago
> (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights). I've definitely had Netflix region-lock most of my content when I made the mistake of briefly switching on wifi to find my connecting gate at some airport. Apparently even though the content was available at my starting point and at my destination that didn't apply to the connecting country. Have yet to hit that with Youtube, and I really hate Spotify so avoid using it. > - Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired. A few days back Prime lost both of the two series that I was in the middle of watching at the start of February. Super-annoying!
saiya-jin 3y ago
Agree 100%, my tiny 10TB collection of literally everything I like in 1080p and selected (and actually available) 4k hdr stuff is enough. Same for music for me, radios where I live are just tons of talk I don't care about and little (weird) music, so my rock & metal collection from usb key is enough. If I ever want that randomness that comes with say radio I just let it on or use ad-infested youtube, and probably soon turn it off in disgust from adverts. With small kids, not much time for that anyway which is a good thing. And all gained legally. I am not losing sleep for poor artists (those I listen/watch are fine, guys in their 40s-60s living in castles or big mansions), I am not type of person what bought 100s of CDs of DVDs before (just to feel like a complete idiot now).
dimask 3y ago
Not being able to use VPN with certain providers really put me off. What is the reason that I pay so much money if they blacklist the vpn's ips I use because my network is not secure enough? I was not even trying to go through a different country or anything, just the same country I reside and I made my account.
grujicd 3y ago
Apart from terrible support for subtitles even when they're available (very limited or noexisting choice of font sizes, colors, outlines, etc), the biggest problem for me is no surround channels at all when watching from a browser. You can find surround sound samples on youtube so it's not something browsers can't play. Is it some kind of anti-piracy measure? If it is it doesn't work, since it's all available on pirate sites. So I download content I already have on services I'm paying for and very rarely used them directly. They're for the rest of my family that doesn't care about surround.
matwood 3y ago
The traveling and losing access to shows you were watching is annoying. But, to be fair, this is a rights holder issue and not a Netflix issue. I think all Netflix owned shows are available everywhere. Your point still stands that it presents a service problem. Given the connectedness of the world now, regions should have been abolished a long time ago.
Jhsto 3y ago
One of the awful things about the subtitles is that series episodes wont be released before the subtitles are done. This might introduce a couple day lag to release window -- and at that time all the discussion online has already happened.
genman 3y ago
Subtitles are a huge issue also when you are an expat. What irritates me the most is leaving out the original subtitles or original audio. I consider this especially hostile behavior.
christophilus 3y ago
Doesn’t have unskippable segments or content (like in dvds). Doesn’t suddenly start injecting ad breaks.
n3storm 3y ago
Sky does not even work on firefox on linux. My tv setup is not smart is xfcestupid
actualwitch 3y ago
My personal pet peeve is that buggy client will also not start streaming at maximum available quality and most likely has no selector for it either. I sure enjoy watching pixel soup instead of what's happening in the story for minutes on gigabit connection while their player is considering if I am worthy of consuming Their Content in discernible quality /s
corethree 3y ago
I too understand this logic and follow it to the T. You know that indie filmmaker who spent his lifesaving filming a movie I now get to watch on his dime? Well guess what. No 4k video and no international subtitles makes that guy deserve not seeing any money come back from his hard work. I'm not a thief. The indie filmmaker is a thief. He stole my subtitles and 4k video. In all seriousness, I pirate shit too. But am I going to walk around like a idiot justifying what I do? No. I don't lie to myself. I don't need to twist reality in order to explain human evil which is an intrinsic aspect of all of us. I'm a bit like a psychopath because one other intrinsic aspect of humanity is that we lie to ourselves in order to justify our sins. I don't need to do that. I can pirate shit, and recognize the sin, and then continue pirating and screwing over that indie filmmaker. An ass hole never recognizes himself as the ass hole. Like seriously the delusions are through the roof. The guy is literally pirating shit, and then calling the party he pirates shit from an "ass hole". If he just didn't buy their content he'd have justification, but he instead pirates the content and still calls them the "arse hole". Wake up. I hate corporations but we are the ones commiting the crime here. We are the ass holes.
- smsm42 3y ago
  "Indie filmmaker" is not going to be on Disney+ or AppleTV. If they get there, they are not "indie" anymore, by definition, they are corporate employees of a trillion-dollar corporation, and their income depends 100% on how they negotiated with the corporation and 0% on whether or not I watch that movie via AppleTV or via torrent. I have AppleTV subscription anyway (through one of the free offers) and I still may prefer to watch it via torrent because it's more convenient. So don't push that BS about robbing poor indie filmmakers. That's not what happening. What's happening is trillion-dollar corps dividing the market and trying to extract every single possible dollar of value from the clients. > The guy is literally pirating shit, No, he is literally not pirating anything, unless he's in Somalia and attacking a cargo ship right now. And yes, he has the full right to call the parties who produced the situation where torrenting is the most convenient way to consume content an asshole - because they are assholes. I remember the time where doing that was not necessary - to the point that I almost forgot how to do it at all - but then the assholes came and now you have to pay for 15 different services, with crappy apps and unskippable ads, so yes, it's assholery. And it has nothing to do with indie anything.
chedabob 3y ago
I've ended up pirating a lot more stuff recently because a lot of services won't set the aspect ratio on the stream properly, so on an ultrawide monitor it displays in 16:9 the size of a postage stamp with both pillarboxing and letterboxing. Channel 4 (in the UK) is probably the worst offender, as they preserve the aspect ratio, but have it fill the full width of the screen. This results in the top and bottom of the video being cutting off for most TV shows, including the subtitles. They've gone to some effort to make their player run on different aspect ratios, but somehow implemented it entirely the wrong way. Webrips do suffer from this same issue, but with either FFMpeg or VLC, it can be cropped to the correct ratio without reencoding.
raffraffraff 3y ago
Also: pirated content is usually available. There have been so many times my wife has spent 15 minutes on imdb searching for something to watch, but then we check where it's available and ... it's only available via torrent.
larodi 3y ago
You actually make a very fair point, the only downside of pirated comment is that it comes from a very dubious sources, and sites that are loaded with spyware and whatnot. Then perhaps s.o. would argue that these all are much harder to get done with free tools or by oneself, but I can definitely argue that having a nice personal cloud which allows video streaming is more than enough for most occasions.
- philipov 3y ago
  > and sites that are loaded with spyware and whatnot Not actually different from using the streaming services, who sell info on you as a side gig.
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
What's even easier than torrenting? (I refuse to call it "piracy" since that's a life-threatening activity for physical goods subject to totally different economics which would never apply in the post-scarcity utopia that is cyberspace (which businessmen attempt to inflict meatspace's scarcity back onto for money).) Selling movies and shows DRM-free, like Amazon does with music (but no other software goods for some reason).
- dkn775 3y ago
  There are pirate streaming websites that stream from putlocker etc links to a media player embed They have tons of ads and pop ups so blocker is needed.
cchance 3y ago
Netflix and real 4K HDR is a joke considering you need some magic formula to assure all your devices are actually "eligible" to get what your paying for.
jamaicahest 3y ago
One downside to pirated content is: 99% of the time it only has English audio track and the majority of the world's population does not have English as their native language. I have small children and they don't understand one word of English, and even if they did, I want them to hear their native language on tv, not English.

by izacus 3y ago

rekoil 3y ago

I personally find that Spotifys offline content has worked reliably over the years. You just gotta remember that when you get a new device you have to go to library and click download and then leave Spotify open for a few hours. Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near enough to the truth for this argument. They made it so simple and convenient to pay for access to music that I've had zero reasons to even consider piracy. They have everything (well, enough that I've never felt something was missing anyway), they have clients for everything, the pricing is reasonable, and they have great value-add in the form of playlist generation. As for the rest, full agreement, the low bitrate of streaming services is the big one for me as I'm a film enthusiast with great gear that definitely doesn't reach its potential using any streaming services. Now that it looks like physical media is going the way of the Dodo I'm wondering where I'm gonna get actually high bitrate content from in the future.

mgoetzke 3y ago
Apple Music and Youtube Music both suffer from the issue of vanishing content. I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now. Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?
- take-five 3y ago
  Spotify does this too, at least in my region (Estonia). It's frustrating, but not that frustrating to go back to downloading MP3.
- rekoil 3y ago
  It happens, but pretty rarely in my experience, though I'm probably not the most avid consumer of music so other people might have a better grasp of the extent of this issue on Spotify.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- superhuzza 3y ago
  It does indeed happen. There seems to be a few different types of it. Sometimes a whole band will just disappear off the platform - chalk it up to contractual disagreement. Sometimes a particular album will not be available on Spotify, but other albums from the same band will be - likely some issue with the label that produced the album. Finally, sometimes the particular version of the song you like (e.g. a certain live version, acoustic version, whatever) will disappear but others will remain (e.g. studio version). However, it really doesn't happen that often. I probably have a few thousand songs save on Spotify and perhaps a dozen have been taken off after many years of using the platform.
- Levitz 3y ago
  Spotify has left me doubting my sanity a couple of times by removing albums I could have sworn I had listened to before in the platform. And I had, but they removed them since, listing nothing in their place.

mgoetzke 3y ago

They cannot help themselves. Just like buying and watching a DVD/bluray was much worse than a pirated copy, as the DVD/bluray made you sit through an increasing amount of unskippable content. From "do not steal this" to "not for kids" or, worst of all, "did you see this other content?". Btw. Ads in front of streaming content I just selected, to tell me about other streaming content on the same service I did NOT select should also be on the NO list.

offices 3y ago
Your second paragraph is why BBC radio is unlistenable to me. The source of the advertising is only a minor piece of the irritation - it's still painful to listen to the same ads and jingles multiple times in an hour.
dathinab 3y ago
Wait there was unskippable content on DVD/Bluray?? What nonsense is that. That makes no sense at all.
- mi_z 3y ago
  The person is acting like it's several minutes. It's maybe 20 seconds at most. A studio logo or some piracy warning. You can buy Blu Ray players that let you skip it though. Much worse is minutes of ads throughout what you watch.
  - dathinab 3y ago
    it's still not okay on a bluray you bought the thing, you should be able to use it however you want and putting ads into a bluray you already bought for a probably not so small price is ridiculous And if you skip some epilepsy warning then that is your responsibility, same with when you pirated it and get caught. Also why force me to see anti-piracy propaganda (and that's what it is, nothing else, sometime also legally misinforming) when I already DIDN'T pirate it or a logo I already know from the packaging of the bluray (because if I did pirate it I already would have skipped it). it's just a ridiculous dictation of behavior in context of a bought physical product

rrr_oh_man 3y ago

> - Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles. > - Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off. This was the dealbreaker for me.

crashingintoyou 3y ago

> (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights). I've definitely had Netflix region-lock most of my content when I made the mistake of briefly switching on wifi to find my connecting gate at some airport. Apparently even though the content was available at my starting point and at my destination that didn't apply to the connecting country. Have yet to hit that with Youtube, and I really hate Spotify so avoid using it. > - Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired. A few days back Prime lost both of the two series that I was in the middle of watching at the start of February. Super-annoying!

saiya-jin 3y ago

Agree 100%, my tiny 10TB collection of literally everything I like in 1080p and selected (and actually available) 4k hdr stuff is enough. Same for music for me, radios where I live are just tons of talk I don't care about and little (weird) music, so my rock & metal collection from usb key is enough. If I ever want that randomness that comes with say radio I just let it on or use ad-infested youtube, and probably soon turn it off in disgust from adverts. With small kids, not much time for that anyway which is a good thing. And all gained legally. I am not losing sleep for poor artists (those I listen/watch are fine, guys in their 40s-60s living in castles or big mansions), I am not type of person what bought 100s of CDs of DVDs before (just to feel like a complete idiot now).

dimask 3y ago

Not being able to use VPN with certain providers really put me off. What is the reason that I pay so much money if they blacklist the vpn's ips I use because my network is not secure enough? I was not even trying to go through a different country or anything, just the same country I reside and I made my account.

grujicd 3y ago

Apart from terrible support for subtitles even when they're available (very limited or noexisting choice of font sizes, colors, outlines, etc), the biggest problem for me is no surround channels at all when watching from a browser. You can find surround sound samples on youtube so it's not something browsers can't play. Is it some kind of anti-piracy measure? If it is it doesn't work, since it's all available on pirate sites. So I download content I already have on services I'm paying for and very rarely used them directly. They're for the rest of my family that doesn't care about surround.

matwood 3y ago

The traveling and losing access to shows you were watching is annoying. But, to be fair, this is a rights holder issue and not a Netflix issue. I think all Netflix owned shows are available everywhere. Your point still stands that it presents a service problem. Given the connectedness of the world now, regions should have been abolished a long time ago.

Jhsto 3y ago

One of the awful things about the subtitles is that series episodes wont be released before the subtitles are done. This might introduce a couple day lag to release window -- and at that time all the discussion online has already happened.

genman 3y ago

Subtitles are a huge issue also when you are an expat. What irritates me the most is leaving out the original subtitles or original audio. I consider this especially hostile behavior.

christophilus 3y ago

Doesn’t have unskippable segments or content (like in dvds). Doesn’t suddenly start injecting ad breaks.

n3storm 3y ago

Sky does not even work on firefox on linux. My tv setup is not smart is xfcestupid

actualwitch 3y ago

My personal pet peeve is that buggy client will also not start streaming at maximum available quality and most likely has no selector for it either. I sure enjoy watching pixel soup instead of what's happening in the story for minutes on gigabit connection while their player is considering if I am worthy of consuming Their Content in discernible quality /s

corethree 3y ago

I too understand this logic and follow it to the T. You know that indie filmmaker who spent his lifesaving filming a movie I now get to watch on his dime? Well guess what. No 4k video and no international subtitles makes that guy deserve not seeing any money come back from his hard work. I'm not a thief. The indie filmmaker is a thief. He stole my subtitles and 4k video. In all seriousness, I pirate shit too. But am I going to walk around like a idiot justifying what I do? No. I don't lie to myself. I don't need to twist reality in order to explain human evil which is an intrinsic aspect of all of us. I'm a bit like a psychopath because one other intrinsic aspect of humanity is that we lie to ourselves in order to justify our sins. I don't need to do that. I can pirate shit, and recognize the sin, and then continue pirating and screwing over that indie filmmaker. An ass hole never recognizes himself as the ass hole. Like seriously the delusions are through the roof. The guy is literally pirating shit, and then calling the party he pirates shit from an "ass hole". If he just didn't buy their content he'd have justification, but he instead pirates the content and still calls them the "arse hole". Wake up. I hate corporations but we are the ones commiting the crime here. We are the ass holes.

smsm42 3y ago
"Indie filmmaker" is not going to be on Disney+ or AppleTV. If they get there, they are not "indie" anymore, by definition, they are corporate employees of a trillion-dollar corporation, and their income depends 100% on how they negotiated with the corporation and 0% on whether or not I watch that movie via AppleTV or via torrent. I have AppleTV subscription anyway (through one of the free offers) and I still may prefer to watch it via torrent because it's more convenient. So don't push that BS about robbing poor indie filmmakers. That's not what happening. What's happening is trillion-dollar corps dividing the market and trying to extract every single possible dollar of value from the clients. > The guy is literally pirating shit, No, he is literally not pirating anything, unless he's in Somalia and attacking a cargo ship right now. And yes, he has the full right to call the parties who produced the situation where torrenting is the most convenient way to consume content an asshole - because they are assholes. I remember the time where doing that was not necessary - to the point that I almost forgot how to do it at all - but then the assholes came and now you have to pay for 15 different services, with crappy apps and unskippable ads, so yes, it's assholery. And it has nothing to do with indie anything.

chedabob 3y ago

I've ended up pirating a lot more stuff recently because a lot of services won't set the aspect ratio on the stream properly, so on an ultrawide monitor it displays in 16:9 the size of a postage stamp with both pillarboxing and letterboxing. Channel 4 (in the UK) is probably the worst offender, as they preserve the aspect ratio, but have it fill the full width of the screen. This results in the top and bottom of the video being cutting off for most TV shows, including the subtitles. They've gone to some effort to make their player run on different aspect ratios, but somehow implemented it entirely the wrong way. Webrips do suffer from this same issue, but with either FFMpeg or VLC, it can be cropped to the correct ratio without reencoding.

raffraffraff 3y ago

Also: pirated content is usually available. There have been so many times my wife has spent 15 minutes on imdb searching for something to watch, but then we check where it's available and ... it's only available via torrent.

larodi 3y ago

You actually make a very fair point, the only downside of pirated comment is that it comes from a very dubious sources, and sites that are loaded with spyware and whatnot. Then perhaps s.o. would argue that these all are much harder to get done with free tools or by oneself, but I can definitely argue that having a nice personal cloud which allows video streaming is more than enough for most occasions.

philipov 3y ago
> and sites that are loaded with spyware and whatnot Not actually different from using the streaming services, who sell info on you as a side gig.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

What's even easier than torrenting? (I refuse to call it "piracy" since that's a life-threatening activity for physical goods subject to totally different economics which would never apply in the post-scarcity utopia that is cyberspace (which businessmen attempt to inflict meatspace's scarcity back onto for money).) Selling movies and shows DRM-free, like Amazon does with music (but no other software goods for some reason).

dkn775 3y ago
There are pirate streaming websites that stream from putlocker etc links to a media player embed They have tons of ads and pop ups so blocker is needed.

cchance 3y ago

Netflix and real 4K HDR is a joke considering you need some magic formula to assure all your devices are actually "eligible" to get what your paying for.

jamaicahest 3y ago

One downside to pirated content is: 99% of the time it only has English audio track and the majority of the world's population does not have English as their native language. I have small children and they don't understand one word of English, and even if they did, I want them to hear their native language on tv, not English.