4 ms·

Slight tangent, but movie DRM is really awful. My younger brother has a developmental disability and one of his favorite things is to watch movies. He’s capable

Slight tangent, but movie DRM is really awful. My younger brother has a developmental disability and one of his favorite things is to watch movies. He’s capable enough to use streaming services but since he grew up with dvds he really likes the tangible part of picking a movie out from the cabinet and watching it. He’s in need of a personal computer and ideally it’ll be a Chromebook since he’s the most comfortable with that OS. However it would also be great if he could play movies on the computer for travel, or if the tv is occupied. But the difficulty of trying to play a legally purchased movie on a laptop, even not a Chromebook, makes this almost an impossible task. He _might_ be able to use VLC on ChromeOS to play some/all dvds but it’s highly unlikely he’ll be able to watch blu rays. I’m very tempted to just rip and reburn all of his dvds and blu rays for him so that he can just play the video file off of the dvd. Not really sure where I’m going with this but fuck DRM.

happytiger 3y ago
Let’s make this the top comment? Haha I love it. The love of your brother is evident and you finished with the point just so eloquently.
retrobox 3y ago
You triggered a memory from when I bought Avatar on blu-ray. PC at the time had a blu-ray drive. Booted up Windows. Opened up one of the few dedicated software options I was forced to buy for blu-ray support. Disc doesn’t work properly?? Check software’s support forum and the software hadn’t been updated with the most recent DRM. I felt burned at that point. Pirate copies already existed but I couldn’t play my legally acquired copy. So yeah, +1 on fuck DRM.
atoav 3y ago
This is the problem with DRM: It is a pain for honest customers, while not preventing people who copy things. If you want customers to pay for your thing you just need to make paying for it easier, more straightforward and more reliable than pirating it. As of now the only way they try to reach that goal is by making pirating harder.
- bootlooped 3y ago
  I mostly agree, however DRM does stop laypeople from directly pirating, they have to rely on technical people to do the ripping or cracking, and also find out where to procure those copies. The optimal DRM is something that prevents theft by lay people, but minimally inconveniences legal users. I think a good example would be how you can't just copy PS2 games with a CD burner and play them on an unmodified console.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    This is reasonably accurate. Circumventing DRM is mildly complex enough that it requires someone with technical skill to do it. This means the knowledge around it gets centralized first, then disseminated to the public at large. Once that happens it gives the legal someone to threaten or litigate against, thus validating their presence within the company.
bombcar 3y ago
It might cost a bit, but if you had a Chromebook with an SD card, you could rip movies onto SD cards (1-2 GB should be fine, even 4GB will hold a blu-ray rip), and have it autoplay on insertion. Hardest part would be hiding errors on yanking them out without unmounting. Then you could rip DVD and Blu-ray to SD cards and hold them in the cases.
- gravescale 3y ago
  Oho now i wonder if you could load them up on a hard drive[1] and just trigger playback of the right file using some physical token like an RFID tag or a tiny few-MB SD card, if you can even get them these days, with the ID on it. Or a QR code waved at the camera, with the DVD case artwork on the other side. I just found out how annoying it is to have a two-way switch using smart switches and automation rules that used to be a bulletproof connection of two £3 switch faceplates: madcap computerised complexity to acheive things that used to be trivial is the future, man! [1] Or a Plex-like server. Doesn't even need all the UI gubbins, just a video stream address that can be inferred from the token.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It’s totally doable and as you suspect, quite hard to make as reliable as a DVD player.
    - trescenzi 3y ago
      Hmm what if a DVD contains an index.html which just redirects to the right place. I could build a single entry point too so I can control where the right place is if it ever changes. This could even allow you to “make DVDs” of movies that are streaming only without having to pirate and burn them.
      - gravescale 3y ago
        I think the problem is that Chromebooks don't have DVD drives or any significant amount of their own storage (in which case you could store ISOs and mount them). And SD cards are pretty expensive if you only have one movie per card, because while they're cheap per MB, they only come in huge sizes these days.[1] A USB angle adapter and a judicious use of 3D printing and/or sugru and/or VHB tape might allow an optical "undercarriage" though! A Framework laptop with those nifty expansion slots might permit something unconventional like some kind of key-slot/punchcard/unique-MAC-type EEPROM/RFID reader, but the OS won't be ChromeOS. And that's really getting into the "not because it easy, but because it's there" zone! [1]: But i have just discovered that you can buy "unfinished USB sticks" that are just the little black inserts with the flash in them for £1 each for 8GB on AliExpress (cheaper than the same SD cards and less fiddly), which is big enough to get a DVD ISO or BR rip with some massaging onto! (128MB is 50p, so an indirected method would not save much money). Probably very junky chips but the write-once and read-slow use case would probably not really care much.
southernplaces7 3y ago
>I’m very tempted to just rip and reburn all of his dvds and blu rays for him so that he can just play the video file off of the dvd. Given all the difficulties caused by DRM idiocy that you describe, why not quit being tempted and just do it? If ever shitty, avaricious, unreasonable, idiotic little laws that absolutely deserve to be broken existed, it's those around DRM for movies and TV shows. There's no practical reason to be squeamish about breaking them. As you say, fuck DRM, so why not apply exactly that?
- gravescale 3y ago
  Why would one even be squeamish about it! I would understand torrenting the whole bunch being something you might not wish to do (mostly since you'll be uploading and might cop a "you've been a bad boy" letter if you're very unlucky). You would be done pretty quickly though, depending on your network speed. But ripping from disks that you own and paid for and keeping it private is like the very definition of a victimless not-even-a-crime there is going!
wildrhythms 3y ago
I rented Dune (Part 1) on YouTube and couldn't play it in HD because I was using Google Chrome (not Chromium or any derivative) on Linux, and apparently the DRM didn't like that. I can play any other YouTube HD/4K videos just fine.

happytiger 3y ago

Let’s make this the top comment? Haha I love it. The love of your brother is evident and you finished with the point just so eloquently.

retrobox 3y ago

You triggered a memory from when I bought Avatar on blu-ray. PC at the time had a blu-ray drive. Booted up Windows. Opened up one of the few dedicated software options I was forced to buy for blu-ray support. Disc doesn’t work properly?? Check software’s support forum and the software hadn’t been updated with the most recent DRM. I felt burned at that point. Pirate copies already existed but I couldn’t play my legally acquired copy. So yeah, +1 on fuck DRM.

atoav 3y ago

This is the problem with DRM: It is a pain for honest customers, while not preventing people who copy things. If you want customers to pay for your thing you just need to make paying for it easier, more straightforward and more reliable than pirating it. As of now the only way they try to reach that goal is by making pirating harder.

bootlooped 3y ago
I mostly agree, however DRM does stop laypeople from directly pirating, they have to rely on technical people to do the ripping or cracking, and also find out where to procure those copies. The optimal DRM is something that prevents theft by lay people, but minimally inconveniences legal users. I think a good example would be how you can't just copy PS2 games with a CD burner and play them on an unmodified console.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  This is reasonably accurate. Circumventing DRM is mildly complex enough that it requires someone with technical skill to do it. This means the knowledge around it gets centralized first, then disseminated to the public at large. Once that happens it gives the legal someone to threaten or litigate against, thus validating their presence within the company.

bombcar 3y ago

It might cost a bit, but if you had a Chromebook with an SD card, you could rip movies onto SD cards (1-2 GB should be fine, even 4GB will hold a blu-ray rip), and have it autoplay on insertion. Hardest part would be hiding errors on yanking them out without unmounting. Then you could rip DVD and Blu-ray to SD cards and hold them in the cases.

gravescale 3y ago
Oho now i wonder if you could load them up on a hard drive[1] and just trigger playback of the right file using some physical token like an RFID tag or a tiny few-MB SD card, if you can even get them these days, with the ID on it. Or a QR code waved at the camera, with the DVD case artwork on the other side. I just found out how annoying it is to have a two-way switch using smart switches and automation rules that used to be a bulletproof connection of two £3 switch faceplates: madcap computerised complexity to acheive things that used to be trivial is the future, man! [1] Or a Plex-like server. Doesn't even need all the UI gubbins, just a video stream address that can be inferred from the token.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It’s totally doable and as you suspect, quite hard to make as reliable as a DVD player.
  - trescenzi 3y ago
    Hmm what if a DVD contains an index.html which just redirects to the right place. I could build a single entry point too so I can control where the right place is if it ever changes. This could even allow you to “make DVDs” of movies that are streaming only without having to pirate and burn them.
    - gravescale 3y ago
      I think the problem is that Chromebooks don't have DVD drives or any significant amount of their own storage (in which case you could store ISOs and mount them). And SD cards are pretty expensive if you only have one movie per card, because while they're cheap per MB, they only come in huge sizes these days.[1] A USB angle adapter and a judicious use of 3D printing and/or sugru and/or VHB tape might allow an optical "undercarriage" though! A Framework laptop with those nifty expansion slots might permit something unconventional like some kind of key-slot/punchcard/unique-MAC-type EEPROM/RFID reader, but the OS won't be ChromeOS. And that's really getting into the "not because it easy, but because it's there" zone! [1]: But i have just discovered that you can buy "unfinished USB sticks" that are just the little black inserts with the flash in them for £1 each for 8GB on AliExpress (cheaper than the same SD cards and less fiddly), which is big enough to get a DVD ISO or BR rip with some massaging onto! (128MB is 50p, so an indirected method would not save much money). Probably very junky chips but the write-once and read-slow use case would probably not really care much.

southernplaces7 3y ago

>I’m very tempted to just rip and reburn all of his dvds and blu rays for him so that he can just play the video file off of the dvd. Given all the difficulties caused by DRM idiocy that you describe, why not quit being tempted and just do it? If ever shitty, avaricious, unreasonable, idiotic little laws that absolutely deserve to be broken existed, it's those around DRM for movies and TV shows. There's no practical reason to be squeamish about breaking them. As you say, fuck DRM, so why not apply exactly that?

gravescale 3y ago
Why would one even be squeamish about it! I would understand torrenting the whole bunch being something you might not wish to do (mostly since you'll be uploading and might cop a "you've been a bad boy" letter if you're very unlucky). You would be done pretty quickly though, depending on your network speed. But ripping from disks that you own and paid for and keeping it private is like the very definition of a victimless not-even-a-crime there is going!

wildrhythms 3y ago

I rented Dune (Part 1) on YouTube and couldn't play it in HD because I was using Google Chrome (not Chromium or any derivative) on Linux, and apparently the DRM didn't like that. I can play any other YouTube HD/4K videos just fine.