4 ms·

I don't know about new releases, but I definitely have begun buying physical media (dvds) where I can. I'm extremely tired of shell games around availability on

by rnd0 2y ago

I don't know about new releases, but I definitely have begun buying physical media (dvds) where I can. I'm extremely tired of shell games around availability on different streaming services. If I can't have my own copy of it, I'm not particularly interested in it.

zx8080 2y ago
How long before it's considered a piracy?
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Depends on the local laws. Over here ripping for your own use is legal, sharing isn't. Actually downloading is legal too, you just can't upload (making Bittorrent effectively illegal)
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  Ripping is a tort in the UK.
  - gambiting 2y ago
    It's explicitly legal in the UK: "In the United Kingdom, it was illegal to rip or copy the content of a CD, ebooks or DVD to even for your own personal use before October 1, 2014. It was illegal to break the DRM (Digital Rights Management) or TPM (Technical Protection Measures) used on DVD to protect the content from ripping. But the changes had come into force in October 2014 under the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014. UK government changed the law after inspecting DVD/CD copyright legislation and public consultation announced the legalization of DVD copy, backup or formats shifting."
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      The right was rescinded the following year after lobbying by media representative organisations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 (I've not looked at this link, I just know it to be the case and prima facie this looked right)
shiroiushi 2y ago
I can't imagine doing this: DVDs look SO awful on modern displays that it's just not worth watching them. Besides, you can get super-high-quality copies elsewhere if you want your own copy of something. Of course, then you have to worry about storing it long-term, using various backup and archival strategies.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  If the option is not watching at all vs DVD, you still kinda need to pick the DVD. There are many worthwile movies you can't find anywhere (legally) unless you own the DVD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues And then there are the ye olde Criterion Collection DVDs with exclusive extras like commentary tracks that can't be reprinted because of licensing issues.
  - mikae1 2y ago
    > you still kinda need to pick the DVD. Or the high seas...
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      On some cases it may or may not be easier and faster to hit the high seas instead of bothering with ripping :)
- upon_drumhead 2y ago
  Not every HD redo is better. https://youtu.be/oZWNGq70Oyo https://youtu.be/oZWNGq70Oyo And honestly a ton of why dvds look so terrible is people forgot about deinterlacing. Toggle it on and things look a lot better.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    It's not just the interlacing, the main problem is the terrible resolution. Upscaling can only do so much; it's not going to make 480p video look decent on a 75" 4k screen. As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film. Yeah, for some old 80s-90s show that was tragically shot on videotape, it's going to look like shit no matter what, so you're just stuck with that unfortunately.
theshrike79 2y ago
I've even started storing digital music on my own server, something I haven't done (checks timestamps on old mp3s) in 15 years. Musicbrainz Picard is a huge life-saver when managing your mp3/CD-collection, it can tag even the weirdest crap with every mp3tag you could imagine. Same with DVD/Bluray, you can get them crazy cheap nowadays and ripping is a breeze with makemkv. With the current storage pricing you really don't need to compress DVDs even - and if you want to, it's like 10-15 minutes with GPU acceleration. I just need to build proper tooling to cross-reference a list of movies I want vs sales available in the stores I use, doing it manually when I remember it is a huge chore.
Yodel0914 2y ago
I can understand the move back to physical media with CDs, because for almost all people on almost all audio equipment, 44.1khz 16bit is indistinguishable from higher resolutions. DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality. And you have to deal with region restrictions, unskippable anti-piracy propaganda etc. Before we moved we just gave away about 200 DVDs because we couldn't even sell them. Physical media itself is quite a pain too, which I re-discovered when I recently ripped my ~300 CD collection. I am very much enjoying the experience of listening to "my own" digital collection though - it's far more satisfying than trying to remember/discover what I want to listen to on Spotify. I was surprised to find that it's quite easy to buy DRM-free, CD quality (or higher) digital downloads these days from bandcamp, qobuz etc. I wish it was like for that for video.
- PlaneSploit 2y ago
  24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones. I don't know why you think that. Similarly, 4k Blu-ray is obviously vastly superior to crappy compressed streams from Netflix or YouTube.
  - DragonStrength 2y ago
    Do you mean lossless over lossy? Few people if any will be able to tell the difference between 16/44.1 lossless and 24/44.1 or 24/48 lossless.
    - snvzz 2y ago
      24bit is definitely noticeable. The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.
      - Yodel0914 2y ago
        > The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering. I'm not an audio engineer by any means, but I'm not sure that sentence makes sense. Mastering is what produces the final audio output - if you take a badly compressed master it's not going to matter if you export it to 16 or 24 bit.
shinycode 2y ago
I buy most of my games on blueray and for almost all of them I can’t play them because when inserted into the Xbox there is an update to download often the size of the blueray, sometimes +100go. Even on day 1 of the launch of a game I have to download a patch. Some games won’t start without downloading the patches. The only reason to have a physical disk in the case of a game is to be able to sell it, otherwise the disk is just the key
- cubesnooper 2y ago
  For games, the equivalent level of ownership comes from DRM‐free digital purchases. That means buying games from platforms like GOG, Itch, and Zoom Platform, and then backing them up. Steam is distantly behind in terms of user ownership—their installers are always DRM‐locked, but some games can be run DRM‐free after that—and Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t even on the same planet due to their hideous DRM and online service tie‐ins.

by rnd0 2y ago

zx8080 2y ago

How long before it's considered a piracy?

theshrike79 2y ago
Depends on the local laws. Over here ripping for your own use is legal, sharing isn't. Actually downloading is legal too, you just can't upload (making Bittorrent effectively illegal)
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
Ripping is a tort in the UK.
- gambiting 2y ago
  It's explicitly legal in the UK: "In the United Kingdom, it was illegal to rip or copy the content of a CD, ebooks or DVD to even for your own personal use before October 1, 2014. It was illegal to break the DRM (Digital Rights Management) or TPM (Technical Protection Measures) used on DVD to protect the content from ripping. But the changes had come into force in October 2014 under the Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014. UK government changed the law after inspecting DVD/CD copyright legislation and public consultation announced the legalization of DVD copy, backup or formats shifting."
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    The right was rescinded the following year after lobbying by media representative organisations. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933 (I've not looked at this link, I just know it to be the case and prima facie this looked right)

shiroiushi 2y ago

I can't imagine doing this: DVDs look SO awful on modern displays that it's just not worth watching them. Besides, you can get super-high-quality copies elsewhere if you want your own copy of something. Of course, then you have to worry about storing it long-term, using various backup and archival strategies.

theshrike79 2y ago
If the option is not watching at all vs DVD, you still kinda need to pick the DVD. There are many worthwile movies you can't find anywhere (legally) unless you own the DVD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma_(film)#Rights_issues And then there are the ye olde Criterion Collection DVDs with exclusive extras like commentary tracks that can't be reprinted because of licensing issues.
- mikae1 2y ago
  > you still kinda need to pick the DVD. Or the high seas...
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    On some cases it may or may not be easier and faster to hit the high seas instead of bothering with ripping :)
upon_drumhead 2y ago
Not every HD redo is better. https://youtu.be/oZWNGq70Oyo https://youtu.be/oZWNGq70Oyo And honestly a ton of why dvds look so terrible is people forgot about deinterlacing. Toggle it on and things look a lot better.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  It's not just the interlacing, the main problem is the terrible resolution. Upscaling can only do so much; it's not going to make 480p video look decent on a 75" 4k screen. As for HD redos, for movies this isn't an issue: they were all made on 35mm (or 70mm) film. Yeah, for some old 80s-90s show that was tragically shot on videotape, it's going to look like shit no matter what, so you're just stuck with that unfortunately.

theshrike79 2y ago

I've even started storing digital music on my own server, something I haven't done (checks timestamps on old mp3s) in 15 years. Musicbrainz Picard is a huge life-saver when managing your mp3/CD-collection, it can tag even the weirdest crap with every mp3tag you could imagine. Same with DVD/Bluray, you can get them crazy cheap nowadays and ripping is a breeze with makemkv. With the current storage pricing you really don't need to compress DVDs even - and if you want to, it's like 10-15 minutes with GPU acceleration. I just need to build proper tooling to cross-reference a list of movies I want vs sales available in the stores I use, doing it manually when I remember it is a huge chore.

Yodel0914 2y ago

I can understand the move back to physical media with CDs, because for almost all people on almost all audio equipment, 44.1khz 16bit is indistinguishable from higher resolutions. DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality. And you have to deal with region restrictions, unskippable anti-piracy propaganda etc. Before we moved we just gave away about 200 DVDs because we couldn't even sell them. Physical media itself is quite a pain too, which I re-discovered when I recently ripped my ~300 CD collection. I am very much enjoying the experience of listening to "my own" digital collection though - it's far more satisfying than trying to remember/discover what I want to listen to on Spotify. I was surprised to find that it's quite easy to buy DRM-free, CD quality (or higher) digital downloads these days from bandcamp, qobuz etc. I wish it was like for that for video.

PlaneSploit 2y ago
24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones. I don't know why you think that. Similarly, 4k Blu-ray is obviously vastly superior to crappy compressed streams from Netflix or YouTube.
- DragonStrength 2y ago
  Do you mean lossless over lossy? Few people if any will be able to tell the difference between 16/44.1 lossless and 24/44.1 or 24/48 lossless.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    24bit is definitely noticeable. The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.
    - Yodel0914 2y ago
      > The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering. I'm not an audio engineer by any means, but I'm not sure that sentence makes sense. Mastering is what produces the final audio output - if you take a badly compressed master it's not going to matter if you export it to 16 or 24 bit.

shinycode 2y ago

I buy most of my games on blueray and for almost all of them I can’t play them because when inserted into the Xbox there is an update to download often the size of the blueray, sometimes +100go. Even on day 1 of the launch of a game I have to download a patch. Some games won’t start without downloading the patches. The only reason to have a physical disk in the case of a game is to be able to sell it, otherwise the disk is just the key

cubesnooper 2y ago
For games, the equivalent level of ownership comes from DRM‐free digital purchases. That means buying games from platforms like GOG, Itch, and Zoom Platform, and then backing them up. Steam is distantly behind in terms of user ownership—their installers are always DRM‐locked, but some games can be run DRM‐free after that—and Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t even on the same planet due to their hideous DRM and online service tie‐ins.