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So I’m familiar with what their other apps do. I read the readme many times. I still wonder what “web content“ means. Apparently it’s media. Maybe it’s a headle

So I’m familiar with what their other apps do. I read the readme many times. I still wonder what “web content“ means. Apparently it’s media. Maybe it’s a headless browser that can capture inputs and stream them? Re reading the readme and trying to figure out what each discrete part does made me realize it feels like if ChatGPT had designed a generic, non descript product, and made a readme. It’s got a file that tells me there are things in it. The code does stuff. This is definitely what a product looks like to a human. Philip K Dick described that to see information is to be consumed by it. This feels exactly that way. Presented with something that has just enough meaning to feel “figure out able“.

notatoad 2y ago
i think the main purpose of this is to pull in illegal streams of copyright content, so the readme probably has to be intentionally obtuse to avoid summoning law enforcement.
- sneak 2y ago
  This is like saying that the purpose of a gun is to commit murder. It’s a tool. You can use it for any purpose, including simply reading the code to inspire you to write other software or learn how software is designed. Especially for media playback tools, to say its main purpose is for crime is as silly as to say a monitor’s main purpose is for looking at Facebook.
  - denhaus 2y ago
    i agree. in principle this is totally fine. in reality, highly paid lawyers throw the law around to accomplish whatever their objectives are. if they’re paid by a media company, and the media company’s objective is to reduce “illegal” reproduction of their content, principle is less important than winning.
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    You had to pick the most controversial example that also is poorly defensible? Guns don’t exactly have many uses besides shooting, compared to your monitor example. Similarly, I’d assume most people who use Jellyfin/Plex/etc acquire their content through questionably legal sources. There simply aren’t many legal avenues left to acquire DRM free media. Especially not where you’re rebroadcasting from a webpage. The “arr” suffix on this software is especially flagging - there is a popular suite of software associated with piracy and they all use the “arr” suffix. Reading source code is nice and all, but come on, that’s not the main purpose of most open source code. > Broadcastarr is a service that allows you to broadcast media content retrieved from web pages. That’s the purpose.
    - ndriscoll 2y ago
      Two obvious sources of legal media for jellyfin are home movies and university lectures (which are generally creative commons licensed), both of which I serve on my family's instance. I believe recording broadcast television is also perfectly legal in the US, and there are still commercial products to do it. The *arr software by contrast are pretty explicit about what they're for. e.g. radarr says it will upgrade a movie you have from dvd to bluray quality via torrent or usenet, which is almost certainly illegal. It does look like they don't distribute executables though, so their repositories contain only a detailed description of the knowledge of how to perform illegal activities.
      - close04 2y ago
        I think the most obvious sources of legal media are bargain bin DVDs/BRs which you are allowed to rip for personal usage and backup. This would justify all the discussions about episode numbering and so on. I have a small mountain of discs in boxes in the basement, which I bought almost for free (looking at you 17 EUR DVD box set of Friends) and will never see the light of day because they're all comfortably copied on a NAS too. Same for games, I have titles like RDR which I bought from a bargain bin while it was still very much in vogue for ~2 EUR. I can't use it as a copy but the supermarket bargain bin can be an eternal Black Friday for your media consumption.
    - 2y ago
danpalmer 2y ago
A common issue in this space is that things are either actually illegal, or they break terms of service. Many of these things are at constant risk of being DMCA’d. My guess is this is a deliberate attempt to not get taken down from GitHub after Netflix find out people are streaming content through different systems.
- ramon156 2y ago
  As much as I understand people need to feed their family, i hate how media access has all become paywalled. Why can't I choose which media to support? Why can't I pay 10 bucks to a Studio because I think they did a good job?
  - tadfisher 2y ago
    Because the costs are insane. You're not making Game of Thrones on a Patreon budget; the early seasons were $50 million each, and the series as a whole cost $1.5 billion. The media companies are essentially giant VC firms that assume crazy amounts of risk in the hopes that a few hits will outweigh losses from the bombs. This is why they paywall everything; subscriber revenue is steady revenue, kind of like government bonds in an investment portfolio. This is also why so many IPs are remakes, reboots, or franchises, because those are much less risky to bankroll.
savant2 2y ago
This code seems to be aimed at pirates selling access to Jellyfin instances. It allows them to restream video feeds through Jellyfin with a control plane over a Discord bot.
recursive 2y ago
Who are "they"? This account has like a half a dozen repos, but I doubt any of them are what you're talking about.

notatoad 2y ago

i think the main purpose of this is to pull in illegal streams of copyright content, so the readme probably has to be intentionally obtuse to avoid summoning law enforcement.

sneak 2y ago
This is like saying that the purpose of a gun is to commit murder. It’s a tool. You can use it for any purpose, including simply reading the code to inspire you to write other software or learn how software is designed. Especially for media playback tools, to say its main purpose is for crime is as silly as to say a monitor’s main purpose is for looking at Facebook.
- denhaus 2y ago
  i agree. in principle this is totally fine. in reality, highly paid lawyers throw the law around to accomplish whatever their objectives are. if they’re paid by a media company, and the media company’s objective is to reduce “illegal” reproduction of their content, principle is less important than winning.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  You had to pick the most controversial example that also is poorly defensible? Guns don’t exactly have many uses besides shooting, compared to your monitor example. Similarly, I’d assume most people who use Jellyfin/Plex/etc acquire their content through questionably legal sources. There simply aren’t many legal avenues left to acquire DRM free media. Especially not where you’re rebroadcasting from a webpage. The “arr” suffix on this software is especially flagging - there is a popular suite of software associated with piracy and they all use the “arr” suffix. Reading source code is nice and all, but come on, that’s not the main purpose of most open source code. > Broadcastarr is a service that allows you to broadcast media content retrieved from web pages. That’s the purpose.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    Two obvious sources of legal media for jellyfin are home movies and university lectures (which are generally creative commons licensed), both of which I serve on my family's instance. I believe recording broadcast television is also perfectly legal in the US, and there are still commercial products to do it. The *arr software by contrast are pretty explicit about what they're for. e.g. radarr says it will upgrade a movie you have from dvd to bluray quality via torrent or usenet, which is almost certainly illegal. It does look like they don't distribute executables though, so their repositories contain only a detailed description of the knowledge of how to perform illegal activities.
    - close04 2y ago
      I think the most obvious sources of legal media are bargain bin DVDs/BRs which you are allowed to rip for personal usage and backup. This would justify all the discussions about episode numbering and so on. I have a small mountain of discs in boxes in the basement, which I bought almost for free (looking at you 17 EUR DVD box set of Friends) and will never see the light of day because they're all comfortably copied on a NAS too. Same for games, I have titles like RDR which I bought from a bargain bin while it was still very much in vogue for ~2 EUR. I can't use it as a copy but the supermarket bargain bin can be an eternal Black Friday for your media consumption.
  - 2y ago

danpalmer 2y ago

A common issue in this space is that things are either actually illegal, or they break terms of service. Many of these things are at constant risk of being DMCA’d. My guess is this is a deliberate attempt to not get taken down from GitHub after Netflix find out people are streaming content through different systems.

ramon156 2y ago
As much as I understand people need to feed their family, i hate how media access has all become paywalled. Why can't I choose which media to support? Why can't I pay 10 bucks to a Studio because I think they did a good job?
- tadfisher 2y ago
  Because the costs are insane. You're not making Game of Thrones on a Patreon budget; the early seasons were $50 million each, and the series as a whole cost $1.5 billion. The media companies are essentially giant VC firms that assume crazy amounts of risk in the hopes that a few hits will outweigh losses from the bombs. This is why they paywall everything; subscriber revenue is steady revenue, kind of like government bonds in an investment portfolio. This is also why so many IPs are remakes, reboots, or franchises, because those are much less risky to bankroll.

savant2 2y ago

This code seems to be aimed at pirates selling access to Jellyfin instances. It allows them to restream video feeds through Jellyfin with a control plane over a Discord bot.

recursive 2y ago

Who are "they"? This account has like a half a dozen repos, but I doubt any of them are what you're talking about.