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Piracy also offers: 0. Ability to watch offline! 1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location. 1.2 Ability to ge

Piracy also offers: 0. Ability to watch offline! 1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location. 1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language) 2. Ability to normalize audio. 3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection. 4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish 5. Arbitrary number of user accounts 6. Multicast streams to watch the same show across different devices regardless of if someone has an account or not (see JellyFin's SyncPlay) 7. No big organization tracking you and selling your data to the highest bidder There's more, but honestly pirating is just a better experience. I can't tell you how many times Netflix has fucked up the subtitles so they are covering half my screen. There's tons of little issues like that that are just random and the only option is to just not watch Netflix (or pick your streaming service) that day. Besides that, for the price of a yearly subscription you can build a NAS that can do all this for you and you get to keep the movies. Instead of having a monthly fee you can progressively add more drives and this can also be used for all your other things. Pictures, home videos, games (you can make a Steam cache), your local AI models, or whatever else you want. With $1k you can build a pretty good system, though that's 3 years of 4k Netflix, so not the cheap route in the short term.

account42 1y ago
Or more generally: the ability to use a video player of your choice, which can have whatever features and interface that you want.
Galaxeblaffer 1y ago
[flagged]
- kryptn 1y ago
  Mind elaborating?
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    "Look, doing something illegal offers a lot of benefits for me! I must be a genius"
    - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
      You’re not considering that many of these points are in no way illegal to provide as a streaming service.
      - throwaway290 1y ago
        I didn't say it. but the comment we are replying to says "piracy offers:", so direct your complaint to that guy. I agree with you. How about launch a better service instead of pointing out how breaking the law is beneficial to the breaker. Duh it always is, I wonder why??
        BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        Ah sorry i misread you.
- MobiusHorizons 1y ago
  I stopped pirating in college when I got a job and was making enough money to pay for movies I wanted to watch. But I miss almost every single one of the points listed so much so that I have begun purchasing dvd or Blu-ray copies of movies and shows I would otherwise stream, and ripping the content for my own use. It is an absurd amount of work, but the end result is a better experience than streaming in almost every way. If I could legally download movies and shows (paying full price for them) I absolutely would.
Dylan16807 1y ago
Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Similarly annoying is when original language subtitles aren’t available in your region for some reason, even when the audio track of the same language is. Really puts a damper on using foreign media for immersive language learning purposes.
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening!
    - cgriswald 1y ago
      Max has an anime and we stopped watching because even though English subtitles and English dubbed audio was available the original Japanese audio was always strangely delayed by days or weeks and the only way to tell it had been added was to check manually.
      - zerocrates 1y ago
        Lazarus?
        cgriswald 1y ago
        Yes. We figured it was a mistake and watched a single dubbed episode and it was terrible. IIRC when I googled it I found out it was an intentional decision and of course people were talking about just pirating the original. Edit: It has been some months, but I also vaguely recall the episodes getting the Japanese audio out of order, which is why we thought it was just a mistake for that episode until we 'caught up' to the newest episodes.
imoverclocked 1y ago
Until recently, 3. (poor connection) has been a huge issue for me and streaming services. When there is a download/watch later, I sigh with relief. 7. is only sort-of an issue, IMHO. Anything that is pirated is usually fairly benign content and I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too. I would add: Piracy offers the ability to remember content that isn't popular enough to remain in streaming services. I just searched "Big Trouble in Little China" and Google Play wants me to pay $3.79 to rent it or the full original price to purchase it. Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?
- qrios 1y ago
  > I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list. Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula
  - callc 1y ago
    This. Privacy does not matter until it does. Thanks for your example, qrios
  - tclancy 1y ago
    What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others? (Which everyone in the US should.)
    - qrios 1y ago
      ‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe). US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner. "The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation "Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) "The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege "In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film... "Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.
efilife 1y ago
What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression?
- komali2 1y ago
  Some movies have portions that are really quiet and others that are quiet loud. Depending on your taste you may prefer to not have the experience of turning up the audio so you can hear a quiet conversation, then having your ears blown out by a loud explosion or whatever. Director's tastes be damned, I'm trying to relax over here!
  - jack1243star 1y ago
    In audio processing, the more precise term for it is compression (dynamically adjust gain). Normalization usually means that the gain is adjusted so that the highest volume meets a certain level. (Like what YouTube does)
    - thayne 1y ago
      But compression is ambiguous because that could also refer to compressing the video stream to reduce the size of the movie.
      - kbouck 1y ago
        > compression is ambiguous I think the unambiguous term for this is "Dynamic Range Compression" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
    - lucideer 1y ago
      Compression is an entirely different thing. Compression isn't just gain adjustment - it's a specific type of audio processing that increases perceived "gain" (loudness) of the entire source audio by "compressing" the levels of loud frequencies & increasing the levels of quiet frequencies. Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time. It doesn't reduce dynamic range.
selcuka 1y ago
Offline watching is a thing with streaming services, too. Also, there is no reason for a paid streaming service not to implement 1 (but not 1.2), 2, 3 and 4. It's not like these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value in implementing and supporting them.
- godelski 1y ago
  > these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value That's the problem. These are useful features. Look around you, people are... using them. I got a ton of upvotes for my comment. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying that because it is evidence that these things are in demand. The issue is that most of this "what has value" is just as made up as anything else. Most people don't even know what they want. They get features and then they know they want it, but often not before. So it is affecting their bottom line, but the problem is group think.
  - selcuka 1y ago
    Sorry, I meant that "implementing them wouldn't affect their bottom line in a negative way". I agree with you that they are useful features. That's what separates these bullet points from the others: Others will never be implemented because they won't help them make more money.
    - godelski 1y ago
      I'm still not convinced it would affect their bottom line in a negative way. There's a thing I hear a lot from other engineers. They always talk about value. Here's a dumb example. Why when migrating over to Apple do I have 3 copies of holidays in my calendar? I got one from Google, one from Microsoft, and one from Apple. You are telling me you can't regex that out and just display one of them for me? You don't need to remove the events, just don't show me multiple copies. Have the failure mode be showing dupes, that's fine. It's what, an afternoon's work for an intern? But pushback I get is "where's the value", by which it it is always clarified that they mean money and profits. I can't come up with that, any number would be made up, right? A poor estimate at best. Everyone recognizes this. But why is this not the same for a ton of other bullshit features? We got features on teams with budgets of millions of dollars that are clearly going to fail from the get go. They then fail but became too big to fail and so they keep sinking money into it because it turned into politics. FFS, it's engineering, sometimes ideas just fail, it's not a big deal! But you're telling me that we can sink tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into this bullshit but not an afternoon for something that clearly will make a better user experience? Before I got most of these dupes solved my calendar was just unreadable. The same is with the rest of this. It's easy to sit high and mighty with your user data acting like people don't want these features. But the problem is you aren't even measuring that desire. If anything, you should be looking at what the most popular features are in platforms like Jellyfin and replicate them. That way you at least know there's existing demand! But the reality of it is that when you write programs you are writing an environment. There's on one-size-fits-all product you can make. You can give good sane defaults but the rest, it's just too noisy. Letting users have flexibility reveals a lot of things you'd never have been able to figure out on your own. It's very hard to know what users are frustrated with and honestly, most don't even know themselves. But open platforms allow for a small set of power users to fix those problems and make everything better for everyone else. That's the whole reason computers and smartphones have been so successful. But the same is for any program you write. It's the same reason everyone uses ffmpeg. It's because ffmpeg didn't just build a product, they built an environment. It's the same for Jellyfin. 99% of Jellyfin users are just using the platform as is and don't touch code ever. A good portion of those will install plugins like intro skipper. But your powerusers are the real win with this system. In our out of touch business structures we look and see that powerusers are a small portion of the userbase and dismiss them and their wants because of this. But they miss that these people also drive a lot of innovation of their products. That it makes them a lot of money. But the problem is, it's hard to measure a counterfactual. You'll never have in the spreadsheets "we would have made x profit if a poweruser made y feature for us". I mean it took god damn years for the fucking flashlight app to become a native app for both Android and iPhones. Yet, it was an app available within months and is to this day something everyone uses and uses frequently. I don't think anyone could even tell you how many dollars that generated. But I also don't think anyone can really tell you how many dollars Siri generated. Or your newest reskin of iOS or Android. Or the value of fancy features like AI magic erasers and stuff. So stop asking for value. The value numbers are just made up bullshit. It is politics. Just make good fucking products. Especially as an engineer. Your job is to make the product good, the business people's job is to make the company profitable and sustainable. Without each other, companies collapse. But when the business people take over they die much more slowly. It's not about value. It's not about better products. It's not even about the god damn profits. It's all politics. So just make the god damn product better. /rant
dencher 1y ago
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AnthonyMouse 1y ago
This is a case study in why competitive markets are important in general. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly but the monopoly is hard to enforce. It works because most people actually want to support the creators, not because DRM is effective or anything like that. So you have the uncommon situation in which a monopoly (the copyright holder) is operating in parallel to a competitive black market for content distribution (pirates). And then the competitive market -- even though it has to operate underground and makes hardly any profit -- provides the better experience. Lesson for anyone who thinks market consolidation doesn't lead to consumer harm.
- JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
  The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content.
  - remexre 1y ago
    Alfred Hitchcock's movies aren't missing from Netflix because Netflix couldn't afford to pay for their production.
  - ok123456 1y ago
    The non-black market produces an intentionally inferior product so they can maximize their rent-seeking behaviors.
  - therealpygon 1y ago
    None of them are paying the cost to create the content for movies and TV, except for their own original shows. I also have no problem paying a company to watch their original content…that’s completely fair. I also have no problem paying toward the “cost of creating content” as you say. I have a problem with how media is carved up to make sure you have to use multiple services and maximize profit. I have a problem with the ads they want to force me to watch…and charge me to watch them. I have a problem with their ever increasing prices for worse and worse catalogs. I have a problem with, despite paying for the right to watch it, they still decide how and when I can watch. None of those things are the “cost” of creating content.
benjiro 1y ago
> With $1k you can build a pretty good system 1. The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for. 2. Its cheap to upgrade / expand over time (if its not a all in one solution) 3. It opens a door to not just store movies/music/images, but as emulator, streaming service, or game streaming to one or multiple. 4. The content will not arbitrarily vanish. 5. Your bookmarks / last viewed / ... will not arbitrarily vanish. Do not get me started on this and how annoying it can be when a services removes content! 6. It serves not only as a device for "linux isos" or other gray zones but also as a legit backup of your own personal data. 7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services. 8. Can be enhanced with programs that offer image conversion, pdf conversion etc, all private! 9. Run your own chat server for the family, no US/EU "we want to know what you are saying" issues. 10. Can act like your own VPN, to route data from your phone or other devices outside your home. 11. Provides service if you are in area's with horrible internet connection with its ability to "cache isos" at night slowly. 12. Your control over the media means you can stream 4k to your PC. Netflix kuch kuch ... No, its not 4k. 13. You can gain the FULL bitrate of the media. You do not get a washed down version of the supposed media based upon how busy a streaming service their servers are or other limitations. 14. It can be used for so many other activities like programming. 15. Did i mention home automatization? And so much more ... People are probably doing things with NAS setups that i can not even think about. Your not investing into a machine for "illegal" stuff, your investing into a machine that frees you as the end user from all those cloud, streaming, and other services their lackluster service. And then provides all the added benefits on top, that a 24/7 running PC can provide. Lets also not forget the future where LLM's are a thing. Having your own open source LLM that runs at home, can be a major benefit. But ... it does require more knowledge, especially as you step up beyond simple storage. So that is the real downside, not the money, the time and knowledge buildup.
- BrandoElFollito 1y ago
  You completely forgot to mention home automation :) Home Assistant FTW Making all this work is not difficult with docker once you get past the steep learning curve
- sumtechguy 1y ago
goosedragons 1y ago
I think my favorite thing of not even piracy, just ripping my DVDs, is the ability to watch a random episode of a show. There's some shows like The Simpsons that I don't want to watch in production order any more, nor do I want to manually select. Now I just tap some buttons in Kodi and it randomly picks a recently unwatched episode.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Funnily enough, ability to watch offline is something the Netflix app for Windows (yes from their app store) lets you do. It is my favorite reason to install Windows apps instead of just using the browser, really handy for a trip when you have a real screen to watch movies from.
3036e4 1y ago
GOG used to have a small selection of DRM-free movies that you could buy to download and that would then make all those things possible to do in a way that would be legal or at least able to do locally in a way that would have a zero risk of being discovered even if it violated some EULA. Announcement from 2014: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree_movies https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree... Sadly http://www.gog.com/movies http://www.gog.com/movies now redirects to http://www.gog.com/games http://www.gog.com/games and the movies link that used to be on the front page is gone. Based on a comment in that announcement thread it looks like the movies were silently removed already back in 2023. I only noticed it now. They never seemed to really add any new movies and the existing ones were mostly game-related documentaries.
nostrademons 1y ago
Also the trust that your favorite music will still be available to you if the streaming service goes bankrupt or cancels its content licensing deal or decides to jack up prices unaffordably or makes its player incompatible with your OS or introduces a service-ending software bug.
foobarian 1y ago
1.3 Ability to make your own subtitles so your Klingon grandma can watch the movie 1.4 Ability to edit the video so your 10 year old can watch Top Secret! without gross anal sex jokes
kylebenzle 1y ago
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happymellon 1y ago
You shouldn't need to spend anything like $1k to get yourself going with a simple Jellyfin server running on a $50 TinyMiniMicro and a 4 tb external HDD. $150? 8 months to match Netflix. Substantially less to replace two services.
NoSalt 1y ago
Nice zero indexed array.
zzo38computer 1y ago
In addition to these and what you replied to, there is also the ability to downgrade the video quality in case you do not need the highest quality (e.g. in case you want to reduce the disk space and bandwidth requirements), and you might have a better UI (and otherwise use your own implementation of various software). About subtitles, something else I sometimes want to fix is adding an outline to the text and adding a translucent background (many use a opaque background (making it hard to see the picture) or a transparent background (making it hard to see the text)).

account42 1y ago

Or more generally: the ability to use a video player of your choice, which can have whatever features and interface that you want.

Galaxeblaffer 1y ago

[flagged]

kryptn 1y ago
Mind elaborating?
- throwaway290 1y ago
  "Look, doing something illegal offers a lot of benefits for me! I must be a genius"
  - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    You’re not considering that many of these points are in no way illegal to provide as a streaming service.
    - throwaway290 1y ago
      I didn't say it. but the comment we are replying to says "piracy offers:", so direct your complaint to that guy. I agree with you. How about launch a better service instead of pointing out how breaking the law is beneficial to the breaker. Duh it always is, I wonder why??
      - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        Ah sorry i misread you.
MobiusHorizons 1y ago
I stopped pirating in college when I got a job and was making enough money to pay for movies I wanted to watch. But I miss almost every single one of the points listed so much so that I have begun purchasing dvd or Blu-ray copies of movies and shows I would otherwise stream, and ripping the content for my own use. It is an absurd amount of work, but the end result is a better experience than streaming in almost every way. If I could legally download movies and shows (paying full price for them) I absolutely would.

Dylan16807 1y ago

Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Similarly annoying is when original language subtitles aren’t available in your region for some reason, even when the audio track of the same language is. Really puts a damper on using foreign media for immersive language learning purposes.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening!
  - cgriswald 1y ago
    Max has an anime and we stopped watching because even though English subtitles and English dubbed audio was available the original Japanese audio was always strangely delayed by days or weeks and the only way to tell it had been added was to check manually.
    - zerocrates 1y ago
      Lazarus?
      - cgriswald 1y ago
        Yes. We figured it was a mistake and watched a single dubbed episode and it was terrible. IIRC when I googled it I found out it was an intentional decision and of course people were talking about just pirating the original. Edit: It has been some months, but I also vaguely recall the episodes getting the Japanese audio out of order, which is why we thought it was just a mistake for that episode until we 'caught up' to the newest episodes.

imoverclocked 1y ago

Until recently, 3. (poor connection) has been a huge issue for me and streaming services. When there is a download/watch later, I sigh with relief. 7. is only sort-of an issue, IMHO. Anything that is pirated is usually fairly benign content and I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too. I would add: Piracy offers the ability to remember content that isn't popular enough to remain in streaming services. I just searched "Big Trouble in Little China" and Google Play wants me to pay $3.79 to rent it or the full original price to purchase it. Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?

qrios 1y ago
> I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list. Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula
- callc 1y ago
  This. Privacy does not matter until it does. Thanks for your example, qrios
- tclancy 1y ago
  What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others? (Which everyone in the US should.)
  - qrios 1y ago
    ‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe). US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner. "The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation "Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) "The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege "In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film... "Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.

efilife 1y ago

What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression?

komali2 1y ago
Some movies have portions that are really quiet and others that are quiet loud. Depending on your taste you may prefer to not have the experience of turning up the audio so you can hear a quiet conversation, then having your ears blown out by a loud explosion or whatever. Director's tastes be damned, I'm trying to relax over here!
- jack1243star 1y ago
  In audio processing, the more precise term for it is compression (dynamically adjust gain). Normalization usually means that the gain is adjusted so that the highest volume meets a certain level. (Like what YouTube does)
  - thayne 1y ago
    But compression is ambiguous because that could also refer to compressing the video stream to reduce the size of the movie.
    - kbouck 1y ago
      > compression is ambiguous I think the unambiguous term for this is "Dynamic Range Compression" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
  - lucideer 1y ago
    Compression is an entirely different thing. Compression isn't just gain adjustment - it's a specific type of audio processing that increases perceived "gain" (loudness) of the entire source audio by "compressing" the levels of loud frequencies & increasing the levels of quiet frequencies. Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time. It doesn't reduce dynamic range.

selcuka 1y ago

Offline watching is a thing with streaming services, too. Also, there is no reason for a paid streaming service not to implement 1 (but not 1.2), 2, 3 and 4. It's not like these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value in implementing and supporting them.

godelski 1y ago
> these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value That's the problem. These are useful features. Look around you, people are... using them. I got a ton of upvotes for my comment. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying that because it is evidence that these things are in demand. The issue is that most of this "what has value" is just as made up as anything else. Most people don't even know what they want. They get features and then they know they want it, but often not before. So it is affecting their bottom line, but the problem is group think.
- selcuka 1y ago
  Sorry, I meant that "implementing them wouldn't affect their bottom line in a negative way". I agree with you that they are useful features. That's what separates these bullet points from the others: Others will never be implemented because they won't help them make more money.
  - godelski 1y ago
    I'm still not convinced it would affect their bottom line in a negative way. There's a thing I hear a lot from other engineers. They always talk about value. Here's a dumb example. Why when migrating over to Apple do I have 3 copies of holidays in my calendar? I got one from Google, one from Microsoft, and one from Apple. You are telling me you can't regex that out and just display one of them for me? You don't need to remove the events, just don't show me multiple copies. Have the failure mode be showing dupes, that's fine. It's what, an afternoon's work for an intern? But pushback I get is "where's the value", by which it it is always clarified that they mean money and profits. I can't come up with that, any number would be made up, right? A poor estimate at best. Everyone recognizes this. But why is this not the same for a ton of other bullshit features? We got features on teams with budgets of millions of dollars that are clearly going to fail from the get go. They then fail but became too big to fail and so they keep sinking money into it because it turned into politics. FFS, it's engineering, sometimes ideas just fail, it's not a big deal! But you're telling me that we can sink tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into this bullshit but not an afternoon for something that clearly will make a better user experience? Before I got most of these dupes solved my calendar was just unreadable. The same is with the rest of this. It's easy to sit high and mighty with your user data acting like people don't want these features. But the problem is you aren't even measuring that desire. If anything, you should be looking at what the most popular features are in platforms like Jellyfin and replicate them. That way you at least know there's existing demand! But the reality of it is that when you write programs you are writing an environment. There's on one-size-fits-all product you can make. You can give good sane defaults but the rest, it's just too noisy. Letting users have flexibility reveals a lot of things you'd never have been able to figure out on your own. It's very hard to know what users are frustrated with and honestly, most don't even know themselves. But open platforms allow for a small set of power users to fix those problems and make everything better for everyone else. That's the whole reason computers and smartphones have been so successful. But the same is for any program you write. It's the same reason everyone uses ffmpeg. It's because ffmpeg didn't just build a product, they built an environment. It's the same for Jellyfin. 99% of Jellyfin users are just using the platform as is and don't touch code ever. A good portion of those will install plugins like intro skipper. But your powerusers are the real win with this system. In our out of touch business structures we look and see that powerusers are a small portion of the userbase and dismiss them and their wants because of this. But they miss that these people also drive a lot of innovation of their products. That it makes them a lot of money. But the problem is, it's hard to measure a counterfactual. You'll never have in the spreadsheets "we would have made x profit if a poweruser made y feature for us". I mean it took god damn years for the fucking flashlight app to become a native app for both Android and iPhones. Yet, it was an app available within months and is to this day something everyone uses and uses frequently. I don't think anyone could even tell you how many dollars that generated. But I also don't think anyone can really tell you how many dollars Siri generated. Or your newest reskin of iOS or Android. Or the value of fancy features like AI magic erasers and stuff. So stop asking for value. The value numbers are just made up bullshit. It is politics. Just make good fucking products. Especially as an engineer. Your job is to make the product good, the business people's job is to make the company profitable and sustainable. Without each other, companies collapse. But when the business people take over they die much more slowly. It's not about value. It's not about better products. It's not even about the god damn profits. It's all politics. So just make the god damn product better. /rant

dencher 1y ago

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AnthonyMouse 1y ago

This is a case study in why competitive markets are important in general. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly but the monopoly is hard to enforce. It works because most people actually want to support the creators, not because DRM is effective or anything like that. So you have the uncommon situation in which a monopoly (the copyright holder) is operating in parallel to a competitive black market for content distribution (pirates). And then the competitive market -- even though it has to operate underground and makes hardly any profit -- provides the better experience. Lesson for anyone who thinks market consolidation doesn't lead to consumer harm.

JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content.
- remexre 1y ago
  Alfred Hitchcock's movies aren't missing from Netflix because Netflix couldn't afford to pay for their production.
- ok123456 1y ago
  The non-black market produces an intentionally inferior product so they can maximize their rent-seeking behaviors.
- therealpygon 1y ago
  None of them are paying the cost to create the content for movies and TV, except for their own original shows. I also have no problem paying a company to watch their original content…that’s completely fair. I also have no problem paying toward the “cost of creating content” as you say. I have a problem with how media is carved up to make sure you have to use multiple services and maximize profit. I have a problem with the ads they want to force me to watch…and charge me to watch them. I have a problem with their ever increasing prices for worse and worse catalogs. I have a problem with, despite paying for the right to watch it, they still decide how and when I can watch. None of those things are the “cost” of creating content.

benjiro 1y ago

> With $1k you can build a pretty good system 1. The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for. 2. Its cheap to upgrade / expand over time (if its not a all in one solution) 3. It opens a door to not just store movies/music/images, but as emulator, streaming service, or game streaming to one or multiple. 4. The content will not arbitrarily vanish. 5. Your bookmarks / last viewed / ... will not arbitrarily vanish. Do not get me started on this and how annoying it can be when a services removes content! 6. It serves not only as a device for "linux isos" or other gray zones but also as a legit backup of your own personal data. 7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services. 8. Can be enhanced with programs that offer image conversion, pdf conversion etc, all private! 9. Run your own chat server for the family, no US/EU "we want to know what you are saying" issues. 10. Can act like your own VPN, to route data from your phone or other devices outside your home. 11. Provides service if you are in area's with horrible internet connection with its ability to "cache isos" at night slowly. 12. Your control over the media means you can stream 4k to your PC. Netflix kuch kuch ... No, its not 4k. 13. You can gain the FULL bitrate of the media. You do not get a washed down version of the supposed media based upon how busy a streaming service their servers are or other limitations. 14. It can be used for so many other activities like programming. 15. Did i mention home automatization? And so much more ... People are probably doing things with NAS setups that i can not even think about. Your not investing into a machine for "illegal" stuff, your investing into a machine that frees you as the end user from all those cloud, streaming, and other services their lackluster service. And then provides all the added benefits on top, that a 24/7 running PC can provide. Lets also not forget the future where LLM's are a thing. Having your own open source LLM that runs at home, can be a major benefit. But ... it does require more knowledge, especially as you step up beyond simple storage. So that is the real downside, not the money, the time and knowledge buildup.

BrandoElFollito 1y ago
You completely forgot to mention home automation :) Home Assistant FTW Making all this work is not difficult with docker once you get past the steep learning curve
sumtechguy 1y ago

goosedragons 1y ago

I think my favorite thing of not even piracy, just ripping my DVDs, is the ability to watch a random episode of a show. There's some shows like The Simpsons that I don't want to watch in production order any more, nor do I want to manually select. Now I just tap some buttons in Kodi and it randomly picks a recently unwatched episode.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Funnily enough, ability to watch offline is something the Netflix app for Windows (yes from their app store) lets you do. It is my favorite reason to install Windows apps instead of just using the browser, really handy for a trip when you have a real screen to watch movies from.

3036e4 1y ago

GOG used to have a small selection of DRM-free movies that you could buy to download and that would then make all those things possible to do in a way that would be legal or at least able to do locally in a way that would have a zero risk of being discovered even if it violated some EULA. Announcement from 2014: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree_movies https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree... Sadly http://www.gog.com/movies http://www.gog.com/movies now redirects to http://www.gog.com/games http://www.gog.com/games and the movies link that used to be on the front page is gone. Based on a comment in that announcement thread it looks like the movies were silently removed already back in 2023. I only noticed it now. They never seemed to really add any new movies and the existing ones were mostly game-related documentaries.

nostrademons 1y ago

Also the trust that your favorite music will still be available to you if the streaming service goes bankrupt or cancels its content licensing deal or decides to jack up prices unaffordably or makes its player incompatible with your OS or introduces a service-ending software bug.

foobarian 1y ago

1.3 Ability to make your own subtitles so your Klingon grandma can watch the movie 1.4 Ability to edit the video so your 10 year old can watch Top Secret! without gross anal sex jokes

kylebenzle 1y ago

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happymellon 1y ago

You shouldn't need to spend anything like $1k to get yourself going with a simple Jellyfin server running on a $50 TinyMiniMicro and a 4 tb external HDD. $150? 8 months to match Netflix. Substantially less to replace two services.

NoSalt 1y ago

Nice zero indexed array.

zzo38computer 1y ago

In addition to these and what you replied to, there is also the ability to downgrade the video quality in case you do not need the highest quality (e.g. in case you want to reduce the disk space and bandwidth requirements), and you might have a better UI (and otherwise use your own implementation of various software). About subtitles, something else I sometimes want to fix is adding an outline to the text and adding a translucent background (many use a opaque background (making it hard to see the picture) or a transparent background (making it hard to see the text)).