7 ms·

Not a lawyer but... if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy. I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 p

• tim-tday 6mo ago
  It is, but it is illegal to break the copy protection. So if you have the license, download a legal fair use back via “alternate distribution channels”.
• yellottyellott 6mo ago
  TrueNAS + AppleTV + Infuse + Tailscale is my setup. Also iTunes has Movies for $5, but it has DRM, which bit me since I always remembered their mp3s being DRM-free back in the day being a big deal.
  • mapontosevenths 6mo ago
    That's ok if you don't care about sound much. Apple prevents local playback apps from playing back Atmos audio. It's fine if you only want 5.1 though. There used to be some limitations with Dolby Vision as well, but I think those have mostly been straightened out now.
    • mingus88 6mo ago
      Yeah if Apple ever allows audio passthru then the appleTV would dethrone the aging Nvidia shield as the best streamer on the market I have a modest AVR and 7 channel setup and still watch movies on my shield which is still getting android updates
    • maayank 6mo ago
      wait. If I use VLC (for example) on AppleTV to play something from my network using SMB or DLNA, I cannot get Dolby Atmos?
      • mapontosevenths 6mo ago
        Right. I'm under the impression that it's a licensing thing. It also can't do TrueHD Atmos in general. Just lossy Dolby DD+ for audio. It also doesn't do Dolby Vision properly, only supporting the profiles meant for streaming that use less data. Similarly, It CAN do Atmos for E-AC3 audio, but E-AC3 is meant for streaming, so it's really rare to have that in a file you're playing back locally. Basically, it just falls back to whatever the next best thing it can support is at the hardware level. This is one area where Android wins. The Nvidia Shield, despite being ancient, is your best bet for local playback. It's still limited on the supported Dolby Vision profiles, but can just pass the audio through to your receiver without mucking with it. So you get all the bells and whistles. Other than the shield your only alternatives are weird dedicated devices that are literally built for playing back UHD blu-ray rips (Dune HD, etc). https://community.firecore.com/t/help-get-more-dolby-atmos-on-apple-tv/16477 https://community.firecore.com/t/help-get-more-dolby-atmos-o...
      • hapticmonkey 6mo ago
        Dolby TrueHD and DTS:X audio tracks (from Bluray) are played as lossless 7.1 PCM. Only Dolby Atmos from WEB-DLs will play, and you need to use a supported player (like Infuse or VidHub). It’s a tvOS limitation.
• benoliver999 6mo ago
  I run jellyfin and on iOS infuse is the only player that seems to work with all codecs
  • bombcar 6mo ago
    I've had some luck with Swiftfin though the UI is no where near as polished as Infuse.
• tombert 6mo ago
  > if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy. Is this actually true? I thought there was inherent illegality to cracking the DRM on DVDs. Granted, I doubt anyone is going to come after you for making a backup of a legitimate copy, but I think strictly speaking it's still illegal. I am also not a lawyer.
  • surround 6mo ago
    Yes, DMCA made the mere act of breaking DRM illegal, even if what you do with the media is legal.
  • mingus88 6mo ago
    This was a big issue back in the DVDCSS days. The DMCA explicitly forbids bypassing protective measures. Doesn’t matter who owns the media, the copyright holder owns the content. 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A) Which was the beginning of the end for ownership vs purchasing a license. That thing you paid for isn’t yours.
  • babypuncher 6mo ago
    I am also NAL, but it almost certainly is legal to make backups for personal use. Breaking the encryption is the usual legal hangup, though there is no real enforcement on this front and nobody is stopping you from using Handbrake or MakeMKV. More importantly however, is the fact that there isn't a meaningful argument that making backups of physical media you own is ethically wrong.
    • tombert 6mo ago
      Oh I don’t think it’s ethically wrong in the slightest. If you own the DVD you have given the copyright holder due compensation; I think it’s ethically fine to make a backup of media that you legally purchased. I was just saying that I don’t think it’s actually legal to do so for a DVD since those usually have CSS encryption.
  • to11mtm 6mo ago
    Possibly in some countries... But at least in the US, it is a DMCA violation. DMCA gets a little weird; Basically unless you're distributing it is a civil penalty (which, I could be wrong but would mean you'd get a Jury trial, even assuming it ever came up) and I doubt you would ever run into legal issues so long as you were only backing up for personal use. It's where you get into distribution that anyone starts to care, and it's when you do distribution on a large scale that criminal penalties come into play. However there may be countries where possession of an 'illegal number' or 'DRM Breaking software' is considered legal for personal use.
• rahimnathwani 6mo ago
  The vertical resolution of a DVD is either 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL). This usually matched the visible vertical resolution of the TV you were using. A 1080p screen has 6 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD. A 4k screen has 24 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.
  • tehwebguy 6mo ago
    I don’t think DVDs look bad on a 1080p TV, others that assume they will may be surprised!
    • to11mtm 6mo ago
      I think too many people remember DVDs but mostly remember them on Interlaced displays. Or hooked their DVD player to the HDTV with an RCA cable and were disappointed. On the flipside, if you had a DVD player capable of progressive scan and Component or HDMI-out, it's fine for couch viewing. That said, there are plenty of DVDs out there (extreme case, single layer DVD with extras on same disc as movie) where the bitrate can show, but that's not a fault of the format.
      • prmoustache 6mo ago
        I am watching DVDs on a 1080p projector to the large wall of my living room. It is a 10y old cheap aliexpress one so it is not the sharpest you can get and it actually makes the DVD enjoyable as it smoothen a bit the whole thing. I don't really know what is at play but I can only say it seems to blur the image in a pleasant "optical way", not like if I was applying a gaussian blur and was watching it on an high dpi screen.
        • mrec 6mo ago
          Makes perfect sense; old CRT TVs had the same kind of effect in making low resolutions bearable. (If you think DVD is bad, you'd have loved long-play VHS at around 230p...)
    • b112 6mo ago
• lamasery 6mo ago
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• kllrnohj 6mo ago
  > You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea. The image quality on these is also quite bad, especially with cost cutting resulting in these being compressed further to fit on a single-layer DVD. Often without any indication that it happened, as well. Whether or not you find it acceptable is definitely a matter of personal taste, but it's very much apples & oranges vs. Netflix. Blu-ray by contrast is generally better quality than what you'll get from streaming services.
  • altairprime 6mo ago
    As a kid I watched Fantasia on VHS so many times that the tape quality started to decay and my parents stored it away for special occasions. The quality decay didn’t bother me at all.
    • IAmBroom 6mo ago
      Long prior to that, I played my Jesus Christ Superstar album so many times that the tic-sound where a scratch appeared is now embedded in my memory as part of the song. I sometimes "sing" the tick, even in other versions.
  • hulitu 6mo ago
    > The image quality on these is also quite bad, Streaming services are not exactly known for their image and sound quality.
• deleted 6mo ago
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• babypuncher 6mo ago
  I've been doing this since 2009. Regular 1080p blu-rays still usually provide better image quality than streaming services. It's not even a contest between streaming and 4k discs. I've bought and watched hundreds of movies and TV shows on disc, but can count the number of times I've used an actual disc player to do so on one hand.
• giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  If you buy one that has a VUDU code, and go on moviesanywhere.com you can now link your VUDU account, your Apple iTunes account and your Google Movies account, and whoever else, and the movie unlocks on all those other streaming services. So if you buy a BluRay movie, you can stream it on your favorite streaming service provider thanks to MovisAnywhere (run by the movie industry - the one rare good thing they did). I buy movies only when its one I really want and there's either an iTunes code or a VUDU code.
  • tracker1 6mo ago
    It's also worth looking into if your local library offers Kanopy services.
    • ynac 6mo ago
      Big ups on that! Not to mention your local library's collection of DVDs. Or, their inter-library loan system for the ultra weird and rare. One note on Kanopy - they use a ticket system (10-15 tickets per library customer). So if you have a couple people in your household, all of your library card numbers contribute tickets to the login. And, if you have two library systems like we do here (KCLS and SPL) you can double dip on all the cards again. No hack required - Kanopy actually has a very nice way of failing over to other cards as your quota is used up. And if that's not enough, try Scarecrow Video out of Seattle. They are the masters of physical digital film media right now. It's fun to try to stump them. And they provide mailorder system similar to the old red envelopes of NetFlix. eBay has DVD collections go up for sale all the time. Fun to buy the "box of movies" for $100 and see what you get. Another big haul for me is from local thrift stores - usually 50 cents to 2 bucks a disc.
    • giancarlostoro 6mo ago
      https://www.hoopladigital.com/ https://www.hoopladigital.com/ Hoopla is good for this is what I hear as well. I have not tried it yet, I have not taken the time to get my library card since I moved and forgot to renew. There's a new library opening up near me, so waiting on that to open a new card.
  • 6mo ago
• bisby 6mo ago
  "Own" the movie in quotes is interesting. Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted and can be treated in some ways like a license still. It is possible to obtain a legal copy of physical media and not be legally allowed to view it in certain ways. Backups are legal (assuming you keep the physical DVD, like youve said, and dont just "make a backup" and then sell the original), but you don't just have carte blanche to the content still (ie, region coding has weird legalities to it, public viewing is still not allowed, because you havent licensed that right.) That said, I still fully agree with you. I just find the "license" vs "ownership" topic interesting for physical copies. The fact that media companies are so strongly trying to limit your rights just means you need to make sure you keep what rights you do have. I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad. Reference: https://language-studio.clas.ufl.edu/copyright-law-and-educational-media-with-special-attention-to-foreign-media/rights-of-the-purchaser-or-owner-of-a-legal-copy/ https://language-studio.clas.ufl.edu/copyright-law-and-educa...
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
    >Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted Yes, and it turns out I also own the hard drives that it's stored on. The thumb drives. The SSDs. And there is no copyright police in my utility room. But there is a Plex server. The "Netflix sucks and I don't have enough control over my shows" problem was solved years ago. Seriously, you can stream this to any device you own, whether you're at home or in some hotel a continent away. You can stream it for your friends. >I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad. I made a list of our DVDs, then gave them away and spend a few weeks downloading those. In many cases, like Star Trek TNG, I ended up getting improved versions... god help me, interlace comb.
    • fhn 6mo ago
      So if I rent out the device that I own, I can make $$? Also, the everybody is my friend. $$$$.
• iwontberude 6mo ago
  I'll just continue to take the DVDs out of my neighbor's trash and play those instead and disregard licensing entirely.* * Usenet
• deleted 6mo ago
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• toddmorey 6mo ago
  Also with this approach, you actually have a real collection and it's fun to collect things. My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection. So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.
  • airstrike 6mo ago
    > So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings. That is absolutely hilarious and it totally sounds like a villain's name
  • HWR_14 6mo ago
    It is interesting that Netflix alone gets blamed, as opposed to the parties they are negotiating with.
    • altairprime 6mo ago
      Netflix chose to negotiate revocable licenses to save money and draw in users, so it does seem valid to assign blame to Netflix for signing such contracts.
    • autoexec 6mo ago
      Netflix is ultimately responsible for what they put on the platform, for delivering a consistent product to their users, and for setting expectations. Netflix is exceptionally shitty at letting people what is leaving their platform and when, and even letting them know when the shows they saved or were in the middle of watching have been removed. Netflix has been around for ages but we still have to depend on third party websites to tell us what's coming/leaving. Some items will have a "leaving soon" banner on the thumbnail, but that's only good for shows netflix decides to push at you. There's no section or search that will find all that stuff (searching for "leaving soon" will show you some of them)
• usernametaken29 6mo ago
  Just say you’re training a multimodal language model and in this weird parallel universe we live in suddenly you’re not breaking copyright. Bonus points if your model reproduces the original 1:1. Definitely not a copy though
  • IAmBroom 6mo ago
    Eerily like paying someone for sex... while filming it "for a movie". Suddenly, not prostitution!
• dawnerd 6mo ago
  It's also fairly trivial these days to backup 4k blurays. You can also buy them very cheap second hand. The quality difference between streaming and 4k BR is nuts.
  • Taikonerd 6mo ago
    What workflow do you use to backup Blu-rays? I was looking into this before, and I couldn't find anything convenient...
    • dawnerd 6mo ago
      Just dump the man movie + extras with makemkv and copy to my nas. Hardest part is finding a drive with compatible firmware to flash for uhd support (or just buy one preflashed I guess). It’s easy once you get the hang of makemkv.
    • jshier 6mo ago
      Like dawnerd said, you can use MakeMKV to decrypt and rip the discs, ideally using a BR drive with an unlocked firmware (I have the Asus drive that MakeMKV ships a firmware for). Really the only annoying part is track identification, as there isn't an equivalent of CDDB for Blurays (or if there is, MakeMKV doesn't integrate it), so you have to identify content yourself. When you do that, make sure you do it in the same way that your media server will identify it. I had quite the issue trying to name my episodes as Plex expects them for things like two parters. And while Plex has "AI" credit identification, it isn't super accurate, and is another db service that should really exist but doesn't.
• kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
  The EFF doesn't decide what is legal. Unauthorized copies of commercial videos are still a copyright violation in the US. The DMCA anti-circumvention provisions aren't relevant. The AHRA permits private copies of audio recordings with the proviso that SCMS (or equivalent) must be implemented to prevent multi-generational copying. That last requirement has never been enforced and is now unworkable but it's still in effect.
• DuperPower 6mo ago
  why DVDs why arent people getting blurays
  • solstice 6mo ago
    Maybe because they are significantly more finicky than DVDs to set up for playing in VLC for example. You need to download a key list of all released bluray movies from a slightly sketchy website, put it on a folder in the system somewhere and only then does it work. I'm not sure if it's easier using jellyfin etc.
• aaron695 6mo ago
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• rkagerer 6mo ago
  But who wants boxes of DVD's cluttering up the place? Could someone turn this into a business where they store all those DVD's you bought, on your behalf? Or even go out and proactively build your library for you. Then let you download the missing ones (or if that flouts distribution laws, roundtrip mail them to you). Since you're unlikely to need to view all of your titles at once, maybe they could do a loaner program where customers pool their entitlements and "check out" movies to watch. Wait, have I just reinvented OG Netflix? Move the storage to the cloud and now you have something like contemporary Netflix. The difference being instead of going out and negotiating bulk streaming contracts, there's a physical DVD backing every single ownership title. (For my next trick we'll tokenize them to a cryptocurrency...)
  • doublerabbit 6mo ago
    > But who wants boxes of DVD's cluttering up the place? I buy Blu-Rays at charity shops, strip them from the case and once ripped slide them in to a CD wallet with the inner leaflet. A horror show if you were collecting with cases but works for if you desire to own movie to NAS legally. > Could someone turn this into a business where they store all those DVD's you bought, on your behalf? Someone did, got sued and the business took the shock and closed down. They used to let you buy old stocked DVD's they owned. When you cancelled your subcription they sent you back the DVD's.
• wil421 6mo ago
  What about Blu-ray? I don’t want DVD quality and last time I checked you can’t exactly legally backup Blu Rays because you break DRM. Most 4k kids movies on eBay were from the bargain bin at Walmart. The DVDs are as cheap as 4k blu rays.
• mcculley 6mo ago
  > You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license". You do not "own" the movie. You still only have the right to view your personal copies. You cannot broadcast it. You cannot charge others to watch it.