7 ms·

Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience. Most recent example - I wa

by hbn 5mo ago

Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience. Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years. Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.

a1o 5mo ago
On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?
- Geonode 5mo ago
  The fact that they refuse to balance audio for standard stereo setups is a whole other nightmare.
  - skarz 5mo ago
    Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.
    - ramgine 5mo ago
      From my understanding it’s not which soundbar that’s the issue, it’s that you’re only using a soundbar for audio. The channels all get compressed into one device with a couple speakers instead of whatever it was originally created for, like five or seven speakers with a subwoofer
      - Geonode 5mo ago
        You're right. I just don't want surround.I have two big, nice speakers for my tv, and that's what I want. But I still have to actively work the remote, especially with a kid sleeping in my house.
        ramgine 5mo ago
        I’m in the same boat. I have a couple floor standers for audio, but I added a center channel and it helped with dialogue
    - alamortsubite 5mo ago
      There's an easy fix for that if you use a player like VLC that has an audio compressor: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-movies-that-are-really-quiet-then-really-lo-5920290 https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-movies-that-are-really-qui...
doublerabbit 5mo ago
> Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. The licenses for the song tracks have also expired; so they removed these too. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which has been replaced with a less-impressive cover that ruins the vibe. Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. A £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS. I've not watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show. Real acting, real filming; the last of it's kind.
- triceratops 5mo ago
  > That's because the license for the tracks expired They're talking about pieces of dialogue in the show, not licensed music.
  - doublerabbit 5mo ago
    I know. And I am commenting on that the licensed music within the series has been replaced due to expired licensing for which that itself is ridiculous.
    - radley 5mo ago
      Re-licensing music is a two-fold challenge. Sometimes it's much more efficient to use substitute music, instead of negotiating for new rights. First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels). Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.
      - cwillu 5mo ago
jjulius 5mo ago
Not to go off on a complete tangent, but... >... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV. Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.
- Waterluvian 5mo ago
  To me it is the difference between art and product. A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill. So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.
  - toyg 5mo ago
    The terminology is art vs content. Anybody talking about "content", by definition, do not actually care about what that content is, just that it is contained into something they charge for.
    - cwillu 5mo ago
      This is a great example of when pulling out a dictionary implies that you've lost the argument, because if people were using the word in the same sense as the dictionary definition, you would have no need of the dictionary to “prove” the meaning.
      - the_af 5mo ago
sushisource 5mo ago
Disney+ is truly unmitigated dogshit. It constantly chokes and stutters, seems to cause my NVIDIA Sheild to peg its CPU and/or page to disk, or something, to the point where it becomes unresponsive for multiple seconds at a time. I genuinely cannot understand how you could so utterly bungle software that's been a solved problem for over a decade.
mojo74 5mo ago
This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.
- justaman123 5mo ago
  Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say
- ravenstine 5mo ago
  Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent. People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
  - gk-- 5mo ago
    i feel like this is an important piece. even if you want to do the "right thing", is it really supporting these platforms that horse-trade content in huge multi-billion dollar deals just so they can increase their userbase with the intent to jam more ads down their throat? have any of these platforms _improved_ the experience for the average creator? they're poison, it almost makes it feel more righteous to steal.
    - rkomorn 5mo ago
      You can stop doing the right thing without doing the wrong thing.
iooi 5mo ago
> But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.
- hbn 5mo ago
  It wasn't a surround sound system, we were watching on the built-in app on a Fire TV from the TV's speakers. Also just Google "malcolm in the middle missing audio" and you'll find a ton of people with the issue https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d/new_disney_version_missing_all_kinds_of_random/ https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d... This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - someguyiguess 5mo ago
    Yup. That’s your issue. Disney+ outputting Dolby 5.1 and your speakers are stereo.
    - hbn 5mo ago
      Well it's still their fault for not making sure their audio works on a normal, non-surround setup Also worth noting that we switched the audio track to Spanish and you can hear it just fine.
      - morsch 5mo ago
        Probably because the Spanish track isn't delivered in surround...
kobieps 5mo ago
A recent experience I had was : 1. buy movie on iTunes 2. have kids that can't do long distance drives 3. obtain dvd players for car 4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.
- cheeze 5mo ago
  While I agree with you in spirit... were you expecting that you could... burn the film to a DVD or something? Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.
  - kobieps 5mo ago
    Not at all (hence saying "obvious in hindsight"). Simply pointing out that, at the time, my purchasing decision wasn't influenced by how many use cases it would restrict. Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes. edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
    - cassianoleal 5mo ago
      > there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes. Music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free, so you can definitely burn CDs with them.
      - kobieps 5mo ago
        Ah very nice. I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't
        rkagerer 5mo ago
        I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't Why?
someguyiguess 5mo ago
Are you trying to listen in Dolby surround on a stereo setup? Disney+ defaults to surround sound and you’ll lose some audio channels if your speakers are stereo
- advisedwang 5mo ago
  Channel issues are like 90% of issues like this, but it's not always user error. Often a cheap production will just ship the front left + right channels as the stereo mix, instead of down mixing all the left + center channels into the stereo left etc. This is endemic in back catalogs on streaming providers where the catalog is a bulk assets that nobody reviews and is passed around between companies that don't care about the quality they deliver to each other.
- RobotToaster 5mo ago
  That seems like a terrible default, aren't most people listening in stereo at best?
- gamblor956 5mo ago
  This is basically the issue. User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point. The dialog is just fine if you have a surround sound system or spend 5 seconds once to select stereo sound. Importantly, the dialog is still missing in the torrent versions taken from the surround sound stream because the same problem occurs. You only get the missing dialog in stereo if you download the stereo rip.
  - Jtarii 5mo ago
    >User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point A streaming service incorrectly defaulting to surround sound is most certainly not a user error.
    - gamblor956 5mo ago
      Sure it is. Disney+ defaults to the sound settings passed to it by the user's TV or device. It doesn't default to surround sound unless the user sets their TV or Roku or other device to surround sound. And either way...it's the programmers at fault here. Very hypocritical for tech bros to pirate someone else's content when it's their own brethren that created the problem they're using to justify their piracy.
anthonj 5mo ago
I will add to the list that for some weird reason in my country original language is not always available for all movies, and the subtitle experience in genenal is lacking.
- realo 5mo ago
  I am in the french-speaking part of Canada. In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio. Quite amazing.
  - kakacik 5mo ago
    French part of Switzerland. Quite a few shows and movies, ie anime but also others, have original audio track (so lets say japanese for anime) and only german subs. You can probably count number of folks on your fingers and toes who would even be able, let alone willing to watch this in such combination from this region of meagre 2.2 million folks but quite rich on average. So torrents it is, its legal here, lightning speed, always superb quality (one can choose any movie in range between 1GB and 50 GB for 1080p and all is very good looking), get it in a minute, and watch. I don't blame Netflix generally (well for those german subs I definitely do, I know they have english ones just couldn't be bothered and I have hard time believing they have region issue with english subs) but license owners, they are the ultimate fuckers messing with content holders/resellers/renters, and consequently us users. Also, torrents are so convenient, I won't be paying some service just to see a single show a year. I just won't even for a month and shuffle things like idiot, thats a bad proposition.
    - svl7 5mo ago
      Downloading such content is not prohibited by law in Switzerland, thus legal. Uploading however is a different story. So stating that torrenting is legal is not actually true. Unless maybe you simply fake your upload.
      - 5mo ago
shevy-java 5mo ago
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata A friend once pointed that out. He pays a lot and gets low quality. That was what changed his mind. That was also almost twenty years ago. Most people changed. US corporations trying to raid people in foreign countries is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable at all. The swedish government should be ashamed for acting as US proxies here (nowadays with Trump this is more clear, but even 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it should have been a no-brainer).
jeffwask 5mo ago
The Mad Men AI upscale was such trash. You could see cameras, crew, equipment, etc. total mess that showed no care for the material.
- marysol5 5mo ago
  Wait, they used raw-unedited video as a source? Are they mad! (Pun intended)
- nickthegreek 5mo ago
  Wasn't this a remaster, not an ai upscale? And I thought that the incomplete effect situation has been resolved.
throw-the-towel 5mo ago
> you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Obligatory classic joke: Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.
munk-a 5mo ago
For a while I was really happy because it sounded like the owners of the Intended Method™ had finally realized how much damage to their bottom line their terrible UX was having, so I fondly remembered TPB but moved over to the official platforms... then we started getting some hulu exclusives (not available in Canada) and the H(o)BOGo, and then a few more platform fragmentations... I have enough going on that I can't currently be bothered switching over to TPB but I ended up culling my streaming down to just Dropout, Nebula, severely modified Youtube and some patreons I care about. I am happy to speak with my wallet and tell the services to get lost and I'd be heading back to TPB if I were still in a phase of my life where discussing the latest Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones was a central focus of my socialization - as it is though, the cost to follow the Intended Method™ is simply too expensive in money, discovery time, and platform bugs for me to give a damn. Maybe they'll learn their lesson again and sanity will reign - but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing.
- marysol5 5mo ago
  >but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing. I'd argue that media is substantially better value today, than it ever was back in the day. You pay now the price of a single DVD, for a whole extensive catalogue of content. Or what you'd pay to watch a PPV for the time it was broadcast.
  - yurishimo 5mo ago
    > You pay now the price of a single DVD, for a whole extensive catalogue of content. You pay that amount for access to said catalogue of content for a single month. If you bought the DVD, it would work for years/decades to come (assuming no manufacturing defects) plus you'd be well within your rights to make a digital copy of that DVD for your private collection. Sure, you probably only watched that DVD 1-3 times, but that's not the point. The point is you bought it and that gives you certain rights that are now totally absent from a digital first media consumption reference point.
    - 5mo ago
ignoramous 5mo ago
> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. The thing with free is you will tend to be less demanding & most certainly more forgiving even if not less resentful. One reason why finding market fit for products built for free consumers is harder than for paid. The ones paying you will want their problems solved pronto, and if you're diligent enough, you'll end up building a product that solves those same "hair on the fire" problems for many others with hopefully deeper pockets.
- kakacik 5mo ago
  It doesn't seem you understood we talk about movies and tv shows, not some customer app solving... problems? Puzzling comment overall, will refrain from usual tropes and assume in good faith its 'lost in translation'.
  - ignoramous 5mo ago
    Not talking about movies or apps, but a general observation on the dynamics of free v paid, from both, the supply & demand sides. As counterproductive as putting prices up feels, charging $20 for VEED brought in a different and more serious type of user, they need the product and they are happy to pay for it and have different needs to the $5 users we originally had. Things started looking up for the first time in ages. https://medium.com/@veedio/the-journey-to-ramen-profitability-f202be50e9d5 https://medium.com/@veedio/the-journey-to-ramen-profitabilit... / https://archive.vn/Yt0sn https://archive.vn/Yt0sn
olalonde 5mo ago
I'm in China and often get blocked by Netflix or Prime Video for using a VPN... Torrents are often the only thing that works.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
RAM is too expensive to waste on "streaming" I have always prefered downloading
lovich 5mo ago
[dead]
whywhywhywhy 5mo ago
Ultimately history has proven that copyright owners can't be trusted to preserve their own IP and preservation should be entirely legal.
- qingcharles 5mo ago
  Those involved in the creation of the art can write a contract that stops it being ruined by future owners. When the Bobs sold their rights to Back to the Future they added terms to protect the brand. I know of one time where they intervened to stop a 3D conversion that Universal wanted. (Personally, I think 3D conversion can work well, e.g. Titanic, but other times it is monstrous, e.g. Star Wars Ep 1)
  - account42 5mo ago
    Copyright is a deal to encourage the creation of more information that society sees as valuable by granting limited time monopolies. If we don't all end up with the unmolested work in the end then it had no right to ever receive any copyright protections in the first place. The original creator isn't even the primary party being harmed here - they already got their paycheck out of the deal.
mannanj 5mo ago
Many times I purchase or rent a movie now, and immediately go to torrent it and feel guilt-free. Torrent meets my needs better than official methods. I don't feel guilty about it because I still paid. Now, if only, I could have a better way to filter out the garbage from the gold.
Barrin92 5mo ago
>and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes Personally for me the worst case of this is Scrubs. The soundtrack of the show is so incredibly crucial to its atmosphere. There's a scene with the Coral's Dreaming of You that they've replaced with some awful generic track in the streaming versions. That people see the show now and maybe don't even know it is just a crime.
Fr0styMatt88 5mo ago
Also fun, Google purchased movies over the years getting moved to Youtube and then seemingly losing all surround sound content and coming through as 2-channel only (Android TV).
sourcecodeplz 5mo ago
Thing is, most people don't really care about this. They watch something in the evening maybe weekend and that is it. This will not change and these services are meant for the masses.
xyst 5mo ago
I experienced the same trying to watch One Piece on Crunchy Roll. Many of the episodes on their dubbed versions were just awful or de-synced. It can continue like that for 3-4 episodes then suddenly fix itself. Then when I watch in Japanese with subtitles, the subtitles can occasionally be missing on some scenes.
threethirtytwo 5mo ago
stremio.
tosti 5mo ago
I'd swear to any diety "The Game" on HBO was a screener. No thank you, I'll just trawl the high seas for loot.
pdntspa 5mo ago
The Intended Method(tm) is an intentionally gimped feeding trough designed primarily to pacify uninquisitive minds and line Hollywood exec pockets. They have never ever been honest in their accounting or reasonable in their expectations, let alone charitable enough to let the art propagate amongst its consumers in the manner they see fit (without court interventions). So I don't see why we have to be honest in our consumption. There is plenty of money to be made in secondary sources -- merchandising and so on. They can give up trying to lock down information that naturally wants to be free. But they won't, because greed.
jasonfarnon 5mo ago
One possible exception, do you consider youtube an "intended method"? (A legit question for those of us who remember what a legal gray area they were in, in the 2000s.) Because the convenience of youtube replaced downloading music torrents, for me at least (who don't really care much audio quality). I only wish they would let me hear the music when I turn my phone's screen off.
- merge_software 5mo ago
  Same here. Most of what I want to listen to is on youtube. I use the brave browser on my phone which both blocks adds and allows me to listen with the phone locked.
marysol5 5mo ago
Eh? The whole "scene" is full of shitty re-encodes of video, with the audio or video spliced from another source. There's a whole cottage industry of squeezing content into smaller sizes.
- dspillett 4mo ago
  It is easy enough to avoid those and make sure you get better encodes, if size is not at all a priority for you. My main problem, even with the better encoders, is the lack of choice in audio tracks and subs when I'm pretty sure the source material had the ones I might want.
drunx 5mo ago
I used to pay for "all of them". Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, HBO Max, Mubi, Prime Video and occasional rents on Youtube movies. And I made myself believe that I'm doing it THE RIGHT WAY hence they will do good by me. - price hikes - shows moved between services or different seasons available on different services - some movies are just NOWHERE - sometimes there was no English language (YouTube movies in the none English speaking region like Germany - happened a lot) So many times we would end up on a treasure hunt through the services to watch what we wanted, only to then end up just watching some Netflix vanilla stuff as we just give up. I am all for doing the right thing, but my god, my, customer needs, are not on any priority lists.
piltdownman 5mo ago
Even worse, the MBAs at the top of the pile in Netflix and other streaming services refusing to license the music for TV series' they have bought out and geolocked. This isn't just swapping like-for-like with stock music, it's a pervasive form of Stalinist Revisionism - with certains edits and scenes altered or completely removed when they relied on the track in question. As a fastcompany article notes, "...streaming is also changing the way music works in new titles, with easier, safer, cheaper song choices being added to TV shows in lieu of anything interesting." The logical end-game being the relegation of musical backing in TV to AI generated muzak and genre 'sound-a-likes', like we've already seen in the lowest echelons of the advertisement and backing-track industry. https://www.fastcompany.com/91109690/why-streaming-platforms-are-scrubbing-the-soundtracks-from-your-favorite-shows https://www.fastcompany.com/91109690/why-streaming-platforms...
WhyNotHugo 5mo ago
This (one of the) reasons why sites like TPB are hard to die. The sheer convenience of a simple torrent compared to some piece of shit proprietary DRM overpriced subscription has no comparison. Not to mention the abundant catalogue and the convenience of using whatever player you find convenient.

by hbn 5mo ago

a1o 5mo ago

On missing audio: usually I notice this when I watch with subtitles at night and then end up rewatching during the day with audio at much higher volume… And the thing that is said to be said is just… Not there?

Geonode 5mo ago
The fact that they refuse to balance audio for standard stereo setups is a whole other nightmare.
- skarz 5mo ago
  Lately whenever I watch movies my remote stays in my hand so I can boost the volume during dialogue and turn it down during loud action scenes. I've had two different soundbars, one of them quite expensive, and it's an issue on both.
  - ramgine 5mo ago
    From my understanding it’s not which soundbar that’s the issue, it’s that you’re only using a soundbar for audio. The channels all get compressed into one device with a couple speakers instead of whatever it was originally created for, like five or seven speakers with a subwoofer
    - Geonode 5mo ago
      You're right. I just don't want surround.I have two big, nice speakers for my tv, and that's what I want. But I still have to actively work the remote, especially with a kid sleeping in my house.
      - ramgine 5mo ago
        I’m in the same boat. I have a couple floor standers for audio, but I added a center channel and it helped with dialogue
  - alamortsubite 5mo ago
    There's an easy fix for that if you use a player like VLC that has an audio compressor: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-movies-that-are-really-quiet-then-really-lo-5920290 https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-movies-that-are-really-qui...

doublerabbit 5mo ago

> Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. The licenses for the song tracks have also expired; so they removed these too. The main noticeable difference is being the intro sequence originally sung by There Might be Giants which has been replaced with a less-impressive cover that ruins the vibe. Why can't these tracks just forever live with the series? I went and bought the DVD box-set just because of such. A £2 purchase that I than ripped to my NAS. I've not watched the latest remake because I don't want to ruin the original vibe of such a great show. Real acting, real filming; the last of it's kind.

triceratops 5mo ago
> That's because the license for the tracks expired They're talking about pieces of dialogue in the show, not licensed music.
- doublerabbit 5mo ago
  I know. And I am commenting on that the licensed music within the series has been replaced due to expired licensing for which that itself is ridiculous.
  - radley 5mo ago
    Re-licensing music is a two-fold challenge. Sometimes it's much more efficient to use substitute music, instead of negotiating for new rights. First, licensing arrangements for "all marketing channels" only account for the channels that exist at the time. When a new market channel opens up, such as streaming, music labels will require new licensing terms for that channel. If they don't, they might not get paid. (TV & movie studios are just as ruthless as music labels). Second, in turn, the labels often have to get new permission from artists for the new channel. Tracking down all artists can be a challenge and require resources that they can't recoup.
    - cwillu 5mo ago

jjulius 5mo ago

Not to go off on a complete tangent, but... >... like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. My collection of The Simpsons, seasons 1-13, are all TV rips from waaaaayyyyy back in the 00's. Sure, it's not super high-quality, but at least they don't look like the ugly remasters (on some of the ones I've tried watching on Disney+, they look like someone's drawn over the old cells), the aspect ratio is the original so nothing's missing and, as a personal bonus, they've got the old Q13 logo in the bottom (I grew up in western WA). They still look great on my newer TV. Edit: Oh, and the Michael Jackson episode never suddenly disappeared from my library.

Waterluvian 5mo ago
To me it is the difference between art and product. A show like The Simpsons is both. The viewers care about the art, and we tolerate the product to get it. The creators are creating art, compromising with the corporation and broadcaster to make it enough of a product. But the corp/broadcaster only care about the product. The art is the chocolate around the advertising pill. So when the product-minded people control preservation and resharing of the product, the art always gets compromised. Jokes are clipped. Audio is broken. Episodes are pulled. For all the wrong reasons.
- toyg 5mo ago
  The terminology is art vs content. Anybody talking about "content", by definition, do not actually care about what that content is, just that it is contained into something they charge for.
  - cwillu 5mo ago
    This is a great example of when pulling out a dictionary implies that you've lost the argument, because if people were using the word in the same sense as the dictionary definition, you would have no need of the dictionary to “prove” the meaning.
    - the_af 5mo ago

sushisource 5mo ago

Disney+ is truly unmitigated dogshit. It constantly chokes and stutters, seems to cause my NVIDIA Sheild to peg its CPU and/or page to disk, or something, to the point where it becomes unresponsive for multiple seconds at a time. I genuinely cannot understand how you could so utterly bungle software that's been a solved problem for over a decade.

mojo74 5mo ago

This is the first year I have cancelled all my subs. Used to be a TPB regular around the time it took off. Years later I tried to go legit and have had subs with all the major streamers (netflix, disney, amazon etc) But the way you get squeezed year on year for what was standard before e.g. 4K or no ads to be gradually offered worse terms and degraded output quality just bites after a while. I can't justify spending €20-30 per month on what isn't the best quality available for the content on offer.

justaman123 5mo ago
Yeah all the streaming services have gotten so bad and they are adding ads and they are lowering quality and they are getting too expensive. Arghgg I say
ravenstine 5mo ago
Plus I've found "legit" to be a moving goal post. One day a show is on one platform, the next it's on another, or it becomes unavailable except for [insert random foreign country here]. Even HD is a ripoff sometimes when half the episode comes in all compressed looking. They'll blame my bandwidth except I have no problem streaming an episode without adaptive compression over Bittorrent. People can say what they want about piracy, but it continues to be what I consider a necessity against culturally important media being further tainted by rent seekers looking to make another buck in any way they can.
- gk-- 5mo ago
  i feel like this is an important piece. even if you want to do the "right thing", is it really supporting these platforms that horse-trade content in huge multi-billion dollar deals just so they can increase their userbase with the intent to jam more ads down their throat? have any of these platforms _improved_ the experience for the average creator? they're poison, it almost makes it feel more righteous to steal.
  - rkomorn 5mo ago
    You can stop doing the right thing without doing the wrong thing.

iooi 5mo ago

> But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.

hbn 5mo ago
It wasn't a surround sound system, we were watching on the built-in app on a Fire TV from the TV's speakers. Also just Google "malcolm in the middle missing audio" and you'll find a ton of people with the issue https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d/new_disney_version_missing_all_kinds_of_random/ https://www.reddit.com/r/malcolminthemiddle/comments/1kggg7d... This also reminded me of another issue - the show was filmed to be broadcast in 4:3 but apparently someone along the line decided 16:9 is inherently better, so they put out the show in widescreen and now there's a ton of shots where you can see things you're not supposed to see. Someone else standing in for an actor that wasn't there when they filmed, or a toy doll in place of a real baby because they filmed on a day the baby actor wasn't there.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- someguyiguess 5mo ago
  Yup. That’s your issue. Disney+ outputting Dolby 5.1 and your speakers are stereo.
  - hbn 5mo ago
    Well it's still their fault for not making sure their audio works on a normal, non-surround setup Also worth noting that we switched the audio track to Spanish and you can hear it just fine.
    - morsch 5mo ago
      Probably because the Spanish track isn't delivered in surround...

kobieps 5mo ago

A recent experience I had was : 1. buy movie on iTunes 2. have kids that can't do long distance drives 3. obtain dvd players for car 4. realized I can't play films that I "bought" on DVD players It feels like the "Buy" button on iTunes/Apple TV is misleading, and should be renamed to "License to watch on Apple devices". Obvious in hindsight, but this type of DRM severely restricts use cases.

cheeze 5mo ago
While I agree with you in spirit... were you expecting that you could... burn the film to a DVD or something? Of course buying a movie on itunes means you can only watch it on capable devices. You can't play a youtube video on a VHS player either.
- kobieps 5mo ago
  Not at all (hence saying "obvious in hindsight"). Simply pointing out that, at the time, my purchasing decision wasn't influenced by how many use cases it would restrict. Also, IIRC, there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes. edit: turns out music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free!
  - cassianoleal 5mo ago
    > there was a period where you could burn Audio CDs from music that you purchased on iTunes. Music purchased on iTunes is DRM-free, so you can definitely burn CDs with them.
    - kobieps 5mo ago
      Ah very nice. I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't
      - rkagerer 5mo ago
        I suppose it makes sense that music is DRM-free but films aren't Why?

someguyiguess 5mo ago

Are you trying to listen in Dolby surround on a stereo setup? Disney+ defaults to surround sound and you’ll lose some audio channels if your speakers are stereo

advisedwang 5mo ago
Channel issues are like 90% of issues like this, but it's not always user error. Often a cheap production will just ship the front left + right channels as the stereo mix, instead of down mixing all the left + center channels into the stereo left etc. This is endemic in back catalogs on streaming providers where the catalog is a bulk assets that nobody reviews and is passed around between companies that don't care about the quality they deliver to each other.
RobotToaster 5mo ago
That seems like a terrible default, aren't most people listening in stereo at best?
gamblor956 5mo ago
This is basically the issue. User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point. The dialog is just fine if you have a surround sound system or spend 5 seconds once to select stereo sound. Importantly, the dialog is still missing in the torrent versions taken from the surround sound stream because the same problem occurs. You only get the missing dialog in stereo if you download the stereo rip.
- Jtarii 5mo ago
  >User error but blaming the service to make an ideological point A streaming service incorrectly defaulting to surround sound is most certainly not a user error.
  - gamblor956 5mo ago
    Sure it is. Disney+ defaults to the sound settings passed to it by the user's TV or device. It doesn't default to surround sound unless the user sets their TV or Roku or other device to surround sound. And either way...it's the programmers at fault here. Very hypocritical for tech bros to pirate someone else's content when it's their own brethren that created the problem they're using to justify their piracy.

anthonj 5mo ago

I will add to the list that for some weird reason in my country original language is not always available for all movies, and the subtitle experience in genenal is lacking.

realo 5mo ago
I am in the french-speaking part of Canada. In some Netflix shows, they say words in the english audio that are translated in French with different words with a similar meaning, and with english close-caption words that are also different from the original english audio. Quite amazing.
- kakacik 5mo ago
  French part of Switzerland. Quite a few shows and movies, ie anime but also others, have original audio track (so lets say japanese for anime) and only german subs. You can probably count number of folks on your fingers and toes who would even be able, let alone willing to watch this in such combination from this region of meagre 2.2 million folks but quite rich on average. So torrents it is, its legal here, lightning speed, always superb quality (one can choose any movie in range between 1GB and 50 GB for 1080p and all is very good looking), get it in a minute, and watch. I don't blame Netflix generally (well for those german subs I definitely do, I know they have english ones just couldn't be bothered and I have hard time believing they have region issue with english subs) but license owners, they are the ultimate fuckers messing with content holders/resellers/renters, and consequently us users. Also, torrents are so convenient, I won't be paying some service just to see a single show a year. I just won't even for a month and shuffle things like idiot, thats a bad proposition.
  - svl7 5mo ago
    Downloading such content is not prohibited by law in Switzerland, thus legal. Uploading however is a different story. So stating that torrenting is legal is not actually true. Unless maybe you simply fake your upload.
    - 5mo ago

shevy-java 5mo ago

> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata A friend once pointed that out. He pays a lot and gets low quality. That was what changed his mind. That was also almost twenty years ago. Most people changed. US corporations trying to raid people in foreign countries is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable at all. The swedish government should be ashamed for acting as US proxies here (nowadays with Trump this is more clear, but even 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it should have been a no-brainer).

jeffwask 5mo ago

The Mad Men AI upscale was such trash. You could see cameras, crew, equipment, etc. total mess that showed no care for the material.

marysol5 5mo ago
Wait, they used raw-unedited video as a source? Are they mad! (Pun intended)
nickthegreek 5mo ago
Wasn't this a remaster, not an ai upscale? And I thought that the incomplete effect situation has been resolved.

throw-the-towel 5mo ago

> you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Obligatory classic joke: Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebee. It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.

munk-a 5mo ago

For a while I was really happy because it sounded like the owners of the Intended Method™ had finally realized how much damage to their bottom line their terrible UX was having, so I fondly remembered TPB but moved over to the official platforms... then we started getting some hulu exclusives (not available in Canada) and the H(o)BOGo, and then a few more platform fragmentations... I have enough going on that I can't currently be bothered switching over to TPB but I ended up culling my streaming down to just Dropout, Nebula, severely modified Youtube and some patreons I care about. I am happy to speak with my wallet and tell the services to get lost and I'd be heading back to TPB if I were still in a phase of my life where discussing the latest Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Game of Thrones was a central focus of my socialization - as it is though, the cost to follow the Intended Method™ is simply too expensive in money, discovery time, and platform bugs for me to give a damn. Maybe they'll learn their lesson again and sanity will reign - but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing.

marysol5 5mo ago
>but the current media pricing is too expensive (in a myriad of ways) for the value it's providing. I'd argue that media is substantially better value today, than it ever was back in the day. You pay now the price of a single DVD, for a whole extensive catalogue of content. Or what you'd pay to watch a PPV for the time it was broadcast.
- yurishimo 5mo ago
  > You pay now the price of a single DVD, for a whole extensive catalogue of content. You pay that amount for access to said catalogue of content for a single month. If you bought the DVD, it would work for years/decades to come (assuming no manufacturing defects) plus you'd be well within your rights to make a digital copy of that DVD for your private collection. Sure, you probably only watched that DVD 1-3 times, but that's not the point. The point is you bought it and that gives you certain rights that are now totally absent from a digital first media consumption reference point.
  - 5mo ago

ignoramous 5mo ago

> Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. The thing with free is you will tend to be less demanding & most certainly more forgiving even if not less resentful. One reason why finding market fit for products built for free consumers is harder than for paid. The ones paying you will want their problems solved pronto, and if you're diligent enough, you'll end up building a product that solves those same "hair on the fire" problems for many others with hopefully deeper pockets.

kakacik 5mo ago
It doesn't seem you understood we talk about movies and tv shows, not some customer app solving... problems? Puzzling comment overall, will refrain from usual tropes and assume in good faith its 'lost in translation'.
- ignoramous 5mo ago
  Not talking about movies or apps, but a general observation on the dynamics of free v paid, from both, the supply & demand sides. As counterproductive as putting prices up feels, charging $20 for VEED brought in a different and more serious type of user, they need the product and they are happy to pay for it and have different needs to the $5 users we originally had. Things started looking up for the first time in ages. https://medium.com/@veedio/the-journey-to-ramen-profitability-f202be50e9d5 https://medium.com/@veedio/the-journey-to-ramen-profitabilit... / https://archive.vn/Yt0sn https://archive.vn/Yt0sn

olalonde 5mo ago

I'm in China and often get blocked by Netflix or Prime Video for using a VPN... Torrents are often the only thing that works.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago

RAM is too expensive to waste on "streaming" I have always prefered downloading

lovich 5mo ago

[dead]

whywhywhywhy 5mo ago

Ultimately history has proven that copyright owners can't be trusted to preserve their own IP and preservation should be entirely legal.

qingcharles 5mo ago
Those involved in the creation of the art can write a contract that stops it being ruined by future owners. When the Bobs sold their rights to Back to the Future they added terms to protect the brand. I know of one time where they intervened to stop a 3D conversion that Universal wanted. (Personally, I think 3D conversion can work well, e.g. Titanic, but other times it is monstrous, e.g. Star Wars Ep 1)
- account42 5mo ago
  Copyright is a deal to encourage the creation of more information that society sees as valuable by granting limited time monopolies. If we don't all end up with the unmolested work in the end then it had no right to ever receive any copyright protections in the first place. The original creator isn't even the primary party being harmed here - they already got their paycheck out of the deal.

mannanj 5mo ago

Many times I purchase or rent a movie now, and immediately go to torrent it and feel guilt-free. Torrent meets my needs better than official methods. I don't feel guilty about it because I still paid. Now, if only, I could have a better way to filter out the garbage from the gold.

Barrin92 5mo ago

>and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes Personally for me the worst case of this is Scrubs. The soundtrack of the show is so incredibly crucial to its atmosphere. There's a scene with the Coral's Dreaming of You that they've replaced with some awful generic track in the streaming versions. That people see the show now and maybe don't even know it is just a crime.

Fr0styMatt88 5mo ago

Also fun, Google purchased movies over the years getting moved to Youtube and then seemingly losing all surround sound content and coming through as 2-channel only (Android TV).

sourcecodeplz 5mo ago

Thing is, most people don't really care about this. They watch something in the evening maybe weekend and that is it. This will not change and these services are meant for the masses.

xyst 5mo ago

I experienced the same trying to watch One Piece on Crunchy Roll. Many of the episodes on their dubbed versions were just awful or de-synced. It can continue like that for 3-4 episodes then suddenly fix itself. Then when I watch in Japanese with subtitles, the subtitles can occasionally be missing on some scenes.

threethirtytwo 5mo ago

stremio.

tosti 5mo ago

I'd swear to any diety "The Game" on HBO was a screener. No thank you, I'll just trawl the high seas for loot.

pdntspa 5mo ago

The Intended Method(tm) is an intentionally gimped feeding trough designed primarily to pacify uninquisitive minds and line Hollywood exec pockets. They have never ever been honest in their accounting or reasonable in their expectations, let alone charitable enough to let the art propagate amongst its consumers in the manner they see fit (without court interventions). So I don't see why we have to be honest in our consumption. There is plenty of money to be made in secondary sources -- merchandising and so on. They can give up trying to lock down information that naturally wants to be free. But they won't, because greed.

jasonfarnon 5mo ago

One possible exception, do you consider youtube an "intended method"? (A legit question for those of us who remember what a legal gray area they were in, in the 2000s.) Because the convenience of youtube replaced downloading music torrents, for me at least (who don't really care much audio quality). I only wish they would let me hear the music when I turn my phone's screen off.

merge_software 5mo ago
Same here. Most of what I want to listen to is on youtube. I use the brave browser on my phone which both blocks adds and allows me to listen with the phone locked.

marysol5 5mo ago

Eh? The whole "scene" is full of shitty re-encodes of video, with the audio or video spliced from another source. There's a whole cottage industry of squeezing content into smaller sizes.

dspillett 4mo ago
It is easy enough to avoid those and make sure you get better encodes, if size is not at all a priority for you. My main problem, even with the better encoders, is the lack of choice in audio tracks and subs when I'm pretty sure the source material had the ones I might want.

drunx 5mo ago

I used to pay for "all of them". Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, HBO Max, Mubi, Prime Video and occasional rents on Youtube movies. And I made myself believe that I'm doing it THE RIGHT WAY hence they will do good by me. - price hikes - shows moved between services or different seasons available on different services - some movies are just NOWHERE - sometimes there was no English language (YouTube movies in the none English speaking region like Germany - happened a lot) So many times we would end up on a treasure hunt through the services to watch what we wanted, only to then end up just watching some Netflix vanilla stuff as we just give up. I am all for doing the right thing, but my god, my, customer needs, are not on any priority lists.

piltdownman 5mo ago

Even worse, the MBAs at the top of the pile in Netflix and other streaming services refusing to license the music for TV series' they have bought out and geolocked. This isn't just swapping like-for-like with stock music, it's a pervasive form of Stalinist Revisionism - with certains edits and scenes altered or completely removed when they relied on the track in question. As a fastcompany article notes, "...streaming is also changing the way music works in new titles, with easier, safer, cheaper song choices being added to TV shows in lieu of anything interesting." The logical end-game being the relegation of musical backing in TV to AI generated muzak and genre 'sound-a-likes', like we've already seen in the lowest echelons of the advertisement and backing-track industry. https://www.fastcompany.com/91109690/why-streaming-platforms-are-scrubbing-the-soundtracks-from-your-favorite-shows https://www.fastcompany.com/91109690/why-streaming-platforms...

WhyNotHugo 5mo ago

This (one of the) reasons why sites like TPB are hard to die. The sheer convenience of a simple torrent compared to some piece of shit proprietary DRM overpriced subscription has no comparison. Not to mention the abundant catalogue and the convenience of using whatever player you find convenient.