5 ms·

I somehow still have to deal with region restrictions today, because technology. Actually, it's because licensing.

by jfb 13y ago

lostlogin 13y ago
It's awful. I'd get Netflix in a heartbeat if I could do so easily, but I need to get a VPN and fart about to make it work. And in the evening, the last thing I want to do is fix stuff, after a day of all sorts of format/file/network battles (radiology department job). Fix the licensing stuff and I'll pay.
- jfb 13y ago
  No argument here. It's changing, but keep in mind that many of these licensing deals were multi-year, and that therefore the technical decisions necessary to support these deals have been baked into standards since day one. Thankfully, Blu-Ray is the last physical format we'll have to grapple with.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    Yeah, a reasonable attitude like yours is what I need. I skipped blu-ray and went straight to digital. Discs in the bin etc. I think I jumped too soon. Meta data accuracy, library software, media servers etc have all changes vastly in the time I've been purely digital and every change is awful. My last change over was so awful that I said never again. I'll see if that holds, but having a third part sort it for me seems ideal.
    - Daiz 13y ago
      I wish I could go fully digital but sadly the only way to get high quality "DRM-free" (in the sense that at least it's easy to strip the DRM) video today is by getting BDs. It saddens me that the actually good digital options are pretty much all illegal. Admittedly I do currently have a Netflix account as well, mainly for some casual watching. I wouldn't be paying for it if it wasn't for MediaHint, though, which allows me to watch everything available on US Netflix. Though speaking of DRM, incidentally just 10 minutes ago I was trying to show an example of some horrible subtitling on Netflix to a friend of mine and ran into a DRM error with Silverlight (it was claiming my time and date were inaccurate)... took a while to figure out how to solve it. Ah, DRM, always so friendly to legal consumers.
      - lostlogin 13y ago
        Exactly. We got into the Sopranos and I got out a few series from the local video store on DVD. This was a few years ago. Never again. The DVD player was the wrong region, so I put it into the Mac. It played fine. I tried to output the video on the Apple TV. Some kind of (according to apple forums) DRM prevents this. I was in the brink of encoding the DVDs to a different format, when it occurred to me to torrent them. I set off the torrent and the encode at the same time, and a short time later stopped the encoding, and the torrent had got enough to get us started. And I didn't have to watch the anti piracy warning. How can legal be so hard and free be so easy?
        DanBC 13y ago
        I agree that it's bafflingly hard to legally use legally bought media. > How can legal be so hard Because rights holders have weird beliefs and think that DRM is great, and they won't sell the rights without DRM.

I somehow still have to deal with region restrictions today, because technology. Actually, it's because licensing.

by jfb 13y ago

I somehow still have to deal with region restrictions today, because technology. Actually, it's because licensing.

It's awful. I'd get Netflix in a heartbeat if I could do so easily, but I need to get a VPN and fart about to make it work. And in the evening, the last thing I want to do is fix stuff, after a day of all sorts of format/file/network battles (radiology department job). Fix the licensing stuff and I'll pay.

jfb 13y ago
No argument here. It's changing, but keep in mind that many of these licensing deals were multi-year, and that therefore the technical decisions necessary to support these deals have been baked into standards since day one. Thankfully, Blu-Ray is the last physical format we'll have to grapple with.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  Yeah, a reasonable attitude like yours is what I need. I skipped blu-ray and went straight to digital. Discs in the bin etc. I think I jumped too soon. Meta data accuracy, library software, media servers etc have all changes vastly in the time I've been purely digital and every change is awful. My last change over was so awful that I said never again. I'll see if that holds, but having a third part sort it for me seems ideal.
  - Daiz 13y ago
    I wish I could go fully digital but sadly the only way to get high quality "DRM-free" (in the sense that at least it's easy to strip the DRM) video today is by getting BDs. It saddens me that the actually good digital options are pretty much all illegal. Admittedly I do currently have a Netflix account as well, mainly for some casual watching. I wouldn't be paying for it if it wasn't for MediaHint, though, which allows me to watch everything available on US Netflix. Though speaking of DRM, incidentally just 10 minutes ago I was trying to show an example of some horrible subtitling on Netflix to a friend of mine and ran into a DRM error with Silverlight (it was claiming my time and date were inaccurate)... took a while to figure out how to solve it. Ah, DRM, always so friendly to legal consumers.
    - lostlogin 13y ago
      Exactly. We got into the Sopranos and I got out a few series from the local video store on DVD. This was a few years ago. Never again. The DVD player was the wrong region, so I put it into the Mac. It played fine. I tried to output the video on the Apple TV. Some kind of (according to apple forums) DRM prevents this. I was in the brink of encoding the DVDs to a different format, when it occurred to me to torrent them. I set off the torrent and the encode at the same time, and a short time later stopped the encoding, and the torrent had got enough to get us started. And I didn't have to watch the anti piracy warning. How can legal be so hard and free be so easy?
      - DanBC 13y ago
        I agree that it's bafflingly hard to legally use legally bought media. > How can legal be so hard Because rights holders have weird beliefs and think that DRM is great, and they won't sell the rights without DRM.