Streaming is no longer easier than piracy, why pay for 8 different services and have to waste your time figuring out whats on what when you can just have one service for free, even if its illegal, and have it all under one roof.

The services have taken the piss and now they'll get the repercussions of it.

- 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers.

- Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo).

- Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles.

- Properly functioning offline playback for when I'm traveling, not randomly broken and disappearing offline mode (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights).

- Works on all my devices not a random subset independent on which way greedy execs tried to extract "ecosystem" money from my playback device manufacturer. Looking at you ATV+.

- Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off.

- Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired.

As you can see, I really tried to pay to get content from these people. And all I got was bunch of frustration. F'em, they brought this upon themselves for being user hostile arseholes. Again.

Spotify is also a great example of how to beat piracy. I haven't downloaded an mp3 file since I got a Spotify Premium account in 2007. OK that's probably a slight overstatement, but it's near enough to the truth for this argument. They made it so simple and convenient to pay for access to music that I've had zero reasons to even consider piracy. They have everything (well, enough that I've never felt something was missing anyway), they have clients for everything, the pricing is reasonable, and they have great value-add in the form of playlist generation.

As for the rest, full agreement, the low bitrate of streaming services is the big one for me as I'm a film enthusiast with great gear that definitely doesn't reach its potential using any streaming services. Now that it looks like physical media is going the way of the Dodo I'm wondering where I'm gonna get actually high bitrate content from in the future.

Basically, the download button is a single down-arrow at the top of your library. When you tap it—and download your music–the down-arrow turns solid green to indicate your music is available offline. It doesn't disappear. It turns green, Spotify's primary color.

The kicker is: if you accidentally (or out of curiosity) press that green arrow again, it will wipe all your downloads without confirmation (disabling "offline mode"). Did that on a flight once and lost all my music. It's absurd how that UX made it out of testing.

Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. Tapping this icon deletes your library from your device:

https://i.imgur.com/zrSid1T.jpeg

When updating them, Spotify will first delete all old songs and then try to download the new ones. If a lot has changed and you're on a spotty Wifi connection this effectively deletes everything. Happened to me several times while on vacation.

There is the solution of enabling offline-mode before leaving for vacation, but as you mention it's very easy to accidentally disable it and once it's disabled all your playlists are toast.

There really should be at least a modal to confirm if the result will mean deleting more than say an album.

If you're offline or on roaming mobile data (not sure if they can reliably determine this though, at least not on iOS) when invoking it then they should make you answer a somewhat complex question to confirm that you indeed wanted to delete the songs.

Sometimes the changes get A/B tested, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the A/B test is gamed, sometimes it gets gamed by accident, and sometimes the tests get ignored when they are clearly wrong.

Finally, sometimes the directive is "get people to stop using this feature because it's unpopular with management".

Or that one time when they removed the "set as current playlist" feature, which they still haven't restored. That feature was the only way to change playlist without breaking in the middle of a song, besides literally waiting until a song is over and doing it then, wasting time.

I like Spotify, but they do some infuriating things sometimes.

Don't get me started on their beef with Apple which has resulted in my HomePods still not being able to take music requests via Siri almost 3 years after I got the first one.

(Suppose I should think of dialing back my Spotify hate a little now that apparently in the renewal they're no longer keeping Rogan as Spotify-exclusive)

BTW, I agree about the Spotify UI. I never liked it and was a GPM user until they destroyed it by pushing me to YTM. Now I use AM, since if I'm going to tolerate a poor UI it might as well work well with all my devices.

I’ve also tried on my Mac, slightly more presses (four, to be exact) as I had to press ‘podcasts & shows’ to refine the search slightly more.

I don’t see how that’s hard to use. Each to their own though I guess, I’ve not seen how difficult it is your side so can’t really comment.

For podcasts, I think people who are big into podcasts are also particular about their player. I know I am. For me, there's space for a music app and a podcast app. They are both audio, but otherwise very different.

Music is usually considered art and you are a boring downer of you complain about artists political or personal controversies. That is another thing. And the artist always have the benefit of doubt of the protagonist in the song not being the artist himself.

My point was more the GP wanted to see Spotify go out of business because they bought a podcast. I just thought it was a bit of a wild statement to make.

- You can't turn your queue into a playlist (and you can't see previous queue as part of the queue, only as limited history.)

- Clicking a song or album sometimes clears your queue and starts playing that instead (I know there is a logic to it, but a mistake or mis-click is easy).

- There is no shortcut to add to queue, just long press then find the menu item.

It's possible everyone else is only listening to albums or curating playlists then playing them, but I like to pick things as I go like a jukebox and it sucks at it.

There is, just swipe the song to the right.

meaning that, if you have a bad internet connection and tap on eg an album, it'll open the view for that album and you just have to look at the progress indicator for in some cases up to 20+ seconds, even if you have downloaded that album and all the info is there in the local cache.

this happens annoyingly often, e.g. when leaving an area where you're connected to wifi and your phone hasn't yet switched over to celluar data.

I have playlist where a growing percentage of songs are grayed out, not available, while they do exist in the store, just as part of a different album now.

Very frustrating. Does Spotify do that ?

However, it really doesn't happen that often. I probably have a few thousand songs save on Spotify and perhaps a dozen have been taken off after many years of using the platform.

As for replacements, my understanding is that they are often due to the better royalties on original artist re-recordings. I always try to switch back to the originals, and AM, my current service, only sometimes still them. Frustrating to build a collection on shifting sand.

And I had, but they removed them since, listing nothing in their place.

By being able to compete with it on the price they pay artists. It's a uniquely powerful negotiating position for the publishers that a) won't last b) won't extend to TV/video

I was so annoyed that I actually cancelled my subscription.

I have a friend who’s indeed paying Spotify - but for connecting his account with some “illegal” software, from which he can then download MP3s (or FLACs) to share with his friends.

That’s the issue I think. I listened to music from ~1000 albums last year. At $10 a pop that’s $10k which is just not possible. Spotify is really the only way that listening like that is enabled.

because they are bad for the environment.

And as for Spotify exploiting artists, I don't know how accurate this[1] is, but if it is then it seems pretty fair to me? Maybe slightly on the lower end of what I had expected, but not that far off.

If you have a million monthly listeners (and today you have access to over 574M monthly active users[2] via Spotify) then you're making $5,000/month in static income, meaning you have zero hours of work and still have enough to live on (depending on the size of the band I guess).

The notion that artists (or movie stars for that matter) should be making 10x that or more is a little ridiculous if you ask me.

1: https://purecalculators.com/spotify-money-calculator

2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-ma...

"Zero hours of work" - I know artists get underestimated, but this is next level.

Btw, taking the very top .1% of earners in a field, like movie or pop stars, and using their returns to imply that musicians and actors are fairly compensated, is a very silly thing to do. Tbh, as someone who knows a lot of talented and struggling artists (and teachers and janitors and nurses etc), it's revolting.

If you want to give out about overcompensated people why not look at CEO's, like Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO) and his $3.8 BILLION net worth. That's about as clear a signal that there's exploitation happening that you could ever ask for.

I do understand that a million monthly listeners is a large amount, sorry I was over-exaggerating a bit in my last comment. My point was that Spotify helps with discoverability through their playlist-generation, but I guess that doesn't automatically mean anything more than the odd play here and there, and not necessarily more "monthly active listeners".

I'd love if artists made more on Spotify than they do today, but isn't the big problem all the middle-men in the music industry? It's my understanding that companies like Spotify shorten this ladder at least a little bit, but thinking about it again I guess I agree that the pay is a little too low.

2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated. Marketing is what sells music, not just talent. Marketing requires a lot of money (And payola).

If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.

How exactly does the fact that artists have been exploited before mean that Spotify isn't making things worse?

> 2) Talent and success in music have never been tightly correlated.

That's not remotely true. And even pop stars lip syncing songs other people wrote are working very hard, and often exploited.

> Marketing is what sells music, not just talent.

Sure; like nearly everything else. And guess what - most of the artists on Spotify are doing their own marketing.

> If anything Spotify levels this playing field a bit.

"Artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income generated, receiving as little as £0.002 to about £0.0038 per stream on Spotify" [0]. That's not leveling the playing field, that's exploitation; and if you want to defend it I think you need to start bringing actual evidence instead of just spouting your own (deeply unpopular) opinion as fact.

0 - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/10/music-streamin...

Took them like 6 months to fix that.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Btw. Ads in front of streaming content I just selected, to tell me about other streaming content on the same service I did NOT select should also be on the NO list.

What nonsense is that. That makes no sense at all.

So before you even get to the launch menu for this specific movie you selected, you're subjected to a trailer for a 20 year old movie with a 24% on rotten tomatoes. And an advertisement for a pizza restaurant. And a threat that the film company is going to take all their movies and put them in a vault for 10 years so you really need to go buy more DVDs from them.

For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/nx3o1/since_when_di...

But at the minimum, the piracy notices are 20 seconds long now. For an item you paid for instead of pirating.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/10/2238258/dvds-blu-ray...

you bought the thing, you should be able to use it however you want

and putting ads into a bluray you already bought for a probably not so small price is ridiculous

And if you skip some epilepsy warning then that is your responsibility, same with when you pirated it and get caught.

Also why force me to see anti-piracy propaganda (and that's what it is, nothing else, sometime also legally misinforming) when I already DIDN'T pirate it or a logo I already know from the packaging of the bluray (because if I did pirate it I already would have skipped it).

it's just a ridiculous dictation of behavior in context of a bought physical product

I've definitely had Netflix region-lock most of my content when I made the mistake of briefly switching on wifi to find my connecting gate at some airport. Apparently even though the content was available at my starting point and at my destination that didn't apply to the connecting country.

Have yet to hit that with Youtube, and I really hate Spotify so avoid using it.

> - Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired.

A few days back Prime lost both of the two series that I was in the middle of watching at the start of February. Super-annoying!

> - Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off.

This was the dealbreaker for me.

Channel 4 (in the UK) is probably the worst offender, as they preserve the aspect ratio, but have it fill the full width of the screen. This results in the top and bottom of the video being cutting off for most TV shows, including the subtitles. They've gone to some effort to make their player run on different aspect ratios, but somehow implemented it entirely the wrong way.

Webrips do suffer from this same issue, but with either FFMpeg or VLC, it can be cropped to the correct ratio without reencoding.

Your point still stands that it presents a service problem. Given the connectedness of the world now, regions should have been abolished a long time ago.

Then perhaps s.o. would argue that these all are much harder to get done with free tools or by oneself, but I can definitely argue that having a nice personal cloud which allows video streaming is more than enough for most occasions.

Not actually different from using the streaming services, who sell info on you as a side gig.

Selling movies and shows DRM-free, like Amazon does with music (but no other software goods for some reason).

Same for music for me, radios where I live are just tons of talk I don't care about and little (weird) music, so my rock & metal collection from usb key is enough.

If I ever want that randomness that comes with say radio I just let it on or use ad-infested youtube, and probably soon turn it off in disgust from adverts. With small kids, not much time for that anyway which is a good thing.

And all gained legally. I am not losing sleep for poor artists (those I listen/watch are fine, guys in their 40s-60s living in castles or big mansions), I am not type of person what bought 100s of CDs of DVDs before (just to feel like a complete idiot now).

Its sort of like when VBR encoded MP3s became the standard in the privacy scene in the early 00s. The quality is good enough for most folks plus the reduced file size means that it downloads really fast on average connections and isn't prohibitively expensive to store so you can create a large library very quickly. Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago because the cost per GB was just too expensive and most people weren't going to buy a NAS. But now we are starting to move past the inflection point. SSDs are bigger, H265 reduces file sizes, hardware accelerated H265 encoding is easier (meaning more H265 content), and devices that can decode H265 are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. You can install Plex on your laptop, load up on content, and have a better UX than Netflix.

That's still YIFY-quality video, which is a few steps below HBO/MAX, which happens to be among the lowest quality paid streams.

ATV+ is killing it with 30Mbps 4K HDR+ video (it used to be as high as 48Mbps). Disney+ is close. The Netflix 4K plan serves up high 1080p bitrates, 2x better than their 1080p plan. Worth paying for.

For many folks, pirated 1080p is par with what they'd get streaming, and pirated 2k or 4k is better.

However the extension seems to be gone.[2]

[1] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox?tab=readm...

[2] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox/issues/28

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/16yf3wi/why_do...

I could do so with DVD and blu-ray. You don't want to let me do so via the internet? Okay, I'll do it anyways.

> 1k = 1920x1080

> 2k = 2560x1440

> 4k = 3840x2160

[even though it's not usually referred to as 1k, but rather 1080p directly]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution#2160p_resolution

The resolution that's usually behind 2k, which is 1440p as you've correctly pointed out, is usually available as torrents too.

Rounding 2560 to 2k is massively confusing. Don't do it. 2.5k or don't use "k" at all.

And when I go look at a couple torrent sites and scroll through movies and tv shows, I'm not seeing a single 1440p in the first couple pages. Some searches show barely anything at all.

Define: k = multiple of 1920x1080 pixel count

1920x1080 ~= 2M pixels = 1k 2560x1440 ~= 4M pixels = 2k 3840x2160 ~= 8M pixels = 4k

So now 1440p = 2k, and k becomes meaningful. Problem solved!

It also gives a solution for ultrawides like 7680 x 2160p, which are 8k.

More interestingly, “8K” TVs now become 16k TVs, which marketers should like. We’ve come full circle! Now the k nomenclature also gives you an idea of how difficult that 16k display will be to drive with a video card relative to your existing monitor.

And how do you propose getting your definition out in front of more people than the combined marketers of all the legit sources of movie, TV and other streaming content in the world?

lol

Pick the battles you have a whelk's chance in a supernova of winning.

But if you want to go down that path, instead of trying to redefine k just use megapixels.

Not to mention that 3840x2160 already has a (mostly) separate term : UHD-1.

There's also UHD-2 which is 4 times bigger, but I expect it to be renamed to something else soon enough.

The most recent entry is:

How To Train Your Dragon The Hidden World (2019) 2160p 4K BluRay 5 1-LAMA

Format : HEVC

Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 634 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 2.35:1

Near the top is a recent TV episode:

True Detective S04E04 Night Country Part 4 2160p MAX WEB-DL DDP5 1 DoVi x265-NTb

Format : HEVC

Width : 3 840 pixels Height : 1 920 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 2.000

What makes things problematic is the overbearing love for letterbox like aspect ratios, even pirates have standards and they're having to bundle a slew of aspect ratios together .. this comes from the production companies.

You overwhelmingly see 1280x720, 1920x1080, and 3840x2160, sometimes with a truncated height because of aspect ratio but usually advertised with the full height for consistency reasons.

There's barely any 2560x1440. Anyone going above 1080p goes directly to 4k.

Youtube is pretty much the only place I've ever seen 1440p encodes, and that's because they're super version-happy and make 20 different variants of a video.

If it's about finding 1440p that'd mainly be because it's not a common broadcast format to the best of my knowledge - I just don't see it about much.

Articles such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution

don't mention it as a broadcast format, and articles that are specific to 1440p: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1440p

have it as :

    As a graphics display resolution between 1080p and 4K, Quad HD is regularly used in smartphone displays, and for computer and console gaming.

It's pretty much only available on original encodes, i.e. BluRay rips, this makes it a format that very rarely seen on currently airing shows, which are mostly webrips from official streaming platforms.

You'll often see it alongside the usual resolutions for movies that have since been released on disk.

Read the second clause!

You don't necessarily have to pick YIFY.

Qxr's uploads are a much better comparison. x265 encoded 1080p (with 5 - 6.5Mbps bitrate) from the highest quality sources and they look very good even on 55" 4K panels.

An hour long 30 Mbps 4k HDR+ video file will be roughly around 10-15+ GB with H.265 encoding.

As others have pointed out, a well encoded 720p or 1080p video offers a decent enough viewing experience quickly at far, far smaller sizes than a 2k or 4k videos (file sizes will be 10 to 20 times smaller at these resolutions). Note also that some pirates encode videos with the CPU, than using hardware encoders, and thus these videos tend to have a higher quality with better compression (hardware encoders, while blazing fast, tend to do a poorer job than CPU video encoding). Thus, these smaller sized video files don't require high-speed internet, can be downloaded fast and also encourages people to save the videos longer. This allows some to create their own personal video library. So a side effect of this is that people store and share these videos longer, and their smaller sizes now allow streaming torrents of popular content. Some torrent sites today have even started offering this through the browser itself - so non-techies now don't even have to download any torrent software and learn how to use it. That's near-Netflix like convenience, with more content, for "free" - and that's what these services are up against.

We also can't ignore that 4k videos are often only available at higher tier subscription plan. So even if Netflix, or other streaming services, think that some of these people can be enticed to subscribe to their services, with their high quality 2k or 4k videos, they will have to offer them at a lower price to beat the "free" model of piracy. (It's very hard to compete with "free" - just look at Google search engine's market share and its non-free competitors' market share to understand this).

All this is of course irrespective of the fact that 2k and 4k resolution HDR+ videos are also increasingly available now a days on torrents too.

Popcorn Time seems to have (already?) been based on browser techniques : JavaScript & NodeJS ? (Or is that only for today's version ?)

Also, I'm not exactly impressed because PeerTube has used WebTorrent for quite some years now (before recently abandoning it for something even better ?).

But yeah, you shouldn't expect that website to last long - but then this kind of game of whack a mole has been played by PirateBay-likes and illegal streaming sites for years now.

On small devices like that 4K HDR+ video is kind of meaningless.

Just do what works for you. But with lets say 'cinema experience' distance:size ratio you definitely can see the difference. I could clearly see it on Netflix 4k on tiny 55" 4k screen from maybe 2-2.5m.

But of course after 1-2 minutes it becomes meaningless difference and your brain blends it, what you should focus is not seeing big banding pixels due to low bad compression in very dynamic scenes.

On Netflix, The Sandman looked abysmally bad at 720p. The complex backgrounds became a garbled mess and the dark scenes were filled with banding.

It's just the shitty compression, not the mark of 720p.

This is extremely evident on YouTube now, for a couple of years if the source content is 4K native, they downgrade it to 1080p (so you can stream it with a comfortable bitrate), but despite a good enough resolution (1080p! 2K!) and the need to just downgrade the resolution (yes, double re-encoding, but) the 2K version looks abysmal. Especially evident on live videos with a contrast lights.

It's a real shame that the same store that sold Blu-Ray players didn't have it and I had to pirate it (and also skip buying the player).

Even with 1080p and 2-3 downloaded modern video games per month (which are all greater than 100GB now), I tend to get up to my 1TB bandwidth cap each month. I start paying extra after that.

I still have an old 1080p 32" LG from 10 years ago and it looks fine. In fact I find the motion upscaling weird, it gives this creepy uncanny effect.

I still download H264 too because not all of my devices support H265 yet.

I was thinking about something new but they're just too expensive.

About the subject of this thread, too many paid streaming services are maybe too inconvenient. If they are, the market will fix that. That is: some of them won't make enough money and close, or sell to a competitor, or just create content and license it to streaming services.

My preference would be not to pay per month but per view. There are months when I don't watch any series and months when there is something I like. About movies, maybe no movie at all for a year or two, then a few of interesting ones, including old ones that I never watched and I feel like to watch. The last one was Gilda, 1948.

Only if you are lucky and everything aligns well. You can't ask customers to debug their hardware to make it work.

as much as it pains a certain set of nerds, using a dedicated stream device is still the best way to bypass the arbitrary hurdles that streamers throw at you. To build a general pc that gets Dolby vision and atmos working right requires at best some very specific hardware/software choices and at worst sometimes just don’t work at all on pc (unless you are willing to do things like hackintosh).

The audiovisual space has just always been intensely proprietary, even something as basic as divx was something you paid for or pirated back in the v3.x or v4.x days. Same story as HEVC: Fraunhofer and Dolby have been grubbing for licensing fees for decades now, and you either pay it or spend some time working around it. And if you’re a corporation then you just don’t ship that feature in your product.

Apple also does a really good job implementing those features at the margins, Apple TV is a nice device. But even if you buy (eg) something like a shield tv it’s gonna be easier than tilting at getting Netflix to send you a 4k stream on windows 10 or Linux. At some level it is platform discrimination plain and simple - they just won't send full-quality video to "open" platforms and you can either deal with it or go full pirate. Sometimes they won't stream it even if you have widevine set up properly etc - and it's all completely arbitrary and they could break it tomorrow. Or you just buy an apple tv/shield tv.

Plex, Infuse, and VLC also let you interact with plex/jellyfin on the apple tv, and there really is no question about what it can decode, the answer is "basically everything you'd interact with as a consumer", short of weird stuff (idk about something like 4:2:2 or ProRes). Ironically the A17 also might be my fastest processor (in single-thread) at the moment, lol - definitely faster than my laptop, might be faster than my gaming desktop.

Sucks but that's how it is - to this day, AMD doesn't have working HDMI 2.1 support on linux, because HDMI Forum won't do an open license. You either have closed-source blobs or firmware that implement it, or you don't get the feature. These are hard problems, and people expect to be paid to stare at them. And once you spend the time getting all the software and hardware vendors and studios onto the same page and then implement it etc you're going to want to be paid for that too.

It is one of the real problems for the linux kernel imo - not everything can be GPL licensed all, and (for obvious reasons) there is no escape valve for "ok but this vendor is really proprietary and the feature is really important...". When the unstoppable force meets the immovable object what you get is both vendors shrugging their shoulders. You want to fuck with NVIDIA over whatever GPL symbols? Then I guess you won't have HDMI 2.1 on your platform at all, then - because AMD's not gonna win that battle on licensing. The bulli approach worked with ZFS because ultimately there's diversity in filesystems, but if your hardware works best with HDMI 2.1 then you really don't have a choice in the matter. The very popular RDNA2 cards only have DP1.4, for example, so if you don't get HDMI 2.1 then you lose half the bitrate the card can support.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417

Anyway you can tilt at that, or... pay $125 for a refurb ATV4K ethernet 3rd-gen and go watch a movie. It sucks but that's kinda the reality of the space - it's only troublesome if you aren't willing to grease some palms to make the system work as designed. Do you want to consoom or not?

as someone that grew up with VHS and VGA; 2-3mbps h264 720p is fine and few practical gains above 5mbps 1080p.

X265 1080p movies for both rippers are roughly 1.5-2GB per average movie, which is on average 1.5-2h long. You won't find better quality in this size range, in same way 7-10GB seems a sweet spot for 4k (especially with AV1 instead of HEVC). Not sure who & why downloads those 80GB full bluray releases.

Why? Because I want the highest-quality possible copy. Same reason I download lossless versions of albums. It’s less about being able to perceive the quality increase, and moreso about archival. Then my Plex server can transcode to appropriate streaming bitrates on the fly without having to re-encode an already heavily compressed video stream.

And building and properly maintaining some not-so-small array of massive HDDs for those capacities... I just don't see the point when I can get all I need (and ie in sound much much more), without caring more than buying a single hdd and be done for next 5 years.

Its not the bandwidth, 1gbps is easy to get here, stuff I saw in those sizes was well seeded too, but just overall all added extra work.

You don’t need a massive HDD array, I have my whole collection of 10+ years of Blu-ray remuxes on a single Seagate Exos drive in my NAS.

Too bad even devices that claim av1 support … even some from the makers of said codec .. ahem chromecast w/gtv .. still stutter or fail.

But I remember a period of time where basically every rip was VBR. 192kbps then took over when bandwidth and disk space were no long were no longer concerns.

lol

> Also I think the shift to SSDs from spinning rust delayed the adoption of widespread video piracy 10-ish years ago

Huh? 500GB (and more) drives became available at 2006 and by 2008 dropped below $150.

Also there was no demand for extra-high-wanna-see-every-original-pixel quality, so XviD releases with atrocious quality but a fine file size were common and were fine on 40-80-250GB drives in 2001-2005.

> you can create a large library very quickly

Music library and video library are a different things. While the most people 'store forever' the music they dloaded (well, they were back in 2000s, probably not so much today), the video library is mostly useless for the most, because it's dloaded for 1-time consumption.

2010-2012 is also when most folks would have already upgraded to a HD display and so there was more demand for HD content.

Most of the time people replaced HDD to SSD in the laptops only to use ODD caddy to move their HDD there.

By 2010 storage was not a problem, at all.

If anything the torrenting reached it's peak ~2008 and on a slow decline (but not in absolute numbers, because the userbase is still rising) ever since, because by 2010 almost any music could be found on YouTube (popular ofc, not something obscure what is known by 3 greybeards on the whole planet) and even a lot of movies too. For the parts of the world where broadband was still costly or capped you could always go to the store and buy 5-in-1 DVD for $2 (talk about quality, eh). After that the succesful multi year campaign by Apple to convince the user what it doesn't need to own music and what it is totally okay to stream "your" music over the cellular networks, along with %he rise of the streaming services, moved the torrenting to a niche of nerds (only lossless music!), nerds (248 variants of StarWars) or nerds (anime).

So on vacation I tried to airplay mission impossible from amazon rental to the TV, and the screen just went black for copy-protection. So I refunded my rental and torrented it instead.

I don't usually torrent, but sometimes the ecosystems put it squarely in my self interest.

(Also, for whatever it's worth I have netflix active about 1 month a year because I find their recent content so unimpressive, but perhaps I'm not the target audience)

The situation is still ridiculous though. Streaming is no longer easier than piracy.

You may be able to get away with just an HDMI dummy plug:

https://www.amazon.com/4K-HDMI-Dummy-Plug-3840x2160/dp/B07FB...

I'm not sure if these dummy plugs handle HDCP. If not you can use one in combination with this splitter:

https://www.amazon.com/Splitter-l-b-y-Vision-Atmos-Scaler/dp...

I own this splitter and know for a fact that it handles the HDCP negotiation. But I think it needs a display attached.

AFAIK, DRM video playback over AirPlay only works from within iOS apps that explicitly support AirPlay[1], not via generic iOS/macOS screen mirroring.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204289#iOS

Or, you can just pirate it and not have to put up with any of this BS.

Re-reading what ladzoppelin wrote, I made an assumption that was probably incorrect. I thought they were saying that having an HDCP-compliant TV attached allowed them to watch DRM-protected content on their non-HDCP-compliant primary display. But in retrospect, probably they are watching the DRM content on the TV.

In that case they don't need an HDMI dummy plug at all. They could instead use the splitter I linked between their computer and the non-HDCP compliant display (assuming it's connected over HDMI and not DisplayPort) to fool their computer into thinking the display is HDCP-compliant. Then they can play the DRM content on either their primary display or the TV.

The UX of DRM-laden services breaks. You don’t have that problem with Jellyfin.

Whose fault is it really that all content is not available on a single service? It's nobody's fault, it was inevitable given how things work.

How could you "fix" it? You'd need legislation saying that all content must be made available for licensing at the same price for every service. But that's not enough, because why would HBO sell their content to Netflix and vice versa? No, you'd have to force them to make it available. But that's not enough either, as they could just set the price extremely high. And at this point what would be the point in having multiple streaming services at all? Perhaps we need legislation that enforces separation of content producers and distribution, like the Glass-Steagall Act but for TV, or Net Neutrality?

I think Gabe’s rule is like gravity. It’s inconvenient for space travel, but what are you gonna do? You don’t get to space by complaining about it.

It’s the same in streaming. All the streaming platforms need to do is provide a service that’s better than piracy. And I really do feel for the streaming platforms here. That seems like a hard ask for them. Netflix rarely has content I want to watch any more. Shows I do want to watch are often on a different competing service. And they often remove shows and movies from the platform that I might have otherwise enjoyed. Im not subscribing to multiple streaming platforms at once - that’s ridiculous. I’m not surprised they’re complaining about piracy - they’re rapidly becoming a worse service than piracy and gabe’s law is kicking in for them.

But at the end of the day, like space companies, complain if you want but it’s not my problem to fix. And there are plenty of fixes - make it easy to have a grab bag of streaming services which swaps streaming provider every month. Or give me access to every platform for my $10 and distribute the money based on what I actually watched.

I dunno. Figure it out. Or don’t, and watch piracy eat your lunch. Your call, Netflix.

Actually the more I think about it the less I understand how it hasn't been taken down.

Most people are honest, and will do the the legal thing when faced with two equal options. If the choice is between that UI but it's illegal, and a reskin of that UI but it's £30/mo, I'd pay.

But it's not, as the other comments here said. It's a choice between that for free and a limited catalog of region restricted, ever changing, poor video quality streams spread of multiple services, and given the choice between paying 4 providers for a poor service and getting a good service from one location, people will pick the latter.

The way licensing and streaming costs work is super arbitrary and wacky. There’s nothing fixed and eternal about it. If the fee structure isn’t working (and it’s not) then it should be changed.

The movie industry can get a reasonable amount of my money or none of my money. Their choice.

World of warcraft has had a subscription for 20 years and is wildly successful. PSN has a monthly subscription where you get 2-3 games per month added to your account that you can play as long as you're still subscribed. Gamepass has 25+ million subscribers [0]

> I'm not OK with paying $70 a month

Honest question, why not? That's what cable TV cost 15 years ago, and $70 now has the purchasing power of ~$50 then.

[0] https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/15/xbox-game-pass-30-m...

Value for money. Most households don't spend their lives watching 4-8h of content every day, I'd think.

I'm likely to watch maximum 12h a month. So 6$ an hour? No thanks. And I'm talking maximum. Most months I spend 6h watching in total. That brings it up to $12 / hour.

Pay-what-you-watch sounds better to me and many others. Show me a gradually increasing bill in the top right corner of the UI and I'll manage. Or give me only one subscription -- much less than $70 though -- and then you distribute my money to the proper rights holders. I shouldn't care who owns what, nor should I be bothered switching services.

It doesn't matter if I'm a billionaire as well. Again, value for money.

The hardware was often subsidised (although I recall at one point having to pay an extra €99 for a sky box), but assuming a set top box cost €100, that's 1.5 months of payments to pay for the box, the rest is the subscription cost.

> You need to add the cost of your internet connection on top of that, plus whatever box you use to play to the TV etc.

Only if you exclusively use the internet for this content. And the vast, vast majority of TV's come with apps for Netflix, Prime etc these days. Those that don't, a streaming stick is ~£35.

> That's a fair wack cash.

I never said it wasn't, but (I would wager) it's most households primary form of entertainment. It being ~2% of the median household's income it's good value.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

If compulsory licensing for tv and movies also implied the service was picking the episodes, you'd have potential for competition if service A just played all of the episodes in order and service B only played the good episodes. Etc.

It's like every technology: if this is how things work, and they are suboptimal, the optimal solution will be applied. If we say "oh to bad, it's how it's established", then people will go against the establishment if that means better capabilities.

> How could you "fix" it?

Take a look at the music industry, they have solved it pretty well. I can stream everything on Spotify paying very little, I get everything that I want and I don't have to pirate it anymore. So maybe fostering independent creation? Forbidding "exclusivity" clauses? Fostering independent studio creation?

> They could set the price really high.

Prices are elastic: bigger price, less demand, same benefit. So that doesn't cut it either.

Is it because labels have ownership in Spotify? I don't think the HBOs and Disneys will give up their streaming platform unless forced to do it.

You might be right on HBO and Disney not giving up their service, until customers don’t want to pay for it anymore, and they’ll seek other ways. That’s capitalism after all…

The larger a company is the more it falls back to "let the market decide." In this case the market is starting to decide (again) to bypass the poor user experience the big players offer and just steal the content. This is the point where it's time for the market to adapt (again) if they want to keep revenue.

Then the video stream vendors must find a different way to make things work. If their goal is to be user-friendly, which I highly doubt. Only in marketing-speak (err, marketing lies) they claim "The experience of our user is our utmost goal". But it really isn't.

The same could theoretically happen for entertainment content, in one way or another. A popular scenario present in a lot of sci-fi is that people subscribe to "channels" or data streams or whatchacallit, and the point of access is actually working as an aggregator and single point of payment. I can see no valid reason why big outfits like Sony or Samsung couldn't do that, effectively defragmenting the subscription craziness and easily dealing with backoffice negotiations on licensing and whatnot (Sony could probably do that without leaving the building).

Again, it doesn't HAVE to be the end-user device manufacturer to present such a single-point service, but I think they are best positioned to be first movers for such a paradigm. And not saying it would be easy, because they are subject to the same brain-dead enshittification attempts in their "smart" devices as anyone else, and that is a habit that is hard to quit.

Every streaming service will converge to what cable TV is like: paid channels, maximum amount of ads, additional premium content, attempts at lock-in, exclusive licensing of content, etc.

Not adopting the cable business model is leaving billions of dollars on the table, so it will happen.

There is a second set of the population that will never pay for media, or at least not more than very trivial amounts. Either because of lack of ability to pay, not thinking it's worth it, or not believing there is anything wrong with piracy.

Then the is the third group that will happily pay for content when it is reasonably priced and, perhaps most importantly, easy and convenient. If it's too expensive or too difficult/annoying, they will pirate.

The size of this third group dictates where the equilibrium is. If it's very small, then media will always converge in the cable style maximum extraction. But if that second group is large, then the cable model might lose more money than it gains by pushing consumers towards piracy.

This just shows that the availability of piracy is NOT the problem. It shouldn't matter to HBO whether I've pirated it or not: I could be a paying customer if their prices matched their catalog's value, but it doesn't, so they get nothing, piracy or no.

I’m in group 4. I’ll pay for streaming services to avoid ads, but never linear TV. TV is largely superior content - it’s professionally made and generally high quality. But if I get sick of jumping through hoops, I have plenty of other things to do.

The problem with piracy is if you become a fan of a series and gossip with your friends about it, now you're marketing that company's crappy service. It's a weird way to go about things.

That's what makes the dynamics so weird: it's not just, or even primarily, about your personal entertainment - there are social aspects involved, from wanting to belong with your peer group (e.g. talk about latest GoT episode with your cow-orkers at the water cooler), to all kinds of rituals (e.g. watching romantic comedies with a date/spouse).

Same applies to books and musics, to a lesser degree to magazines/news media. For some reason, it mostly doesn't apply to videogames; I used to think it was because they're a new thing, but these days, I think it's rather because the experience is much more individualized and requires much more effort (and time), making it a poor social object.

It absolutely does, but apparently not for your peer group.

OTOH if you don't have that in common with other people, you just talk about other things. It is the same thing with soccer for example which is the #1 subject around coffee machines for men (and now increasingly women).

What, you mean like babies and mortgages and bills and restaurants and health problems and gossip? I mean I can enjoy talking about those as well to an extent, but at times I like to change it up a bit.

For a lot of people I know, that's all I really have in common with them, besides geek shit. There was like a solid 45 minutes of me sitting quietly at a New Year's Eve party recently, because everyone else started going into all the Marvel and Star Wars TV shows they watched, of which I've mostly skipped (except Loki and a couple seasons of Mandalorian).

For the people who don't even have interests in geek shit, it seems like they're often very limited to the other topics above (or the other topics plus sports if they're into those). At least the people I've encountered.

It's not like I don't have other interests. I have a lot of creative interests, like making games, and writing, and (very amateur) photography, and music. But a lot of adults don't bother with that stuff (or don't bother anymore, at least), and mostly just consume the creative output of others.