This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up...
So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.
The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? James Cameron's True Lies? It is not in our collection, please remain here and we can watch Commando together! It's just as good!
The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies is the best! Ignore that other booth... you may save $2 but are you certain that video will still exist in a year?
And the whole time you know that just under the bazaar is the Underground/Black Market where all is preserved and all can be had, but you'll need to work for it.
Just a minor correction: Commando is superior to True Lies ;)
It is, but it's not much consolation if you want to watch True Lies and not Commando.
From a moral PoV pirating old movies isn't a big issue, especially in cases where the original makers are already dead. At that point you're only feeding Hollywood bosses, shareholders and decendants. Same as torrenting music from dead artists. I don't care for Jimi Hendrix' greedy sister or 'Authentic Brands Group', which owns the rights to Elvis Presley's music. These people can create their own art instead of living off other people's work.
but enough about anthropic
Well played.
What if Jimi Hendrix wanted for his sister to benefit from his work?
Hendrix has been dead for twice the length that copyright originally lasted, and for longer than the copyright period at the time he was alive (i.e. during his life when he was assessing the economic fairness of creating his music, he would've expected his work to already be public domain today). My daughter is older than her grandmother was when that music was written. Why would we care any more than e.g. what Francis Scott Key wanted?
A decent proxy for the maximum appropriate length of copyright might be when the next generation starts making those edits or disclaimers for changing culture (so the original is no longer considered appropriate for current markets), so at most ~20 years or so. One generation, and then it is history/heritage to pass on (or critique, as the case may be).
Who made his guitar? It seems like he made all his art on the back of someone else’s work… they should be getting royalties for every track made with their product
(I’m pointing out the absurdity of trying to assign ownership within a system of shared creation)
I don't think that the guitar manufacturer asked for royalties.
On the other hand there are video cameras that you can't use for commercial purposes because they lack the appropriate video codec license from MPEG-LA :-) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735824)
Too bad because she isn't either way. It's all going to shareholders and top executives.
If we had a sane copyright system everything older than 10 years would be in the public domain
Physical DVD is the way. Praise Criterion
yeah good idea, I'll just pop it into my xbox -- oh.
You can play the DVD without your Xbox being online.
Well!, thank God for small mercies.
Praise Criterion
The whole collection, mostly on Blu-Ray, was 50% off at Barnes and Noble when I was there a couple of weeks ago.
There was a huge display right at the entrance of this huge chain retailer, so in spite of the online streaming hype, there must be a non-niche audience for optical media.
Blu-Ray is risky from the DRM side of things. Those disks can be disabled at anytime and can just stop working if the players are offline too long or the manufacture's servers go down. Rip them to your hard drive if you want to keep being able to watch them without begging for permission.
I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
How would a downloaded file buffer? That sounds more like streaming sites, which yeah are bad. But if you download a movie or season of a show in advance I don't think you'll have the same issues. Language ones or missing subtitles maybe - you gotta check those as the download finishes and before you put it on a media server.
> How would a downloaded file buffer
I've no idea. It happens sometimes and only seems to happen with certain fils. In this case I'm sure it's a jellyfin issue, but this just comes down to having to debug while someone is waiting to watch - which is exactly the time I don't want to.
As for language/subtitles it's true if it happens from the start (which I agree, is usually true) but occasionally the downloads get weird midway through.
At that point you’re not playing the downloaded file. You’re either playing a transcoded version of it which will buffer as a computer tries to convert on the fly. Or you’re dealing with a network throughput issue related to the bitrate of the file you’re trying to remotely play.
If you're talking about those random malvertising-supported streaming sites then sure, but torrenting is not like this at all.
No, I'm talking about downloaded files. It happens maybe 2% of the time. You can't be sure the indexers are giving you the correct one.
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
On streaming services shows get silently censored or edited, or episodes are just outright removed (and get re-numbered so you don't even realize what was removed), and episodes get put out in the wrong order, or they aren't released at all in the right language, and there are no subtitles, only closed captions. Neither streaming or piracy are perfect, but only one them allows you to save a show to your hard drive so you know it will be there the next time you want to watch it unlike streaming where they constantly pull shows offline
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
Well that's hilariously untrue. Movies getting pulled out of streaming services is why I started to buy physical DVDs again.
> Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
Yes, those things do happen with commercial streaming platforms; Paramount is especially bad IME, but hardly unique.
> Movies getting pulled out of streaming services is why I started to buy physical DVDs again
Me too, but sadly more and more shows aren't getting physical releases at all anymore.
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
I have 2 words for you: "soon leaving". You may have seen them on Netflix.
And in the US you have the advantage it's generally leaving to go somewhere. In many smaller countries this is not true.
I've never those words in File Explorer.
"who checks the show in advance?"
Maybe I'm old school, but the primary lesson Limewire taught me was to always check the media before you show it to someone else.
Every 'issue' that you mentioned about wrong episode, wrong language, etc. If those are the costs to ride the ride then so be it. No CEO gets paid in 'had to redownload a different version'.