- 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.

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.

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

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.

(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.

Its amazing how so many apps really struggle at the edges. For a company as big as Spotify they should do better. Its probably a side effect of their company's culture.

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.

- 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.

But imagine my surprise when I checked Spotify a couple of years later and the situation was still the same. Ok, I thought, they must have had different internal priorities, but once they get those, they will make UI at least semi-usable.

A few years passed, but the answer was still no. Once again I didn't write because clearly they must have had thousands of actual users writing and demanding the essentials and those things MUST be on their way, no way they weren't!

Several years later and the situation was still the same... This is when I stopped making excuses for the developers. They must be technically incompetent, be dim product-management wise (not understanding features, people, customers, lacking a vision, not to know how to collect, analyze and work on feedback) or stupid/unmotivated. But probably everything of the above.

I only criticize the technical aspects, not the business side. And I don't even criticize a much more challenging podcast/video side of things. I am merely talking about the lack of essentials in the basic music player. They couldn't even do that! I can bet money that the podcast implementation is on no better level. Other people's comments support that assumption. I am not surprised in the least.

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 was so annoyed that I actually cancelled my subscription.

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

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.

"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...

because they are bad for the environment.

Took them like 6 months to fix that.

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.

¯\_(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.

My favorite videos for all the problems with DVD and BR: AVGN's You Know Whats BS series: (warning a lot of cussing in the following videos)

[1: DVD]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdzaEVeFEE

[2: BR]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetXKdi9U3c

My favorites quote at the end when he was comparing DVDs to VCRs: "Its like we are going forward in technology but only making our lives bullshittier"

A set top unit typically respects the blocks put in place by the DVD author (some rare models have a hidden menu provided by the manufacturer that can bypass things like region coding and this).

Most software players(VLC for example) totally ignore any rules placed on the dvd and allow the user to do whatever they want.

That's gonna be hard to come by, I left that job more than twenty years ago and short of digging an authoring tool and making one DVD I don't see how I could convince you. Provided I even remember how the damn thing even worked.

Here's what I remember:

- around 2004-2005 (checking movies I remember posters in the hallway it's more likely to be early 2004) ?

- the studio had three authoring computers, two macos8 and one windows machine

- couldn't upgrade to macos8 because authoring software wasn't supported on macos9

- authoring consisted in linking b-frame and a-frame as entry and exit points for chunks of video

- programming was a mix of drawing video blocks, mapping some keys to them, building some loops into a kind of finite-state machine

- we used dvdshrink a lot internally to move the movie between authoring guys and color/effects/editing guys

- video blocks were overlayed with TIFF pictures to create menus effect

- subtitles were rendered as TIFF at some points in the process, explained the rough edges (I remember I was surprised it wasn't a txt file or something but DVD players hadn't the processing power to render the overlay of arbitrary text so TIFF files were generated and it could overlay them over the video)

- I remember the distributor representatives coming to check out the final master of the DVD: they would sit in a corner of the room in front of the TV and plays the menu to see if everything was right. We made fun of them because they claimed to check the DVD for quality but the TV was too crappy to actually display colours and play sounds right. Now that I think about it I believe they were more likely to check if subtitles and languages options were in accordance with the distributor's rights. They usually watched the whole movie ^^.

Concerning UOP:

- I don't remember if you could input the combination while the unskippable content was playing, I think it was something you had to do before that to disable UOP on the next block

- But it definitely was like something described in that article https://lifehacker.com/hit-stop-stop-play-and-other-tricks-t...

> These tricks may not work every time and with every DVD, but thank god for the times they do. Got a trick of your own that does the trick?

The fact it doesn't always work is because the authoring didn't always put them in.

First of all I want to take a moment to state how hilarious it is you used DVDShrink: a tool developed for copyright infringement of content.

What you described is the standard authoring process that even I did back when it was fun to make home DVDs.

But regarding unskippable content, it is difficult to prove if the code you described will be respected by all brands of players. I recall that JVC players would always go back to the main menu as soon you press STOP and it would then start the playback over when Play was presented. Pause is what would halt playback temporary. Its been a while since I used JVC players though.

Yeah, the irony wasn't lost on any of us :].

> What you described is the standard authoring process that even I did back when it was fun to make home DVDs.

One year after I left I heard from a coworker that they were going to close shop. Director had visited a freelance guy who was doing authoring with a single consumer PC box and he saw the writing on the wall. He wouldn't have been able to keep his team in-house with all the costs associated if distributors started authoring in-house or spread the orders among freelancers and drive prices down. So that studio left the market and went back to digital picture/movie effects. At that time, being a student, I also tried out adobe encore (I think it was the name) as an alternative the much expensive authoring tool (I think it was sonic but I am pretty sure there was another, both didn't look like a toy interface and the other one had a different name) and thought "wtf, it's way easier to author with that that almost doing assembler with the professional tool" but I found out it didn't produce 100% compliant DVD. Anyway.

> But regarding unskippable content, it is difficult to prove if the code you described will be respected by all brands of players. I recall that JVC players would always go back to the main menu as soon you press STOP and it would then start the playback over when Play was presented. Pause is what would halt playback temporary. Its been a while since I used JVC players though.

Ooooh. I think I understand your point now. Yeah, if the hardware indeed decide to ignore anything happening during an UOP block then nothing would work. My memory fails me, assuming the software can register keys during an UOP block even though the UOP logo blinks maybe what we did was register keys during the UOP block and disable the flag on the fly to give back user control (but then hw players that ignore anything while a UOP block is being played would result in non skipable content obviously) or maybe the combination had to be entered before so it sets a flag that is read before the next block to check if it should disables UOP on the next block (or skip it entirely and drop the user to the main menu ?). I am sorry to say I am unable to remember more details and I didn't keep in touch with anybody there :/.

I'm looking at you, Apple TV+.

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

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...

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.

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.

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).

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

They have tons of ads and pop ups so blocker is needed.

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.

> The guy is literally pirating shit,

No, he is literally not pirating anything, unless he's in Somalia and attacking a cargo ship right now. And yes, he has the full right to call the parties who produced the situation where torrenting is the most convenient way to consume content an asshole - because they are assholes. I remember the time where doing that was not necessary - to the point that I almost forgot how to do it at all - but then the assholes came and now you have to pay for 15 different services, with crappy apps and unskippable ads, so yes, it's assholery. And it has nothing to do with indie anything.

You're a thief. Plain and simple. You just need to justify your delusion because you can't face reality.

All you need to look at is the law. They'd throw you in jail if it didn't cost so much.

You're wrong about nobody caring. You care. That's why you got angry enough to reply. You feel fucking guilty and you're ashamed of being an ass hole thief. Deep down you know it and your getting angry at me because I'm deconstructing your delicately made fantasy world.

I'm the one who truly doesn't give a shit. How else can I criticize myself? I pirate without guilt. I recognize my crime but someone like you has to make up some fantasy in order to live with himself.

What gets me is when that fantasy not only validates your actions, but condemns the party you fucking stole from. That's a freaking joke. That's the epitome of delusional.

> They'd throw you in jail if it didn't cost so much.

They can throw me in jail for liking a tweet or wearing a wrong garment or ingesting a wrong plant. So what?

> You feel fucking guilty and you're ashamed of being an ass hole thief.

Thank you for telling me what I feel. How else would I find out? Please do tell me more about my feelings, I love it when people who know nothing about me still able to figure out everything about what I feel in each particular moment. They must be so smart and perceptive, it's a really enriching experience to interact with such people. My gratitude knows no bounds.

If I wasn't even close to being right you wouldn't even respond. It's the fact that I'm right that makes you respond. I'm right and you can't face it.

That's all.

Says who?

There's no natural right to copyright. It's explicitly an artificial monopoly on content.

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.

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

> 1k = 1920x1080

> 2k = 2560x1440

> 4k = 3840x2160

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Next step is not paying for anything altogether. A middle finger is the only thing those kinds of companies are getting from me in the future, and honestly I'd rather see their demise.

If streaming ever becomes like this, I'm also going back to piracy.

For movies pretty much everything I wanted to watch would eventually show up. Typically a movie would first be in theaters, then become available for purchase on disc or digital, rental, and be included in one paid streaming service. Sometime later, maybe two years after it was in theaters, it should show up on some non-premium cable channel.

The only time I couldn't wait for things to show up on non-premium cable was when "Avengers: Endgame" was coming soon. I knew that one would be hard to avoid major spoilers for once it was released in theaters so decided seeing it in theaters was a must. That meant I had to get get a month of Netflix, which had the Marvel movies then, to get caught up enough for "Endgame".

I also liked cable for rewatching TV series. I'm not sure why, but when some channel is showing "The Simpsons" or "South Park" reruns on a regular schedule I like watching much more than I do when I watch an episode on an on-demand streaming service (or on DVD).

I think it has something to do with the latter being more deliberate. I picked that episode, which somehow makes it so I feel like I need to take it more seriously. When it is just "This channel shows a couple episodes every night" then it seems a lot more casual, like listening to music on the radio. It is easier to just sit back and relax and watch.

We can argue about how pervasive advertising is and how subtle it can be, but cable TV literally has commercial ad breaks.

For series the episodes are written with commercial breaks in mind. For example a typical "The Simpsons" episode is written as 3 acts and the commercials come between the acts.

Movies aren't written with ads in mind, but usually the cable channel running the movie takes into account what is going on in the movie when they decide where to place their ad breaks.

This makes that ads a lot less intrusive than ads on YouTube or most other ad supported streaming services.

With the ads not actually interrupting the story, they actually often provide a convenient break to get up and get a snack, or clean up after the last snack, or visit the restroom. And I can always pick up my iPad or Kindle or a book to pass the time during the ad break if I don't need to do any of those other things.

I am more than willing to pay for content subscription assuming they have everything under one roof and no ads. Pay for cable like service - fuck it. I'd rather watch the paint dry.

To be fair, this is describing oligopolic capitalism in general; streaming services is just where it's most visibly on display for the general public. But the same modus operandi is pervasive throughout the economy: attract customers with good deals initially while maximizing lock-in by all means at your disposal, then start fleecing them. There's simply no economic incentive not to do this, and ethics don't even enter into the equation at the scale those companies operate.

In a more diverse market, competition provides some, albeit limited, check on all this, but very aggressive anti-monopoly regulation is required to keep the market diverse enough for that. I don't just mean breaking up actual monopolies, but even any semblance of market dominance must be mercilessly crushed to maintain competitiveness. Any form of "laissez faire" in the presence of private property inevitably leads to oligopolies.

Distribution has become free with global reach.

So we have Infinite amount of content floating about. Not even bringing generative AI into the picture.

So infinite growing Supply. Finite demand.

I spend a lot of time in both production and post production. The price for good content has certianly decreased but it most certianly hasn't become any definition of cheap. Consumers want very hogh quality content these days and that only comes with experienced staff, you can use cheaper gear.

> Distribution has become free with global reach

Every time someone says this I want to know what where they get this information. So now I am going to ask, prove it. Show me the VOD service or streaming service that is free with global reach. Even network egress from any provider costs a ton of money nevermind compute for transcoding and storage costs. Again prove it.

Media and Entertainment sector has all kinds of bizarre economics cause it's used by the Telcos(check what AT&T and Comcast own in ME sector), the Tech firms (google/youtube, amazon, netflix, apple) to play empire defense and market capture games.

Demand is not decided by the consumer. Or marketing depts won't be getting the budgets they do for demand engineering from their tech and telco overloads. But all that free cash dries up or slows downs once the market capture phase is over which is what has happened with the end of the streaming wars. Disney, Viacom et al have realized they can't compete against tech platforms or telco subsidized shops on the distribution front.

Open an incognito tab, open <insert popular porn site> what is the very first thing on the page after the age disclaimer.

Let me give you a hint, "Meet sexy single in your area" isn't a meme for nothing. Porn is far from free, it is paid for by advertising, and from my recollection they are the ones that revolutionised the ad industry by bringing in pre-roll ads.

Regardless, if video distribution is free at a global scale, then go do it. Create a video hosting service with global scale with any video, not even ones people want to watch, create one that serves 40 views a month. Then come back with an income statement that proves your point.

That is the point I'm trying to make, you claim it's free purely because you don't know what the actual cost is.

I'm not saying the current providers are doing the correct thing. I end up sailing the 7 seas far more than I like purely because I don't even know which one of the 40 services even have the series I want to watch. You know what does? <Insert streaming site with dubious legality>

Ps:

The majority of porn content is user submitted, you knoe we already have a free video service that does the same thing as porn, it's called YouTube.

Big-budget entertainment certainly remains extremely relevant for things like star wars and marvel movies, I agree. Not to mention sports!

But the rise of Youtube and Twitch and suchlike have shown there is a great appetite for cheaply produced niche content.

Linear TV would never have considered it economical to air 30 minutes of chess coverage every day. But it turns out there's a market for 30+ minutes of chess-themed entertainment per day, paying in the low seven figures annually. And the viewers really don't mind if the mic is in shot or the guy flubs his lines, they'll do the whole thing in one take.

And sure it's not literally one guy, I know that low-seven-figures has to pay for video editing and community chat moderation and enough of a creative team to keep things fresh and so on - but compared to the production standards of linear TV, even way back in the 1990s, this stuff is very cheaply produced.

We can do phenomenal things for cheao these days. But cheap still isn't that cheap. Just a few 0s disappeared from the end.

Let me put it this way, it's unlikely even a large YouTube channel is creating The Mandalorian or The Witcher or The Boys anytime soon with a budget that only advertising will be covering.

YouTube is an amazing niche and is the only subscription I will happily pay for monthly. But when I want to see creativity who are truly inspiring it's unlikely YouTube is funding it and I will need to have one of the big providers do that.

There is still a cohort of elderly people like my mother who is just happy I pay her a cable TV (through IPTV) service but they are a diminishing group.

For some reason, they feel they need to burn their own industry down in order to prove that people prefer piracy (or not watching) over inconvenient streaming setups. Is anyone really surprised by the current outcome?

At the time Netflix was literally making a cash loss despite paying less than the cost of production for most of it's output.

But I'm willing to shell out some money for having someone cooking for me and doing the dishes.

Yet, only if the price is right.

A good legal bargain kills illegal ones. But then capitalism greed comes, with that enshitification, and as that lowers the legal bargain value, illegal comes back.

2. That's a problem for them to solve, it's not a problem for me to solve by going like "alright Sony, I'll do you this solid and pay and inconvenience myself instead of pirating just because I like you and I know you're struggling" wink wink

I pay to see movies in the cinema. A few weeks / months later I could pirate them if I want to watch them again.

I have paid once. I am not paying again. It really is that simple but they will rather die than do honest business.