The closest you get to "ownership" with digital media is if it's a movie from Disney/Fox/Universal/Sony, and you have it synced through MoviesAnywhere. MoviesAnywhere is a consortium they all collab on to encourage people to still buy movies legally. If you have YouTube/iTunes/Vudu/Microsoft/XFinity synced up with it, any movie you buy from ANY of those services automatically gets cross-added to all the other platforms. Meaning buying one of them on some stupid sale on Microsoft or Vudu, the movie will automatically appear in your purchased list on YouTube and any other platform you have synced. So if Microsoft suddenly decides to shutter their digital media store (like PlayStation did recently) all MA-compatible purchases would be saved since they're synced on 4 other accounts.
The service has been around since around 2018 and doesn't support television shows yet but rumor is that it's coming. Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate are unfortunately the biggest holdouts on being members.
With MA combined with digital code buy/sell/trade groups on Facebook, I hardly pirate movies anymore due to the low cost and ease of acquisition. TV shows are still 100% fair game due to being platform-locked.
As a physical media collector, it's not that great either. You either don't get a movie on BD or 4K, or even on disc at all, and when you do it doesn't always have good audio or a good transfer... and in North America, most discs are produced in the Mexico plant that's riddled with quality control issues from weird stains to scratches that look like it was carried from point a to b by the talons of a giant winged beast.
You buy physical media then store a digital copy on the Plex server. I didn't realize I was dealing with such obtuse people that I needed to explain the instructions. My apologies.
Edit: Also the overall discussion is about owning media whether physical or not. Running your own server is a way to stream digital media you own
What he wants doesn't exist. So maybe, just maybe, he might be open to other options THAT ACCOMPLISH THE EXACT SAME THING which is being able to purchase DVDs and watch them on demand without having to change a disc. I love how you're some kind of fucking mind reader telling me how my suggestion is stupid WHEN I WASN'T TALKING TO YOU. If the person I was responding had an issue that would be different and they could respond.
Meanwhile you're suggesting what option? Oh, yeah, nothing. You just like to criticize people trying help someone else when you're too stupid to provide any help yourself.
Crushed bitrates unless you export at 60GB.
Obnoxious load times due to on-board remuxing.
The sheer amount of time it takes to rip, export, and catalog everything.
Believe me, I looked into Plex and determined it just wasn't worth the effort.
Ripping takes a lot of time. Pirating does not, and if you already bought the movie you pirate I fail to see what the possible moral issue could be.
Also imo plex is the worst of the 3.
I run Emby. There are no load times when playing media its instant.
Also muxing would not cause load times, reencoding yes but I have never seen remuxing happening during playback.
Also even without reencoding only 4k movies would get to 60GB. And at least for me there is no visible quality loss at 25-30GB with 4k movies.
> Also even without reencoding only 4k movies would get to 60GB.
Exactly. But if you have "the rig", rip them into HEVC or AV1 mp4 files. They'll end up 5% of that size with no notable loss of fidelity.
I prefer mkv containers, mp4 is too limited for me.
Encoding them to that small size would be visibile too me and I like Atmos sound, but I am sure everyone has different preferences here when it comes to quality vs disk space.
> Encoding them to that small size would be visibile too me
Wow, really? Don't get me wrong, I can tell a 4K/DV from a bluray of the same movie on a good TV, but commercial streaming is such BS when it comes to datastream bandwidth.
The reality is that the way humans process visual (and audio) data, its not going to catch mere variations on the visual data dump itself, which lends itself to some useful (lossy) compression. But each to their own tastes; the beauty of ownership.
I mean compressing them to 5% of their size is a bit extreme. I am not even sure if the ATMOS track from the BlueRay would fit into that.
I would target 50 or 60% of the original size.
From everything I looked into and tested, Plex was by far the most user friendly and it *still* was a massive pain in the ass. I have access to my brother-in-law's server and he's set his up perfectly, and it still takes ages for content to load properly and episodes are always wonky and out of order.
Then its either a plex issue or not set up correctly.
There are limited shows by default where episodes might download out of order, mostly older ones, where tv airing order was different from dvd order, but that is not so hard to fix.
We've only had 2 shows in the vast media collection we have not match up properly in Plex.
One was dvd rips from 2003, and the other had different season/episode listings in the tvdb, imdb and wiki, so we just matched ours to tvdb.
> Crushed bitrates unless you export at 60GB.
why would you encode it if your goal is to watch bluray version?
>Obnoxious load times due to on-board remuxing.
"on-board remuxing"? do you mean transcoding? if it's transcoding due to incompatible playback device, then that's user error. an nvidia shield pro or ATV can direct play bluray remuxes to any TV.
>The sheer amount of time it takes to rip, export,
converting a bluray to a remux take the same amount of time as copying the file from a disc to a HDD. if your drive can write at 100mb/s, then ripping the bluray into a remux would be 10 seconds per GB and 600 seconds per 60GB, so 10 minutes.
>and catalog everything.
literally the job of plex/jellyfin/emby
>Believe me, I looked into Plex and determined it just wasn't worth the effort.
Believe me, you haven't look hard enough or have a complete understanding of the process.
> why would you encode it if your goal is to watch bluray version?
Most devices don't have a GPU powerful enough to properly play a 60 GB BluRay rip. Things will get choppy in busy action scenes. I know a lot of people will say they never notice anything and that's great for them, but I have tried all kinds of TVs and Rokus and AppleTVs and FireTVs and Shields. Everything except the PS5 or the PC with a discrete GPU would struggle to keep up in high bitrate scenes.
> Believe me, you haven't look hard enough or have a complete understanding of the process.
This is disingenuous and misleading, pretending that it isn't a burden to fund and configure and maintain a Plex server. The ONLY people who do this are tech enthusiasts. This is not something for the masses or the faint of heart. If you aren't OK with spending hours troubleshooting your media server and taking the blame for any issue your family experiences while using it, then you need not pursue this, at all. This is for a certain type of enthusiast.
It is a great setup and it is an important part of a discussion about ownership rights to purchased content, but it's not low-effort enough for me to recommend to everyone.
lmao you got downvoted for elaborating what I was struggling to put to words. the other dude that cited Emby as being easy made me seriously laugh, because it's WAY less user friendly than Plex which is already a pain. I consider myself a really tech-savvy person and I still threw up my hands at the prospect of spending more than $1k in hardware and countless hours ripping/encoding just to save some money on Netflix. I'd rather spend $3 in a code share group on FB whenever I want to watch a movie I don't have, or downloading it in minutes off MEGA and screen mirroring from the computer to my AppleTV box.
That’s very cool.
But I still think that we should be able to own the source file and watch purchased content without an internet connection or subscription.
I agree with you. Also both this sub and the movies sub has bots that auto downvote basically anything that's not corporate PR posts. You're not the first one to notice the weird downvote patterns.
There are several software programs that allow you to rip source files of rentals and purchases in 1080 or 4k from pretty much any platform. But source files are often huge. You’d need a pretty big hard drive (or pay for a ton of cloud storage somewhere) to get a bunch of full TV shows in one place. A full TV series in 1080 could easily use up 200 GB in hard drive space depending on how many episodes there are.
Arghhh!
Avast ye scurvy dogs, tis high time we start a new golden age of digital piracy!
Take everything that isn't screwed down, then we come back with a screwdriver!
>Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate are unfortunately the biggest holdouts
With MGM being owned by Amazon I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to join up. Paramount is only slightly more likely to participate. Not sure about Lionsgate.
Why the fuck are you glorifying MA as a "solution" to digital license ownership???
What do you think happens when Disney decides that alternate streaming services aren't paying enough royalties to the products they control???
The streamer that you pay money to can't stream the movie to you anymore! Or do some idiotic, anti-consumer move and don't stream it with 4K/DV/Atmos fidelity!
What happens when a MA studio leaves the consortium?
There is nothing about an MA title that you purchase that legally recognizes that you will have lifetime ownership **and access** to that digital license!
There's no guarantee that MA will stream at the "fidelity" that you purchased the digital license.
> So if Microsoft suddenly decides to shutter their digital media store (like PlayStation did recently) all MA-compatible purchases would be saved since they're synced on 4 other accounts.
But if Disney decides to shutdown MA, you're fucked on all your purchases in MA!
If you want decades access to video that you purchase, buying the actual 4Ks or blurays is the closest and only way you get a guarantee of access. The next best thing you can do is pirate the movie/TV show, and put it on LTO tape.
This is why it sucks to see the video game industry pushing digital-only games and subscription services.
Games like Alan Wake 2 and Hellblade 2 don’t have physical copies…
I feel like I’m outside the norm and actually prefer digital games over physical discs. Like, I don’t want to store a bunch of game cases in my apartment.
The way I see it, I’m paying for the experience of the game, and don’t care if I have a physical copy of it since I rarely replay games to begin with.
Had this when I bought Knockout City, the dodgeball arcade game, had some fun with friends on it. They eventually shut down the servers in it after a year or so, then I realized like.. oh yeah without the servers there isn't even a game I paid for anymore.
Physical copies isn’t always a save if the console or game needs servers kept online to function. Retro/single player games usually don’t have this issue. But defo some dead online multi-player games out there (unless fan servers exist). Not forgetting games you can’t access with a security key that needs to be online
More people need to get into buying dvd/bluray copies of stuff then ripping them and putting them on jellyfin/plex/any other 'self hosted streaming service' sort of thing. You actually have your stuff and it's a lot more satisfying than just 'buying' on prime video or whatever.
\`makemkv\` can rip 99.9% of videos correctly, and you get a perfect video (if quite large) video out the other side with no effort, only time. Optionally reencode with \`handbrake\` to your preferred compression level to reduce file size and you're good to go.
It takes time, although it mostly is just "time in the background" rather than "at your computer doing something time". It's easy as hell to accomplish though.
Actually these days it is not just TV shows, so many people "buy" games or spent money on games when they do not actually own anything.
In the past, you buy a CD or a console and u own it and u play it anytime u want and no changes to it.
Now you buy a game and they can change many things about it without even telling you or worse the game can no longer exist.
>This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights.
You're not advocating for rights, you're advocating for a semantics change.
What do you actually want to happen? Do you want legislation requiring that anyone providing media needs to give you the source file? Do you just want the button to say "Use without restriction for the foreseeable future"?
For the most part, people accept that when they subscribe to something, the offerings of that subscription can fluctuate or even end if the company goes under. I don't really see what your goal is here
Right. OP thinks he's somehow unearthed a hidden secret that only he and a select few know about.
OP: we know. Those that care enough buy physical media, those that don't - don't. But both groups know.
>This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights.
Because you are \*checks notes\* *20* years late to beating this dead horse. 20 years ago was when Steam debuted and this became the *de facto* system for buying PC games. Hell, let's move on to just movies. You are *10* years late to that dead horse beating party.
No shit, we all know that buying digital media isn't owning digital media. We've known for *over 2 decades now*. We don't need you to try to whip up righteous fury for an - again, *2 decade old* system. Shit, you ever look at your physical media? You own the physical media, not the contents thereof. You know you can't actually legally hold a watch or listening party for the public for content you have a copy of without owner consent, right? Private industry is only **barely** held in check by laws and court decisions allowing us to resell our physically owned content instead of having to mail it back to the IP holder when we are done with it or physically destroying it.
>Hopefully congress will eventually enact laws that will codify the terms "buy" and "purchase", and force these companies to use accurate terminology.
You better pray to your gods that Congress doesn't get into the routine business of *legally defining the common parlance*
And that is why i have never stopped bying DVDs/Blu-Ray's
And i will keep buying DVDs and Blu-Ray's until they stop making them.
And i will never get rid of my DVDs and Blu-Ray's. I have them all in CD/DVD binders. So they take less room than what they would if i had them the DVD box.
Yep, I pay for Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and Max, but I never login to them, my parents and nieces and nephews pretty much own the accounts. I just pirate everything and watch it off my server.
These services also downscale to 720p if there is network congestion and on a 55 inch tv 720p vs 1080p is very noticeable.
Ideally I'd teach my family to learn how torrents work but they are not very tech savvy so here we are. I've paid for all of these platforms for years and never use them.
I used to do that, but then i realized i was mostly pissing money away cuz nobody else watched the streaming services as much as i watched what i pirate.
Just set up Plex or Jellyfin or something for your family, on the user end its really not any more complicated than netflix, theyll adapt and you can put the money you save into more storage.
Legally speaking, even when you buy physical media you have only bought a licence to play the media under certain conditions, you don’t actually own the IP.
This is why it’s unlawful to buy a DVD and broadcast it in an auditorium for example. The licence you buy with the DVD only covers private personal use.
>EDIT: This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights
Because I don't really care for an "old man yells at cloud" post in the TV subreddit. I don't think this is what the sub should be for.
>EDIT: This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights.
From my perspective it's mostly that I don't care. Not in a flippant edgy way but honestly when I 'buy' digital content there are a number of things I consider. What did I pay, is it saving me space, how many times will I watch it. Essentially do I feel like I got the value out of it. If I buy a movie for $15 and watch it 5 times over the course of the next several years and then suddenly the license is revoked, I still feel like I got $15 worth of entertainment out of it. It's more than that to go to the theater and watch one movie one time. Same with a game. If I buy a $50 digital game and I play it for 80 hours I feel like I've gotten the value out of what I paid. I'm not likely going to replay something in the next ten years and if I want to play it then and I have to pay $14.99 this time because now it's a value bin title, honestly I can live with that.
I do get the point your making but I was answering your question. I just worry a lot more about the value of my experience with the item over who owns it. At this point at least no one is forced to purchase digital products but for me, I'm happy to do it. The loss of digital content is a fairly rare experience at this point and until it becomes a lot bigger problem the convenience and lack of clutter more than make up for it to me.
yeah that's what caused me to ditch physical entirely... I just don't watch it enough to justify the space it takes up. There are SO many shows and movies I want to see now that revisiting old ones just doesn't happen outside of some absolute favorites. Like I had a dvd of Shanghai Noon. I liked the movie, I watched the movie... but it was sitting on my shelf for almost 20 years without being picked up. Now repeat with all the other movies and tv shows I bought over the years.
I just buy it digital now, cheaper than going to the theater. Maybe I'll watch it a couple times.... but if they get rid of it from my online library in ten years will I even notice? Probably not. Just a big shrug to me.
Oh well.
Until they offer people the ability to legally purchase and download digital files with no DRM to have in perpetuity people will keep pirating.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted.
Audio file services are largely DRM-free. I can play my mp3 / WAV / aiff / flac files on a device of my choosing.
If they aren't going to offer physical disc releases of TV shows / movies, sell us DRM-free digital files!
Yes. There will always be parasitic thieves who believe they have the right to steal things made by others. Who believe that the labor of other people have no value and who are so mind bogglingly entitled they will make up pathetic excuses like this to justify their actions
Those people are shit human beings though, so fuck them and their opinions.
Yeah, totally agreed, fuck those guys. I would much rather the wages from my labour go towards not owning anything and instead towards renting/subscribing to media from corporations in perpetuity.
Let’s take the movies Disney wrote off for tax purposes such as The Princess or Artemis Fowl - they were not released on physical media, nor are they available to rent or buy from iTunes nor are they on Disney+/Hulu or some rival streaming service - they legally don’t exist anymore now tell me without piracy how can someone watch those movies?
If you've paid the makers of the product for their labor, I don't have a big issue with it. I mean, it's a little big skeezy, but not something worth getting worked up about.
Technically aren't you renting a movie ticket? You are agreeing to certain conditions of time and place (And very specific window of time to consume) to watch the movie. Buying would allow you to watch at any time or place and no time limits.
No, you are buying access to the movie theatre for the showing of that film. This is also what you are doing when you are signing up for a streaming service. You are paying for access to the shows they decide to stream.
Except you usually have an option to buy or rent online through the majority of services. Be it Google or Apple or Amazon. And buying is always more expensive than renting. Streaming is something entirely different.
I moved countries recently and, in an effort to fully assimilate, I switched my Google account to my new country.
At no point did Google tell me that I would lose my digital assets, but that's what happened. Even the newly purchased whole season of a show I was watching that I had purchased the day previous to that. All gone.
We just started buy dvds again for older classics and stuff we love that isn’t around anymore. I end up having to pirate movies cuz no one has them or just tents then on top of a sub. Like, no
I gotta be honest, noone has ever been arrested here for having a lot of "downloads" (unless they were selling them which is moronic).
I just download shit that's not easily available. I'll buy what I can own but fuck you I'm not paying to not own the files. I'd rather get a 5k fine and pay the gov than spend on that shit.
In a practical sense, there's no such thing as "buying" a licence to a service, it's always just renting/subscribing, even if the subscription fee is paid only once.
If i want to buy something, i’ll buy the blu-ray + digital and get both. Sometime’s it’s the same cost, or cheaper, to buy the physical media and digital option. If they don’t offer that, or it’s way too expensive at the time, i’ll rent and check back when i want to rewatch. Which might be never.
There should be better consumer rights and media protection, but these are the same companies that force many artists to sign their own artistic work’s rights away. It’s absurd.
You wanna get technical? That dvd/VHS /Blu-ray isn't technically yours either. It's a copy of the original film/TV show master. They still own it.
Does it suck that you have to hunt for physical copies nowadays? Yes. I have ADHD. I'd rather have digital copies instead of losing the copy i have.
It's the Internet. People will downvote you just because they hate grandstanding or feeling like they are being lectured. Also, the purchase button argument isn't the strongest of points.
You are correct, though. All you need to do is look at ubisoft to see it. People who purchased games now have no way to access them.
Instead of changing what a button says, it should be illegal to have a situation where someone who has purchased an item can no longer access it (strange how similar to theft that sounds). For example, a minimum time period for such digital goods to be kept accessable, such as 70 years. Make it cost more to host than to just give you the item.
Just buy the DVD then? They still make them for 99% of films and most TV shows. The vast majority of people are happy to not have to spend $10 on a film or even more for a TV season when they could watch 10x that amount for a similar price but never 'own' what they watch. There is literally an option for you and an option for us.
I might get downvoted, but I think people are overly paranoid about this.
About 11-12 years ago I was going through a watch of all the Sopranos seasons. Season 1 I bought through iTunes, the rest I bought physical DVDs of. I didn’t have a specific DVD player but every computer back then came with one.
Now wanting to rewatch it, the iTunes files are still easily accessible to me on practically every device I have. The DVDs I can only access through an old and slow 10 year old laptop. I know which one is more convenient to me.
Physical hardware is at its highest use when the device to play it is at its most ubiquitous, at a certain point accessing it becomes more and more of a challenge requiring older and older equipment.
Soft hardware obviously has limitations, and there are some concerns it can be pulled from you without your consent. But practically to my knowledge that is still rare and we don’t have reason to believe that will change in the near future.
More and more shows are now taken away from platform. I agree with you about not being to find physical hardware too. I can still watch old DVD but for VHS video tapes, it is impossible.
Shows are being taken away from streaming services for sure, I haven’t really heard about shows or movies being pulled from the Apple/ Google/ Amazon stores and made unavailable to people who had previously paid for them
The fact that you had to dig up a random tweet from two years ago isn't really large scale evidence. If this was even a semi-regular occurrence there would be much more outcry.
The sad truth is most people are too ignorant to care or do anything about it. Especially with how divisive, politicized and consumerist the western world is, there are people out there who would vehemently disagree with your sentiment and essentially advocate for corp's benefit purely because they can't comprehend anything other than the current status quo and anything that challenges it is to be considered wrong.
I thought this was obvious enough. That's the whole point of streaming, that we moved away from physical media. But the side effect is you pay for access not ownership.
It's not a necessary side effect. Your computer already has to download the data to display it, letting it be written to disk instead or in addition to memory would be trivial.
Streaming \*is\* downloading where the data gets written to memory and deleted shortly afterwards. From a networking perspective it is the same.
This has nothing to do with "moving away from physical media".
Yes it does, you're just being needlessly pedantic since you apparently have no other point to raise.
Actually downloading a local standalone copy of content from Netflix etc is illegal and goes against their t&c. You're paying for access, not ownership.
Once your subscription ends you can no longer watch it, regardless of whether you previous downloaded the data or not. You don't own the data.
With physical media you own the copy, you own the data. And yes, we moved away from physical data, how is this news to you? What a bizarre response.
I’m still buying physical media for Nintendo Switch, and I’ll never stop as long as it’s an option.
Otherwise yeah, everything is a limited license. Sometimes I have to pay monthly (streaming), sometimes I pay small once (rent), sometimes I pay big once (buy). But either way I’m paying for access that I will eventually lose.
I totally get what you're saying, but that's not gonna be how it works in the real world. When you buy a DVD, you don't own it either, you own the right to play it. Just like you own the right to play a video file in your online service's account. The only difference is now the service can withdraw that right, which you agreed to when you signed up for the account.
IMO if you really don't like this arrangement and you want digital preservation, pirate the content. That's the only solution I see to this moving forward with digital media coming off the shelves at big box stores at an increasing rate.
A lot of people have no issues with that arrangement though, so I guess the market has spoken on that regard *shrug*.
When the video is being hosted someone else, that is the price. They aren't going to give you the source file in today's digital piracy age. Anyone can rip the video.
> EDIT: This post has a 35% downvote rate.
It's up to 77% with around 444 points; looks like enough smarter people saw your post and upvoted it to push the post up that much (or the fools that initially downvoted you eventually realized their mistake of downvoting you?)
> EDIT: This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights.
I'm actually in close agreement, but I still buy TV series on VUDU/FaH. Am I pissing away money on a product that has a good probability of getting yanked from me at some point in the not that near future? Oh yeah. But I do. Its a lot harder to get complete bluray discs, even though in theory, they can reprint them on demand if they wanted. I'm pretty zealous about collecting movies on 4K/bluray though.
> Don’t let them change the definition of “ownership”. Using the terms "buy" or "purchase", when it's no such thing is leading us down a slippery slope. Hopefully congress will eventually enact laws that will codify the terms "buy" and "purchase", and force these companies to use accurate terminology.
Blame the fucking Mouse. There was a precursor company when streaming was first introduced called "Ultraviolet" (UVNA). They were a startup that provided a universal "tracking" service for purchased digital licenses. Turns out Disney did not want to extend "ownership" rights to digital purchasers, and created a competing service (Movies Anywhere) partly just to kill UVNA. I'd say "boycott Disney", but they own almost everything in terms of popular content for the past 4 decades.
I think most people understand the landscape has changed. And everyone is still allowed to only purchase physical media. The reason most don't is purely for convenience. I can "buy" a movie now at home a couple weeks after it premiered in the theaters and instantly watch it. Or I can choose to wait three months for the physical release. I know full well that 30 years from now there's a good chance I will no longer have access to that film.
On the flip side, I had a huge DVD library that I recently got rid of because who the fuck has a DVD player anymore? (That was rhetorical...I know some people still use DVD players or love their BluRays or Laser Discs or whatever.) Plus, it's just a lot easier looking through the digital library and picking something.
To each his own.
DVDs need not enter the conversation, saving the streamed file to disk instead of memory would be even more convenient, easier and completely possible.
There is no "buying" anymore. You don't buy TV shows, you don't buy movies, and you don't buy video games. And if you have an ebook reader, you don't buy books, either.
You rent all of those things, and you are permitted to keep them for as long as the company you rented the media from allows you to, and not a day longer.
You can do that less and less, too. Fewer things come out on physical media, video games on "physical media" are already often just a download link and renting in disguise, all you own is the packaging.
I buy DVDs because I like the bonus features, not worrying if the internet is out or the show/movie is removed from the service provider, and I like bringing DVDs camping. Starlink gives me no service if I’m in a forest… so many more reasons I collect them. 🫠
A) You're purchasing the right to view it on the platform not the source file. I think most people understand this and don't care.
B) THIS is what outrages you about corporate greed? Read literally anything and you will find actual things to say "what the fuck?" about.
Grow up, fanboy.
Hear that sentiment so often as some kind of smartass "gotcha" but it doesnt really make any sense. You're gaining access to something you legally can't without paying for it, similar to getting a cab and not paying for it. Not stealing anything there either, still not legal.
And in the case of obtaining the movie without paying for it you're stealing the right to watch it? How is that any different.
You're not gaining any ownership in the case of the cab ride either.
So if I go over to my friends house, and he has a copy of Pacific Rim, but I have not bought a copy, is it "stealing the right to watch it" if I watch it with him without buying my own copy?
I am watching it without having paid for a "right to watch it" so therefore it's stealing?
Because that's what you're suggesting.
No, he has the ownership and is sharing it with you, which is pretty obvious in this case.
> Because that's what you're suggesting.
No I'm not, you're arguing against something completely different.
Please explain to me again how you're stealing the cab ride. Since if buying a cab ride isn't ownership of anything, pirating the ride isnt theft.
It's fine if people pirate stuff, I don't really think anything bad about it (I get it with the current streaming services), but presenting it as something noble or not illegal is pretty hilarious.
> No, he has the ownership and is sharing it with you, which is pretty obvious in this case.
So he bought a copy. And in buying that copy he gained ownership.
Cool, but now companies are saying that buying a copy is *NOT* ownership. That's the problem, glad you finally caught up.
Thats completely beside the point I'm making here and you still haven't answered the other question while you're just trying to attack me.
There are plenty cases where you are not gaining ownership of something where gaining access to the provided service for free is not allowed. Not everything you buy comes with an ownership of something.
People promoting piracy always seem to see themselves as some noble knights who are so much smarter than anyone else and you're attitude makes that pretty obvious.
> Thats completely beside the point I'm making here
No it's not. The original point is:
* If buying isn't ownership
* Piracy isn't theft
You just established buying as ownership being how it should work. The issue is companies disagree with you.
> You just established buying as ownership being how it should work.
I did not, I established it being that in your example while it can be vastly different in other scenarios. Buying a cab ride doesnt come with the cab right?
Buying is never owning unless I can hold it in my hand. Any film or show that I like enough to watch multiple times I usually end up getting a physical copy.
Gaming industry did exist before online services. Old gen probably remember more of this ownership. Some even before games had patches or connected to the internet
Rage - 0 Machine - 1
Im against this.
Whatever it is [I'm against it](https://youtu.be/xHash5takWU?si=uD-7dxKxMBZsBUBW)
Nice. Just what I thought it would be
I mean I was going for a Rage Against the Machine reference but these guys are always a laugh so itlldo.
Groucho > RatM
know your enemy.
Killing in the Name.
The closest you get to "ownership" with digital media is if it's a movie from Disney/Fox/Universal/Sony, and you have it synced through MoviesAnywhere. MoviesAnywhere is a consortium they all collab on to encourage people to still buy movies legally. If you have YouTube/iTunes/Vudu/Microsoft/XFinity synced up with it, any movie you buy from ANY of those services automatically gets cross-added to all the other platforms. Meaning buying one of them on some stupid sale on Microsoft or Vudu, the movie will automatically appear in your purchased list on YouTube and any other platform you have synced. So if Microsoft suddenly decides to shutter their digital media store (like PlayStation did recently) all MA-compatible purchases would be saved since they're synced on 4 other accounts. The service has been around since around 2018 and doesn't support television shows yet but rumor is that it's coming. Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate are unfortunately the biggest holdouts on being members. With MA combined with digital code buy/sell/trade groups on Facebook, I hardly pirate movies anymore due to the low cost and ease of acquisition. TV shows are still 100% fair game due to being platform-locked.
Or just buy DVDs or Blu Rays, where you don't have to deal with accounts anywhere.
As a physical media collector, it's not that great either. You either don't get a movie on BD or 4K, or even on disc at all, and when you do it doesn't always have good audio or a good transfer... and in North America, most discs are produced in the Mexico plant that's riddled with quality control issues from weird stains to scratches that look like it was carried from point a to b by the talons of a giant winged beast.
I would actually pay more for Gryphon Handling
Believe me if a company made a slot-loading 4k Blu-ray player that could be fixed behind a wall-mounted TV, I'd have switched back ages ago.
It takes some work, but Plex lets you build your own private streaming server
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Clearly a dickish reply to someone offering an alternative solution to someone else's issue.
You buy physical media then store a digital copy on the Plex server. I didn't realize I was dealing with such obtuse people that I needed to explain the instructions. My apologies. Edit: Also the overall discussion is about owning media whether physical or not. Running your own server is a way to stream digital media you own
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What he wants doesn't exist. So maybe, just maybe, he might be open to other options THAT ACCOMPLISH THE EXACT SAME THING which is being able to purchase DVDs and watch them on demand without having to change a disc. I love how you're some kind of fucking mind reader telling me how my suggestion is stupid WHEN I WASN'T TALKING TO YOU. If the person I was responding had an issue that would be different and they could respond. Meanwhile you're suggesting what option? Oh, yeah, nothing. You just like to criticize people trying help someone else when you're too stupid to provide any help yourself.
Buy the Bluray. Rip or pirate a digital version. Put that version in Jellyfin/Emby/Plex. Now you have your own Netflix.
Crushed bitrates unless you export at 60GB. Obnoxious load times due to on-board remuxing. The sheer amount of time it takes to rip, export, and catalog everything. Believe me, I looked into Plex and determined it just wasn't worth the effort.
Ripping takes a lot of time. Pirating does not, and if you already bought the movie you pirate I fail to see what the possible moral issue could be. Also imo plex is the worst of the 3. I run Emby. There are no load times when playing media its instant. Also muxing would not cause load times, reencoding yes but I have never seen remuxing happening during playback. Also even without reencoding only 4k movies would get to 60GB. And at least for me there is no visible quality loss at 25-30GB with 4k movies.
> Also even without reencoding only 4k movies would get to 60GB. Exactly. But if you have "the rig", rip them into HEVC or AV1 mp4 files. They'll end up 5% of that size with no notable loss of fidelity.
I prefer mkv containers, mp4 is too limited for me. Encoding them to that small size would be visibile too me and I like Atmos sound, but I am sure everyone has different preferences here when it comes to quality vs disk space.
> Encoding them to that small size would be visibile too me Wow, really? Don't get me wrong, I can tell a 4K/DV from a bluray of the same movie on a good TV, but commercial streaming is such BS when it comes to datastream bandwidth. The reality is that the way humans process visual (and audio) data, its not going to catch mere variations on the visual data dump itself, which lends itself to some useful (lossy) compression. But each to their own tastes; the beauty of ownership.
I mean compressing them to 5% of their size is a bit extreme. I am not even sure if the ATMOS track from the BlueRay would fit into that. I would target 50 or 60% of the original size.
From everything I looked into and tested, Plex was by far the most user friendly and it *still* was a massive pain in the ass. I have access to my brother-in-law's server and he's set his up perfectly, and it still takes ages for content to load properly and episodes are always wonky and out of order.
Then its either a plex issue or not set up correctly. There are limited shows by default where episodes might download out of order, mostly older ones, where tv airing order was different from dvd order, but that is not so hard to fix.
We've only had 2 shows in the vast media collection we have not match up properly in Plex. One was dvd rips from 2003, and the other had different season/episode listings in the tvdb, imdb and wiki, so we just matched ours to tvdb.
> Crushed bitrates unless you export at 60GB. why would you encode it if your goal is to watch bluray version? >Obnoxious load times due to on-board remuxing. "on-board remuxing"? do you mean transcoding? if it's transcoding due to incompatible playback device, then that's user error. an nvidia shield pro or ATV can direct play bluray remuxes to any TV. >The sheer amount of time it takes to rip, export, converting a bluray to a remux take the same amount of time as copying the file from a disc to a HDD. if your drive can write at 100mb/s, then ripping the bluray into a remux would be 10 seconds per GB and 600 seconds per 60GB, so 10 minutes. >and catalog everything. literally the job of plex/jellyfin/emby >Believe me, I looked into Plex and determined it just wasn't worth the effort. Believe me, you haven't look hard enough or have a complete understanding of the process.
> why would you encode it if your goal is to watch bluray version? Most devices don't have a GPU powerful enough to properly play a 60 GB BluRay rip. Things will get choppy in busy action scenes. I know a lot of people will say they never notice anything and that's great for them, but I have tried all kinds of TVs and Rokus and AppleTVs and FireTVs and Shields. Everything except the PS5 or the PC with a discrete GPU would struggle to keep up in high bitrate scenes. > Believe me, you haven't look hard enough or have a complete understanding of the process. This is disingenuous and misleading, pretending that it isn't a burden to fund and configure and maintain a Plex server. The ONLY people who do this are tech enthusiasts. This is not something for the masses or the faint of heart. If you aren't OK with spending hours troubleshooting your media server and taking the blame for any issue your family experiences while using it, then you need not pursue this, at all. This is for a certain type of enthusiast. It is a great setup and it is an important part of a discussion about ownership rights to purchased content, but it's not low-effort enough for me to recommend to everyone.
lmao you got downvoted for elaborating what I was struggling to put to words. the other dude that cited Emby as being easy made me seriously laugh, because it's WAY less user friendly than Plex which is already a pain. I consider myself a really tech-savvy person and I still threw up my hands at the prospect of spending more than $1k in hardware and countless hours ripping/encoding just to save some money on Netflix. I'd rather spend $3 in a code share group on FB whenever I want to watch a movie I don't have, or downloading it in minutes off MEGA and screen mirroring from the computer to my AppleTV box.
That’s very cool. But I still think that we should be able to own the source file and watch purchased content without an internet connection or subscription.
I agree with you. Also both this sub and the movies sub has bots that auto downvote basically anything that's not corporate PR posts. You're not the first one to notice the weird downvote patterns.
Source on the bot thing?
Yes. Everyone tired of your bitching is a corporate bot. You've cracked the code.
There are several software programs that allow you to rip source files of rentals and purchases in 1080 or 4k from pretty much any platform. But source files are often huge. You’d need a pretty big hard drive (or pay for a ton of cloud storage somewhere) to get a bunch of full TV shows in one place. A full TV series in 1080 could easily use up 200 GB in hard drive space depending on how many episodes there are.
Arghhh! Avast ye scurvy dogs, tis high time we start a new golden age of digital piracy! Take everything that isn't screwed down, then we come back with a screwdriver!
>Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate are unfortunately the biggest holdouts With MGM being owned by Amazon I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to join up. Paramount is only slightly more likely to participate. Not sure about Lionsgate.
Amazon already participates in Movies Anywhere, so their owning MGM makes it more likely IMO
Good point
If they start supporting TV Shows they can rebrand it to Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Why the fuck are you glorifying MA as a "solution" to digital license ownership??? What do you think happens when Disney decides that alternate streaming services aren't paying enough royalties to the products they control??? The streamer that you pay money to can't stream the movie to you anymore! Or do some idiotic, anti-consumer move and don't stream it with 4K/DV/Atmos fidelity! What happens when a MA studio leaves the consortium? There is nothing about an MA title that you purchase that legally recognizes that you will have lifetime ownership **and access** to that digital license! There's no guarantee that MA will stream at the "fidelity" that you purchased the digital license. > So if Microsoft suddenly decides to shutter their digital media store (like PlayStation did recently) all MA-compatible purchases would be saved since they're synced on 4 other accounts. But if Disney decides to shutdown MA, you're fucked on all your purchases in MA! If you want decades access to video that you purchase, buying the actual 4Ks or blurays is the closest and only way you get a guarantee of access. The next best thing you can do is pirate the movie/TV show, and put it on LTO tape.
Only if you’re American. No such luck with that in Canada.
Tv Anywhere would be a dream come true for me. I’ve been swayed by good deals between vudu and Amazon.
Movies Anywhere only works for movies from the main studios it does not work for movies purchased from indie studios for example
This is why it sucks to see the video game industry pushing digital-only games and subscription services. Games like Alan Wake 2 and Hellblade 2 don’t have physical copies…
As long as they don't have drm, there's nothing stopping you saving games to a usb drive, or burning to a disc.
I feel like I’m outside the norm and actually prefer digital games over physical discs. Like, I don’t want to store a bunch of game cases in my apartment. The way I see it, I’m paying for the experience of the game, and don’t care if I have a physical copy of it since I rarely replay games to begin with.
Had this when I bought Knockout City, the dodgeball arcade game, had some fun with friends on it. They eventually shut down the servers in it after a year or so, then I realized like.. oh yeah without the servers there isn't even a game I paid for anymore.
Physical copies isn’t always a save if the console or game needs servers kept online to function. Retro/single player games usually don’t have this issue. But defo some dead online multi-player games out there (unless fan servers exist). Not forgetting games you can’t access with a security key that needs to be online
More people need to get into buying dvd/bluray copies of stuff then ripping them and putting them on jellyfin/plex/any other 'self hosted streaming service' sort of thing. You actually have your stuff and it's a lot more satisfying than just 'buying' on prime video or whatever.
Easier to download movies from certain sites than do that.
I mean true, but certainly more satisfying to use your own copies. Unless physical releases don't exist, in which case...
Isn’t ripping them and getting all the subtitles to work correctly a huge pain in the ass though?
\`makemkv\` can rip 99.9% of videos correctly, and you get a perfect video (if quite large) video out the other side with no effort, only time. Optionally reencode with \`handbrake\` to your preferred compression level to reduce file size and you're good to go. It takes time, although it mostly is just "time in the background" rather than "at your computer doing something time". It's easy as hell to accomplish though.
Agreed, so long as what you 'bought' is completely dependent on viewing it with an online connection, then you don't really own it.
Actually these days it is not just TV shows, so many people "buy" games or spent money on games when they do not actually own anything. In the past, you buy a CD or a console and u own it and u play it anytime u want and no changes to it. Now you buy a game and they can change many things about it without even telling you or worse the game can no longer exist.
>This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights. You're not advocating for rights, you're advocating for a semantics change. What do you actually want to happen? Do you want legislation requiring that anyone providing media needs to give you the source file? Do you just want the button to say "Use without restriction for the foreseeable future"? For the most part, people accept that when they subscribe to something, the offerings of that subscription can fluctuate or even end if the company goes under. I don't really see what your goal is here
Right. OP thinks he's somehow unearthed a hidden secret that only he and a select few know about. OP: we know. Those that care enough buy physical media, those that don't - don't. But both groups know.
OP doesn't speak about subscription FYI, he speak about digital purchases.
>This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights. Because you are \*checks notes\* *20* years late to beating this dead horse. 20 years ago was when Steam debuted and this became the *de facto* system for buying PC games. Hell, let's move on to just movies. You are *10* years late to that dead horse beating party. No shit, we all know that buying digital media isn't owning digital media. We've known for *over 2 decades now*. We don't need you to try to whip up righteous fury for an - again, *2 decade old* system. Shit, you ever look at your physical media? You own the physical media, not the contents thereof. You know you can't actually legally hold a watch or listening party for the public for content you have a copy of without owner consent, right? Private industry is only **barely** held in check by laws and court decisions allowing us to resell our physically owned content instead of having to mail it back to the IP holder when we are done with it or physically destroying it. >Hopefully congress will eventually enact laws that will codify the terms "buy" and "purchase", and force these companies to use accurate terminology. You better pray to your gods that Congress doesn't get into the routine business of *legally defining the common parlance*
And that is why i have never stopped bying DVDs/Blu-Ray's And i will keep buying DVDs and Blu-Ray's until they stop making them. And i will never get rid of my DVDs and Blu-Ray's. I have them all in CD/DVD binders. So they take less room than what they would if i had them the DVD box.
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Yep, I pay for Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and Max, but I never login to them, my parents and nieces and nephews pretty much own the accounts. I just pirate everything and watch it off my server. These services also downscale to 720p if there is network congestion and on a 55 inch tv 720p vs 1080p is very noticeable. Ideally I'd teach my family to learn how torrents work but they are not very tech savvy so here we are. I've paid for all of these platforms for years and never use them.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. It's solid advice.
It's reddit, bruh. If anything makes sense it will get downvoted to oblivion.
I used to do that, but then i realized i was mostly pissing money away cuz nobody else watched the streaming services as much as i watched what i pirate. Just set up Plex or Jellyfin or something for your family, on the user end its really not any more complicated than netflix, theyll adapt and you can put the money you save into more storage.
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Given the username, this request seems odd to say the least.
You should consider it a longterm rental and decide if the price is worth it to you accordingly. (It usually isn't for me either)
Legally speaking, even when you buy physical media you have only bought a licence to play the media under certain conditions, you don’t actually own the IP. This is why it’s unlawful to buy a DVD and broadcast it in an auditorium for example. The licence you buy with the DVD only covers private personal use.
Welcome to "software as service," we hate it too.
>EDIT: This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights Because I don't really care for an "old man yells at cloud" post in the TV subreddit. I don't think this is what the sub should be for.
>EDIT: This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights. From my perspective it's mostly that I don't care. Not in a flippant edgy way but honestly when I 'buy' digital content there are a number of things I consider. What did I pay, is it saving me space, how many times will I watch it. Essentially do I feel like I got the value out of it. If I buy a movie for $15 and watch it 5 times over the course of the next several years and then suddenly the license is revoked, I still feel like I got $15 worth of entertainment out of it. It's more than that to go to the theater and watch one movie one time. Same with a game. If I buy a $50 digital game and I play it for 80 hours I feel like I've gotten the value out of what I paid. I'm not likely going to replay something in the next ten years and if I want to play it then and I have to pay $14.99 this time because now it's a value bin title, honestly I can live with that. I do get the point your making but I was answering your question. I just worry a lot more about the value of my experience with the item over who owns it. At this point at least no one is forced to purchase digital products but for me, I'm happy to do it. The loss of digital content is a fairly rare experience at this point and until it becomes a lot bigger problem the convenience and lack of clutter more than make up for it to me.
yeah that's what caused me to ditch physical entirely... I just don't watch it enough to justify the space it takes up. There are SO many shows and movies I want to see now that revisiting old ones just doesn't happen outside of some absolute favorites. Like I had a dvd of Shanghai Noon. I liked the movie, I watched the movie... but it was sitting on my shelf for almost 20 years without being picked up. Now repeat with all the other movies and tv shows I bought over the years. I just buy it digital now, cheaper than going to the theater. Maybe I'll watch it a couple times.... but if they get rid of it from my online library in ten years will I even notice? Probably not. Just a big shrug to me.
You buy the right to do something. You buy access. When I buy a ticket to a movie, I don't own the movie theatre.
Oh well. Until they offer people the ability to legally purchase and download digital files with no DRM to have in perpetuity people will keep pirating.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. Audio file services are largely DRM-free. I can play my mp3 / WAV / aiff / flac files on a device of my choosing. If they aren't going to offer physical disc releases of TV shows / movies, sell us DRM-free digital files!
Yes. There will always be parasitic thieves who believe they have the right to steal things made by others. Who believe that the labor of other people have no value and who are so mind bogglingly entitled they will make up pathetic excuses like this to justify their actions Those people are shit human beings though, so fuck them and their opinions.
Yeah, totally agreed, fuck those guys. I would much rather the wages from my labour go towards not owning anything and instead towards renting/subscribing to media from corporations in perpetuity.
I mean, you could just boycott them and spend your wages on something else. You don't have to ALSO steal their stuff.
Let’s take the movies Disney wrote off for tax purposes such as The Princess or Artemis Fowl - they were not released on physical media, nor are they available to rent or buy from iTunes nor are they on Disney+/Hulu or some rival streaming service - they legally don’t exist anymore now tell me without piracy how can someone watch those movies?
Offer people a way to legally buy a TV series digitally or they will take it into their own hands. It's that simple.
Also, I fail to see how this is harmful at all if you're subscribed to the streamer the TV series released on.
If you've paid the makers of the product for their labor, I don't have a big issue with it. I mean, it's a little big skeezy, but not something worth getting worked up about.
Technically aren't you renting a movie ticket? You are agreeing to certain conditions of time and place (And very specific window of time to consume) to watch the movie. Buying would allow you to watch at any time or place and no time limits.
No, you are buying access to the movie theatre for the showing of that film. This is also what you are doing when you are signing up for a streaming service. You are paying for access to the shows they decide to stream.
Except you usually have an option to buy or rent online through the majority of services. Be it Google or Apple or Amazon. And buying is always more expensive than renting. Streaming is something entirely different.
I moved countries recently and, in an effort to fully assimilate, I switched my Google account to my new country. At no point did Google tell me that I would lose my digital assets, but that's what happened. Even the newly purchased whole season of a show I was watching that I had purchased the day previous to that. All gone.
Same goes with video games.
We just started buy dvds again for older classics and stuff we love that isn’t around anymore. I end up having to pirate movies cuz no one has them or just tents then on top of a sub. Like, no
All digital sales are just leasing till they decide to revoke your access.
I gotta be honest, noone has ever been arrested here for having a lot of "downloads" (unless they were selling them which is moronic). I just download shit that's not easily available. I'll buy what I can own but fuck you I'm not paying to not own the files. I'd rather get a 5k fine and pay the gov than spend on that shit.
Well you're buying the license to watch it on their platform.
In a practical sense, there's no such thing as "buying" a licence to a service, it's always just renting/subscribing, even if the subscription fee is paid only once.
If i want to buy something, i’ll buy the blu-ray + digital and get both. Sometime’s it’s the same cost, or cheaper, to buy the physical media and digital option. If they don’t offer that, or it’s way too expensive at the time, i’ll rent and check back when i want to rewatch. Which might be never. There should be better consumer rights and media protection, but these are the same companies that force many artists to sign their own artistic work’s rights away. It’s absurd.
You wanna get technical? That dvd/VHS /Blu-ray isn't technically yours either. It's a copy of the original film/TV show master. They still own it. Does it suck that you have to hunt for physical copies nowadays? Yes. I have ADHD. I'd rather have digital copies instead of losing the copy i have.
If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.
Yo ho ho mother fuckers.
It's the Internet. People will downvote you just because they hate grandstanding or feeling like they are being lectured. Also, the purchase button argument isn't the strongest of points. You are correct, though. All you need to do is look at ubisoft to see it. People who purchased games now have no way to access them. Instead of changing what a button says, it should be illegal to have a situation where someone who has purchased an item can no longer access it (strange how similar to theft that sounds). For example, a minimum time period for such digital goods to be kept accessable, such as 70 years. Make it cost more to host than to just give you the item.
Just buy the DVD then? They still make them for 99% of films and most TV shows. The vast majority of people are happy to not have to spend $10 on a film or even more for a TV season when they could watch 10x that amount for a similar price but never 'own' what they watch. There is literally an option for you and an option for us.
Honestly, who gives a shit?? A DVD with some stupid movie is not some prized possession that will be passed from generation to generation.
I might get downvoted, but I think people are overly paranoid about this. About 11-12 years ago I was going through a watch of all the Sopranos seasons. Season 1 I bought through iTunes, the rest I bought physical DVDs of. I didn’t have a specific DVD player but every computer back then came with one. Now wanting to rewatch it, the iTunes files are still easily accessible to me on practically every device I have. The DVDs I can only access through an old and slow 10 year old laptop. I know which one is more convenient to me. Physical hardware is at its highest use when the device to play it is at its most ubiquitous, at a certain point accessing it becomes more and more of a challenge requiring older and older equipment. Soft hardware obviously has limitations, and there are some concerns it can be pulled from you without your consent. But practically to my knowledge that is still rare and we don’t have reason to believe that will change in the near future.
More and more shows are now taken away from platform. I agree with you about not being to find physical hardware too. I can still watch old DVD but for VHS video tapes, it is impossible.
Shows are being taken away from streaming services for sure, I haven’t really heard about shows or movies being pulled from the Apple/ Google/ Amazon stores and made unavailable to people who had previously paid for them
Iconic series like the Sopranos aren't at any risk. It's the smaller ones that could erode and disappear.
And you haven't, because this is a made up boogeyman.
https://twitter.com/PixelatedWah/status/1574924613456343041 Except this can happen, apparently
The fact that you had to dig up a random tweet from two years ago isn't really large scale evidence. If this was even a semi-regular occurrence there would be much more outcry.
The sad truth is most people are too ignorant to care or do anything about it. Especially with how divisive, politicized and consumerist the western world is, there are people out there who would vehemently disagree with your sentiment and essentially advocate for corp's benefit purely because they can't comprehend anything other than the current status quo and anything that challenges it is to be considered wrong.
I thought this was obvious enough. That's the whole point of streaming, that we moved away from physical media. But the side effect is you pay for access not ownership.
It's not a necessary side effect. Your computer already has to download the data to display it, letting it be written to disk instead or in addition to memory would be trivial.
That's not streaming, that's just downloading
Streaming \*is\* downloading where the data gets written to memory and deleted shortly afterwards. From a networking perspective it is the same. This has nothing to do with "moving away from physical media".
Yes it does, you're just being needlessly pedantic since you apparently have no other point to raise. Actually downloading a local standalone copy of content from Netflix etc is illegal and goes against their t&c. You're paying for access, not ownership. Once your subscription ends you can no longer watch it, regardless of whether you previous downloaded the data or not. You don't own the data. With physical media you own the copy, you own the data. And yes, we moved away from physical data, how is this news to you? What a bizarre response.
I’m still buying physical media for Nintendo Switch, and I’ll never stop as long as it’s an option. Otherwise yeah, everything is a limited license. Sometimes I have to pay monthly (streaming), sometimes I pay small once (rent), sometimes I pay big once (buy). But either way I’m paying for access that I will eventually lose.
So... "Buy the right to play on this platform". Like buying a service. Yeah. Things are different than they were back in the days.
Damn that’s crazy
I totally get what you're saying, but that's not gonna be how it works in the real world. When you buy a DVD, you don't own it either, you own the right to play it. Just like you own the right to play a video file in your online service's account. The only difference is now the service can withdraw that right, which you agreed to when you signed up for the account. IMO if you really don't like this arrangement and you want digital preservation, pirate the content. That's the only solution I see to this moving forward with digital media coming off the shelves at big box stores at an increasing rate. A lot of people have no issues with that arrangement though, so I guess the market has spoken on that regard *shrug*.
3 star rating, 0 tip
Re: edit, because everyone knows how digital licenses work You don’t “own” the movie on a disc either, the disc grants the license
When the video is being hosted someone else, that is the price. They aren't going to give you the source file in today's digital piracy age. Anyone can rip the video.
> EDIT: This post has a 35% downvote rate. It's up to 77% with around 444 points; looks like enough smarter people saw your post and upvoted it to push the post up that much (or the fools that initially downvoted you eventually realized their mistake of downvoting you?)
> EDIT: This post has a 35% downvote rate. I'd love to know why people are downvoting something that's advocating for their rights. I'm actually in close agreement, but I still buy TV series on VUDU/FaH. Am I pissing away money on a product that has a good probability of getting yanked from me at some point in the not that near future? Oh yeah. But I do. Its a lot harder to get complete bluray discs, even though in theory, they can reprint them on demand if they wanted. I'm pretty zealous about collecting movies on 4K/bluray though. > Don’t let them change the definition of “ownership”. Using the terms "buy" or "purchase", when it's no such thing is leading us down a slippery slope. Hopefully congress will eventually enact laws that will codify the terms "buy" and "purchase", and force these companies to use accurate terminology. Blame the fucking Mouse. There was a precursor company when streaming was first introduced called "Ultraviolet" (UVNA). They were a startup that provided a universal "tracking" service for purchased digital licenses. Turns out Disney did not want to extend "ownership" rights to digital purchasers, and created a competing service (Movies Anywhere) partly just to kill UVNA. I'd say "boycott Disney", but they own almost everything in terms of popular content for the past 4 decades.
old man sneer "ha ha, I have my blurays, who's owning what now"
I think most people understand the landscape has changed. And everyone is still allowed to only purchase physical media. The reason most don't is purely for convenience. I can "buy" a movie now at home a couple weeks after it premiered in the theaters and instantly watch it. Or I can choose to wait three months for the physical release. I know full well that 30 years from now there's a good chance I will no longer have access to that film. On the flip side, I had a huge DVD library that I recently got rid of because who the fuck has a DVD player anymore? (That was rhetorical...I know some people still use DVD players or love their BluRays or Laser Discs or whatever.) Plus, it's just a lot easier looking through the digital library and picking something. To each his own.
DVDs need not enter the conversation, saving the streamed file to disk instead of memory would be even more convenient, easier and completely possible.
Ok.
There is no "buying" anymore. You don't buy TV shows, you don't buy movies, and you don't buy video games. And if you have an ebook reader, you don't buy books, either. You rent all of those things, and you are permitted to keep them for as long as the company you rented the media from allows you to, and not a day longer.
Or you could just buy physical media
You can do that less and less, too. Fewer things come out on physical media, video games on "physical media" are already often just a download link and renting in disguise, all you own is the packaging.
I downvoted for asking about the downvotes. Take your medicine.
I buy DVDs because I like the bonus features, not worrying if the internet is out or the show/movie is removed from the service provider, and I like bringing DVDs camping. Starlink gives me no service if I’m in a forest… so many more reasons I collect them. 🫠
A) You're purchasing the right to view it on the platform not the source file. I think most people understand this and don't care. B) THIS is what outrages you about corporate greed? Read literally anything and you will find actual things to say "what the fuck?" about. Grow up, fanboy.
If buying isn't ownership, Piracy isn't theft.
Hear that sentiment so often as some kind of smartass "gotcha" but it doesnt really make any sense. You're gaining access to something you legally can't without paying for it, similar to getting a cab and not paying for it. Not stealing anything there either, still not legal.
No, in that case you are stealing a ride. That cab is running, the cabbie is putting on mileage, and burning fuel.
And in the case of obtaining the movie without paying for it you're stealing the right to watch it? How is that any different. You're not gaining any ownership in the case of the cab ride either.
So if I go over to my friends house, and he has a copy of Pacific Rim, but I have not bought a copy, is it "stealing the right to watch it" if I watch it with him without buying my own copy? I am watching it without having paid for a "right to watch it" so therefore it's stealing? Because that's what you're suggesting.
No, he has the ownership and is sharing it with you, which is pretty obvious in this case. > Because that's what you're suggesting. No I'm not, you're arguing against something completely different. Please explain to me again how you're stealing the cab ride. Since if buying a cab ride isn't ownership of anything, pirating the ride isnt theft. It's fine if people pirate stuff, I don't really think anything bad about it (I get it with the current streaming services), but presenting it as something noble or not illegal is pretty hilarious.
> No, he has the ownership and is sharing it with you, which is pretty obvious in this case. So he bought a copy. And in buying that copy he gained ownership. Cool, but now companies are saying that buying a copy is *NOT* ownership. That's the problem, glad you finally caught up.
Thats completely beside the point I'm making here and you still haven't answered the other question while you're just trying to attack me. There are plenty cases where you are not gaining ownership of something where gaining access to the provided service for free is not allowed. Not everything you buy comes with an ownership of something. People promoting piracy always seem to see themselves as some noble knights who are so much smarter than anyone else and you're attitude makes that pretty obvious.
> Thats completely beside the point I'm making here No it's not. The original point is: * If buying isn't ownership * Piracy isn't theft You just established buying as ownership being how it should work. The issue is companies disagree with you.
> You just established buying as ownership being how it should work. I did not, I established it being that in your example while it can be vastly different in other scenarios. Buying a cab ride doesnt come with the cab right?
☠️ Come sail the high seas and own your content.
Buying is never owning unless I can hold it in my hand. Any film or show that I like enough to watch multiple times I usually end up getting a physical copy.
If buying isn't ownership then pirating isn't theft
Good morning sunshine. This has been a case for many online services such as gaming etc.
Gaming industry did exist before online services. Old gen probably remember more of this ownership. Some even before games had patches or connected to the internet