Films OLED TV permanently broke my piracy habit

BD isos are a thing, so you can have piracy without quality losses.

That being said:
If you are like me and don't give a donkey about the release date of a movie the blu ray will often be less than £10 on amazon with free next day shipping, so eliminating the bandwidth and storage requirements is worth the small asking price.

 

Tad has hit the nail on the head for me, having a ripped copy of a DVD on the NAS means I can share it around any of the 6 PC's, 2 laptops, 3 smart TV's, 2 iPad's and 4 phones in the house. Plus we have the ability to either download movies to a individual device or take a USB drive with us when we go away on holiday.

Yeah, we will watch them usually on Netflix, Sky or Amazon then if they are worth keeping, just wait until they are a tenner for a physical copy and rip it.

 

This thread has inspired me to check if my bluray drive is just a reader, and if not I'll start making copies of the blu rays I've got, since getting rid of all my pirated media, it'll give something for the microserver to do! Maybe I'll be able to convert my OH to the higher quality for her ghibli if she can watch them as easily as via netflix etc instead of having to get the disk out and only watching on the TV.....

Edit:
Obviously it doesn't need to be a writer to rip derp.
What's the best way to rip blu rays for easy viewing later then? Some kind of combo of handbrake and makemkv?

 

IIRC (may be a bit out of date): you can put the Dolby Vision metadata (and HDR10 metadata) into a .mp4 container, but not yet into an .mkv container.

 

I think pirates generally turn more toward quality once file size becomes less of an issue (as it naturally does over time). This has already happened with audio files where low quality streaming and relatively difficult availability has made high resolution copies attractive. I think similar will be the case for video once very high quality displays become more common and start to expose the limitations of streaming video.

 

I'm likely out of date as well - but last time I looked into it, playback was the issue, moreso than ripping. There were some standalone players and specific setups that could, but I wasn't ready to sacrifice the ease of Plex for the sake of DV in a handful of films (that if I really wanted it, I could pop a disc in). Now that the latest shield supports DV, perhaps there might be a change there.

Whilst I'd like to have the hit of the whole fruit for DV content in a perfect world, it's not something that's even bothered me enough to look into, let alone buying another device to do it.

It's not even bothered me enough for me to re-rack my BD player after pulling it out to make some space a few months ago.

 

I can only see one justification for piracy... 'entitlement'.

 

Or availability and format. Decent amount of stuff (foreign especially) may not have seen a physical release post-laserdisc (and any of those could well have rotted by now, if you can even find one) even if a more recent digitisation has been made (the case where you can find HD broadcast rips but literally can't buy it). Or if you want to retrofit subtitles or older dubs to a new release, you need to rip it in order to manipulate the file. Or if a release is available domestically, but it's $#!£ due to incompetence on the part of the licensor (a sad proportion of stuff from Mangle Ent.); you've already spent money on it, the least you can get is a half-decent copy from elsewhere.

 

Ahh into the debate! I knew it'd get there sooner or later.

Ripping and preserving decrypted offline copies of media, as per VipersGratitude's salty but somewhat valid argument, is entirely commendable. There are good reasons to do it, and not just convenience.

Piracy is often conflated with this concern (see VipersGratitude's posts). By keeping decrypted, publicly available copies of media for posterity, the pirate network is actually doing God's work and spitting in the face of copyright-trolling corporate giants who would snatch it all away from us, supposedly.

However, decrypting and archiving films for posterity is not one and the same thing as uploading them to the internet on a convenient platform so that millions of other people can obtain it without paying into the economic food chains that made its creation possible. The latter is like tipping over a rice cart and letting everyone take a handful of the rice because you think everyone deserves to eat. Your intentions are good. And individually, every person taking a handful isn't doing much wrong. But by tipping over the cart, you've deprived the person who was having it delivered to the market a whole heap of money. Even if you could never tip over enough carts to stop the market from trading altogether or deprive the towns of rice, your actions are still unethical in one way or another because they will have negative repercussions - increased prices, increased security hassles, fewer willing cart drivers, increased insurance costs....whatever, the metaphor is drawing thin. I'm sure you get the idea.

Wanting everyone to be able to eat is noble. Tipping over rice carts is bad. Grabbing a handful of rice when someone tips over a cart isn't very bad, it isn't impactful, but it's still not great in principle.

Is there some middle ground where we fight back against the encryption and monopolization of access routes to media? Could you decrypt a Blu-Ray, make it available on the internet, and charge people for it, then divert all the revenue to the work's copyright beneficiaries, snubbing the corporation for their encryption and their gatekeeping, imbursing creators and studios whilst spiting the oligarchs who would bind us all with their distribution chains?

No, not really. That isn't feasible. For now, if you want to support the creators of a film but don't like the distribution channels and formats available, you're **** out of options. Too bad. Doesn't make that handful of rice any more legitimately yours to take.

This post is not in violation of the forum rules, but any useful reply to it would be. Only word I'll say on that. (Seriously, they're mean about it. I got a temp ban just for mentioning the size of my pirated media library. No shade, mods, love you.)

 

Silicon Valley's goal isn't to provide a service, but to restructure society so that they are the gateway to every aspect of modern living - Not just search or media, but shopping (e.g. amazon), transport & logistics (e.g. tesla or uber), everything...

The data they gather in the process is extremely powerful. It can, and has, been used to swing elections and referenda but it's ultimately silicon valley who own that data and can distribute it to whichever political party supports their interests. This creates a feedback loop, rendering political infrastructure just tool of corporate oppression.

This isn't a fringe conspiracy theory, as noted, FT are concerned about it and it doesn't get more mainstream than that. They are concerned about a neo-feudalism, where technology lords control all the resources and rent access to their subjects. Everything-as-a-service. Civil disobedience, through resisting the wishes of silicon valley (to whom our political structures are already subservient through technological obsolescence) is what I meant by piracy, actual piracy, being the most ethical course of action.

 

Things like this make me think that the amazing modern displays we have available these could/should be doing a better job of making imperfect media look as best it can, rather than simply using all it's technological might to brutally expose it's flaws. Good quality upscaling would be a start, but imagine AI features on the fly.

 

Is it bad that my only takeaway from this thread is to not to buy an OLED TV?

 

That's not the takeaway, it's do a better job on your rips, probably need to add another processing pass.

OLED seems to have made most of my TV viewing much more wow, the contrast is great, even the rubbish free view stuff looks better, accepting the sources inherent quality issues, I didn't think it could be that much of a step up from my Samsung QLED, but now I want to switch out that for another OLED.

It's main draw backs for me are the concerns on its longevity when it comes to it's price, but if I get 5yrs that's enough.

 

Because you know a language other than English? Is it entitled to want my child to speak multiple languages? From what I've seen, physical media died in China some years ago.

Research of films the have been out of production for 30+ years with no digital distribution? I suppose you make the same argument regarding the emulation of retro games or games where the DRM is broken, even if you have the original disc.

 

My definition of piracy is refusal to buy official versions of or pay full-price for newly released media, physical or digital... but instead obtaining the same via black market appropriation.
Example: a back street copy of a PC title or a cheap DVD copy of a new cinema release, because the price of a DVD is 'too much'; granted, software licencing is now tighter than a duck's @$$ in a flood, but still...

My view of piracy may be older &/or skewed, but it's not an avenue I entertain, anyway.

 

Call me old fashioned, but my definition of piracy is hijacking an old ship and pillaging villages in the Caribbean, with a sweet eye patch and a parrot. And I think we can all get behind that being awesome.

 

You owe Jeff £5 for that quote

 

Let's make sure we're clear about our terms here.

@Mister_Tad's post raises a good point, even if it was unintentional. In this context there is no such offence as 'piracy'. Unauthorised reproduction is not inherently a criminal offence and it is not theft. Of course you could still go to jail for running a bootleg DVD operation, or for hosting a massive filesharing site which made unauthorised reproductions available to all and sundry, but you won't go down for 'piracy'. Instead you'll go down for some form of fraud, or money laundering, or something similar - not 'piracy'. It is a civil offence, not a criminal one. This is not a petty distinction and it is often deliberately buried or obscured as a scare tactic.

Whether it's a criminal or civil matter does not affect the ethics or morality of unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted material. It might be ethically wrong to download an unauthorised reproduction, but it is not always morally wrong.

As with many others in this thread, I keep digital copies of all the blurays and DVDs we buy. It's more convenient, I can flick through my films & TV series at a glance and instantly get information like synopsis, ratings, runtime, etc, without having to scour my shelves and look stuff up on IMDB. I can also watch films & TV series on my computer(s) or tablet(s) as well as my TV - none of my computers have had optical drives for many years. However, format-shifting (i.e. ripping or backing up) the discs I have already paid for is piracy. It's an unauthorised reproduction. So is using a torrent or usenet site to download a digital copy of a film/TV series I have already purchased. Format shifting is ethically wrong, as it's an unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted materials.

So. Hypothetical. My other half has been hogging the TV because she's catching up on Ru Paul's Drag Race, but I have a mighty need to watch Season 1 of Game of Thrones again. My tablet is right next to me, but I can't play the BluRay discs in a tablet and my computer doesn't have a BluRay drive. If I want to watch it on my tablet or my computer then the only ethical choice I have is to pay for it a second time so I can buy or rent it on a streaming service. Why should I pay again for something that I've already paid for? That might be the ethical thing to do, but it sure as hell isn't morally right to make me pay for something a second time because I want to watch it in a different way.

My knowledge of video codecs and optimal encoding settings is well out of date; I don't know which presets look best and trying to learn this information involves a lot of time doing reading and research. Plus it's a slow process to rip and re-encode every single disc I own. I can't keep uncompressed images around since I don't have the money (or space) to keep buying more and more hard drives. So I download stuff instead. It takes me about 20 minutes to download a 1080P film and the quality in many cases is indistinguishable to the BluRay (at least with the TV I have now...). It's certainly better than what I could achieve and I get results infinitely quicker. Usually I'll watch the disc version once or twice and then it goes away in a cupboard somewhere. If it's something I really enjoy, or something with visuals that deserve the uncompressed media, then I will dig out the disc occasionally when I want to watch it.

Ethically, I am in the wrong. I am obtaining unauthorised reproductions of digital media. But am I doing anything morally wrong? Should I go to jail for that? That's what megacorporations and their industry bodies would have you believe, but ask yourself: have I really done anything wrong?

Of course if I ever upgrade my TV & BluRay player to the point where there is a noticeable difference in quality, as @boiled_elephant discovered with his fancy OLED TV, then I'm probably going to have to re-think how I approach the situation.

And - apologies for stating the obvious but sometimes people really do need the obvious statement to be made - I'm not talking about running a service where I make my unauthorised reproductions available to other people (whether I make a profit from that or not). I'm talking about a purely 'personal use' scenario.

EDIT: I sound like an apologist here, but that's really not my point. My point is that in the context of copyright violation there is no difference between making a backup copy of a CD, DVD, BluRay, etc, you've purchased and buying a hooky copy from the back of Dodgy Dave's Dodgy Van Full Of Dodgy Stuff.

Unfortunately the modern pirates are not quite so glamorous.

The problem is with your definition then, because downloading an unauthorised reproduction of digital media that you have not paid for is ethically the same as downloading an unauthorised reproduction of digital media that you have paid for in a different format.

 

I take the hard stance that no one should have a monopoly on information due to where it's all headed - Technologically - A post-scarcity utopia; Economically - A Neo-feudalistic PAYG corporatocracy.

Wikipedia is free, and of course knowledge should be free. It's very easy to make the argument for the collective social good that comes of it.

Media is culture, and due to simple historical legacy we are led to believe that culture should be behind a paywall. That legacy, as Nicholas Negroponte put it was "Shipping atoms to ship bits". There used to be a marginal cost to shipping bits, but now it's practically zero. The capital costs of producing it are massively inflated (hello Hollywood accounting) but I would happily live in a world without The Avengers if cultural access was available to all, not just the privileged.

Neil Gershenfeld, head of MIT's center for bits and atoms, believes the Star Trek replicator is only 50-100 years away. I'd say that's very optimistic, but given our technological trajectory it's easy to imagine a world where it exists - So would it then be immoral or unethical to download a burger if you're hungry? In the information age, knowledge, culture, and some day burgers will all be 1's and 0's...but the hoarding pigs would have you believe that some 1's and 0's are more equal than others.

 

*Cries in games i have had to obtain Pirate copies because they have GFWL activation, or hardware scanners that were never updated ( your Cpu ( core i7 9900k ) doesnt appear to be able to run this game effectivly, we rec recommend a 2.1ghz or more Pentium 4 processor )

i have the physical copies sitting on my desk, but alas they are unusable. as the installer call's home, and somewhere, in a dark basement room at Microsoft HQ, in the office that once was GFWL, a lonely forgotten server's phone rings, with nobody to answer