Films OLED TV permanently broke my piracy habit

I'm not sure you're allowed to simultaneously sit on this high horse whilst you download hollywood's latest output.

 

Looks like another thread where I've got the wrong end of the stick... if the wording of the title or the inference of the OP has been lost on me, then my input here is misplaced.
If this isn't about software/media counterfeiting - but actually about how/why users share media across multiple machines in the same address, w/o buying multiple copies - then I need to delete all my (previous) comments...

 

I think this is precisely the issue being highlighted throughout many posts here. The difference between users' perception of what piracy is, vs what is technically allowed when you purchase a disc (i.e. very, very little)

I know that ripping my discs to watch via Plex is not strictly allowed in fine print somewhere, but I'm fine with that because A) I've paid for the media B) I'm not hosting the content for others C) I'm not actually watching the disc and most importantly D) it's the least compromised way to watch the content.

I did the same with all of my CDs because of the same reasons, I don't any more because Tidal gives me at least the same quality of audio with the same or greater level of convenience and user experience.

Others are fine with taking further liberties because of ignorance, or because "well I wouldn't have bought it otherwise" or "screw the man" or various other reasons. You're likely breaking rules somewhere about media consumption/reproduction without even realising it, whether it's installing the same thing on two machines, using software for work with a personal license, copying/pasting images from somewhere within citing/attributing the source, when you recorded that mix tape for a mate when you were young or video'd a film off the TV - the possibilities are endless. Copyright & IP law is a dumpster fire for the layman.

 

My point was that we have to be absolutely specific about the terms we're using because they're often deliberately misused and abused in order to spread fear. 'Piracy' can encompass both format shifting your own discs and downloading a film you haven't paid for. According to the copyright terms (at least in the vast majority of cases), you do not have the right to do either. In terms of ethics, rights, copyright violation, etc, both acts are equivalent, and neither act constitutes a criminal offence.

This isn't a black and white situation, there is a lot of FUD and disinformation out there.

 

Firstly, I never said I did. Secondly, "high" is a relative them, it implies there is something lower, and I'm sure you'll agree that would be pretty low for a multi-billion dollar company to steal fan art and put it on merchandise without paying, or even crediting, the original creator. Or using renders of fan-made models for packaging. Or ripping off a poster design to advertise a globally distributed film. In case you hadn't guessed all these examples come from just one company - Disney, who are rarely challenged on it because they will happily litigate their victims in to poverty.

I simply don't think that the copyright/IP system makes sense in the digital age. It stifles innovation and creates a false economy of frivolous non-rival products which derive value not from their utility, but their legal enforceability. It's no accident that China rose to become an innovative economic powerhouse by ignoring IP, and now that it is a powerhouse wants to secure that position by bolstering it's IP laws. In both East and West, as technological complexity and production values increase, shutting out our romanticised notion of a lone creator whom these laws were originally designed to protect, IP law only serves to solidify corporate power.

 

Did you invite friends over to watch a film/listen to an album as long as they brought you snacks? Whoops, public performance for compensation, **AA gonna get ya...

 

FTFY

 

Yeah, but if you dig enough and anyone and everyone has done something sh**ty. Whether it's Disney, or any one of us here. Using that as a rationalisation to do sh**ty things back, breaks the world.

Copyright/IP law being hopelessly outdated is IMO a better rationalisation, but still doesn't make it all okay IMO.

 

Okay, but what does it say about the legitimacy of a law if even those who have the most to gain from it break it regardless? If everyone...and I mean everyone...regularly ignores it, maybe it's not shi**y behaviour, maybe its just a shi**y law based on a shi**y paradigm.

 

We've gone backwards, quality wise.
When I go to friends/family that use streaming, they've got horrible banding, even sparkling green pixels (due to low bandwith) and they're absolutely loving it because it's so convenient.
This is why im' getting my media on BD, and watch them on a native FHD device.

• Exactly THIS is what keeps me from watching streamed media.
• And from OLED.
• And from 4K

Bluray on a FHD screen was 1-to-1.
4K is either interpolated , or compressed (even 4K-bluray has to be compressed)
Anything that's streamed has the sh*t compressed out of it, can't be any different, nobody is streaming you an uncompressed 50GB steam (and your 100.000 neighbours simultaniously.)

Same thing for sound.

• Mono
• Stereo
• 5.1
• 7.1
• Hey, iv'e got a Sonos (or Bose) mobile system that streams from my phone. Yay! (Back to effin Mono!)

 

Have we though?

Physical media has always been the superior medium to broadcast - a VHS was miles better than anything you could get from an aerial or cable.
We've just moved the game along - the quality from any of the major streaming services is leaps and bounds better than broadcast quality a few years ago, just as 4K BDs are vastly better to 1080 BDs (which are compressed too), which were in turn way better than DVDs (also compressed) and so on.

If the quality of the Netflix et al you've seen is so atrocious that it's unwatchable, you're either watching it with seriously constrained bandwidth or something is wrong with the setup.
4K Netflix, Amazon, ATV and so on can look pretty fantastic. You may get the odd sparkle or notice the odd bit of banding as with virtually any medium because that's compression - and any and all video you're going to be watching is compressed, but good content is still going to be good content (the difficulty in finding the quality content however, that's a different gripe)

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about physical media for the best possible quality and I'd sign up to a Netflix tier with 100mbit streams in a heartbeat, but "horrible"is an overstatement IMO.

Most of the latest major content on all of the major streaming services is DDP Atmos. If not that, generally 5.1 at a minimum. Not quite the THD-Atmos or DTS-X of 4K discs, but still pretty good.

 

So was BD (and DVD). Uncompressed video does not make its way outside editing rooms because it's a ballache to handle. 4K and 8K Digital cinema cameras capture compressed video. Even digital cinema for projection onto enormous silverscreens with fancy 8K multi-chip laser setups uses compressed video.

As a rough back-of-the-napkin: an uncompressed 8K (8bpp) frame is ~100MB (not bits, bytes). That makes a 90 minute movie around 13TB, and requires a 20 gigabit connection just to play back!

 

Netflix nerfs the quality of their browser stream because they know how much easier it is to save the stream locally to your computer. I think it's pretty silly considering the fact that pirates are going to find a way to get an uncompressed stream saved locally regardless. I guess it's a way to appease content creators.

I have 18Tb of hard drives in a Drobo. I keep uncompressed rips of all my discs and use Kodi as a front end to browse. In my experience, having to look at and dig through hundreds of discs got really old and resulted in me spending so much time trying to figure out what to watch that I would run out of time to watch anything.

Pirates are, ironically, some of the best preservationists. Star Wars is a perfect example. Even today, you can't get a legit copy of the theatrical versions of the original trilogy. The fan groups? There are dozens of versions from different scans and sources. They're transparent about their process, their sources, the limits and critiques of their work.

Malcolm in the Middle is another complicated show. Syndication rights have been passed around, but the show existed before widescreen and before streaming. This meant that the music rights for the show have been complicated and new music has often been added to the episodes, including the DVD release. It's now a chore to figure out which episodes are "correct" with both the original aspect ratio and the original music. The show was filmed in widescreen and then cropped for TV. When Netflix got the rights to stream the show, they went to the film and rescanned it all in widescreen. Fans + piracy will give you whatever version you like.

On the topic of blocky garbage. I see it all the time in streaming services. It drives me nuts. I also see a weird compression glitch, especially in HBO shows, where the sharpness of the image seems to increase for about five seconds, then resets back to a soft image and the process repeats for the whole show. That one is worse.

H.265 is helpful. It's more efficient, so should allow for a much better image. That 20gig 1080p H.264 rip will be just as good looking at 4-10gigs in H.265 depending on the content.

That said, for any content with lots of dark shots, I'll keep the compression minimal or not compress at all. Watching Pennywise' face come out of a sea of compression artifacts is extremely distracting.

 

Brah...why would quality concerns put you off OLED? My whole thing in this thread has been that OLED is a gargantuan leap up in quality, and the problem with it is that it lays bare the artifacts created by excessive compression, artifacts that an LCD disguises in it's shitty black depth. A proper source like a blu ray looks fine!

Honestly, if you savour cinematic quality, get a good OLED TV, I implore you. The upscaling/interpolation is a nonissue, the onboard cpu handles it so, so well. It looks amazing. It certainly looks no worse for being upscaled than it would look on a native 1080p panel. And the step up from LCD is otherwise just....why haven't you bought one? You report going round to people's houses and recoiling at their inferior setups, but you still have LCD? Pot, stop hanging out with the kettles. Honestly mate, get OLED. It's not for everyone but it is categorically for people like you. It's a quality purist's dream come true.

This makes a lot of sense and also makes me ****ing furious. I hate so much about how Netflix operate. This is the icing on the cake.

That's a lot of money on hard drives, but if you have the money, more power to you. I honestly would only contemplate a digital archive now if I could store all my blu rays exactly as ripped, no further compression.

The Episode IV master cleanup, I forget the name, is probably one of the most beautiful and inspiring collective efforts I've ever seen, and the results put all the official blu ray releases to shame. So...yeah, in specific cases where studios act like *****, it is nice to have a pirate community willing to do a better job.

I hear you. Went to reacquire Ren and Stimpy a while back only to find it doesn't exist in my region on any official format. Had a limited physical release that dried up, or something, and no interest from publishers since. A few foreign films and old TV programs fall into this pit.
Piracy, to my mind, ceases to be an ethical issue for old things. I'd happily pirate Life of Brian. Are the remaining Pythons really going to suffer any at this point for one missed sale on the re-re-rereleased DVD of it? No.

The valid objections to piracy are where you're happy with the current publication, it's readily available, and you pirate it simply to avoid paying for it. I think we can all agree that this is where piracy becomes indefensible. Except for those of us who are raving anti-establishment conspiracy theorists, ahem

 

Surveillance Capitalism is only a conspiracy theory if you spend less time reading non-fiction, and more consuming fiction on fancy screens

 

I mean, you do actually make quite a lot of sense when you get going on the anti-capitalist tinfoil hattery. But where I get stuck is, under any proposed alternative solution, how would you see remuneration make its way back to content creators and workers such that it remained economically viable to make films and TV shows at all? Piracy may be good for your soul, but it's not putting food on their tables. Even if you have valid concerns about the industry, or the economy, or the means of distribution, or the legal structures surrounding them - *****es gotta get paid, right? Otherwise what are we left with?

As I said in an earlier post, if it were somehow possible to entirely circumvent the distribution methods put in place by the copyright holders and giant corporations that orchestrate things in the film and TV industry, to cut them out and obtain the media whilst still fairly compensating all the people who worked to create it, that'd be great. But there isn't. You can cut out the big evil megastructure or you can keep food on the actor's table. You can't do both.

 

I think those gigantic corporations are, basically, necessary to make films.

With the skyrocketing cost of making a films these days, who's going to finance it?

Take Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, for example. Call the budget for the three $550m, which I suspect is a little under. I know the films made crazy money, but without the power of hindsight is it really plausible that 13-14 million people are going to pledge $11 to make the first movie with its 150 million dollar budget?

Bearing in mind that, up until that point, Nolan's feature film projects hadn't even reached $100 million combined. $6,000, 9m, 46m, respectively on his first features.

On the pitch of "Batman but more grounded in reality. Also no bat nipples. Oh, by the way, the guy who wrote Blade Trinity is doing this too."?

I mean, I love Batman films, but hot damn. You'd struggle getting eleven dollars out of me for that pitch.

 

Years and years ago I recall watching Lars Ulrich complain about piracy of Metallica albums. He pointed out that he pays his maid for her job, so he should get paid for his job, and I remember thinking that was a terrible comparison because they both get paid for doing their job, but he makes enough money to employ a maid because he also sells recordings of him doing his job.

The recording artist, or film actor, could be seen as a quirk of the relationship between commerce and technology at a particular time - The recording had to be held on a tangible media; A record or a film reel. That tethering of bits to atoms meant it was a rival good, however now digital technology has made it a non-rival good; No one loses access to the media because you have a copy. While I love film and music, I think the economy of scale based on artificial scarcity creates a massive distortion of true economic utility. People who play instruments or pretend to be someone else are multimillionaires while what we've recently recognised as key, essential workers are paid a pittance. Maybe, as a culture, we should shift back towards live entertainment. Normal. The way it always was throughout human history, spare these last 100 years.

 

You both make valid points, but I think lirathael's account is more appealing simply because it allows big budget films to still exist. Vipers, going back to some humble peasant live-stage economy of entertainment means putting up with basically rubbish entertainment. I've seen some good local amateur theatre but I've seen a lot more mediocre stuff, and even when it's really good, it's such a qualitatively different experience to big-budget cinema that suggesting we substitute one with the other is like saying we should replace sugars and sweetener syrups with starchy carbs. Nutritionally they're similar on some level, but I won't be putting potato powder in my tea. Civilization could no more easily backtrack away from big budget cinema and TV than it could abandon sweet flavours in food.

TL;DR: your objections are valid but your proposed solution isn't. You can't adapt Interstellar to work in local theatre troupes. Or if you can, I won't pay to see it.

To put it another way, Vipers, your arguments are valid but they will never be relevant if they lead you to totally unworkable conclusions. Technically it is true that contemporary entertainment structures and industries are a weird blip. Technically many of the professions they have birthed are bizarrely overpaid and overcelebrated. Technically it would be beneficial in some ways to undo this industry to the ground and replace it with something else.

It's absolutely impossible and categorically not going to happen, so it's a pretty useless thought experiment. So the task now is to think of other potential remedies to the situation, ones that actually have a snowball in Hell's chance of ever being implemented.

And piracy still isn't one of them, it doesn't solve anything. It's a dodge, and not a very good one.

 

I was in a rush writing that earlier. Let me clarify. I'm not saying that we ditch movies and instead all head to The Globe. I'm saying that we simply don't value films to the same extent. They don't need to cost $250m+ and it's arguable that larger production budgets are detrimental to the art of film because it makes studios extremely risk-averse and their output formulaic. Likewise, it shouldn't cost $20 to watch a copy of a non-rival product. Scale and price it appropriately and piracy will all but disappear - That was actually the assumption in early streaming service's business models before the studios waited for their 3rd party licensing agreements to expire so they could launch their own. The only argument I can see against this is "...but I like spectacle!" to which I would point to the fall of Rome, and ask wouldn't you rather see your local theatre troupe fight to the death in a gladiatorial arena than another avengers movie?