These assholes are going to make books impossible to read next. We are going full Fahrenheit 451.
I never completely stopped collecting conventional DVDs specifically because of the Blu-Ray DRM scheme and it’s need for an external decryption key. The few blu-rays I have are either from DVD+Blu-Ray bundles or because standard DVD wasn’t an option.
Surely we have that permanently cracked by now?
I know there have long been workarounds but I don’t know if there’s ever been a “crack” per se.
Literally just started collecting blu rays again because I’m sick of the shitty selection streaming platforms have. Good thing my PS3 still runs perfect haha.
Streaming only. Sign up now for your recurring subscription. You’ll own nothing and you’ll like it, or else.
I genuinely believe more people would have kept uaing physical media if they made it more convenient just to pop in a movie and play it.
Everytime I put in a 4k blu Ray, there’s like 40 seconds of useless loading screens, unskippabble warnings, menu animations, and other bullshit. It feels like the old days of massively overcooked multimedia “experiences” in the worst way possible.
That and DVDs were like £3 most of the time. I’d always be picking up stuff just for the hell of it. Got shelves full of them.
Blu-rays and especially 4K Blu-rays were pretty much always full price of £20. That’s at least a whole month of any streaming service and sometimes two. Plus I can barely tell any difference between streaming and disc, especially on the picture quality. The audio is more noticeable, but not worth £20 a movie.
The current streaming services will slowly decline as well until they realise they need to switch to a music industry model where nearly everything is on every service. I installed Jellyfin ages ago, and the experience of just having one service to look through is so much better than dipping into half a dozen apps to see if any of them have what you want to watch.
I know what I’m after as an experience, it’s up to them if they want to provide it at a reasonable price.
I ripped our physical media, and the experience is way better. I wish I could just buy and download a .mkv or .avi or whatever.
You can rent (until your service decides to stop selling that content) and download a DRM-locked copy only playable in one app that’s 1/5 the bitrate. Is that not good enough for you?
What if we include a full screen ad whenever you pause. You’re not watching anyways, what’s the harm?
Oh, also, did you hear about our other content and services? We would like to remind you of all of those every time you start to watch something - we don’t consider them advertisements, just important feature updates, so you can’t remove them.
Aand… you HAVE to be connected to the internet to watch, because we made this really cool AI thing that watches literally everything you do, sends it to our servers, and sometimes happens to recognize which characters are on screen so you can access their IMDB pages through your TV while watching the movie for some reason, like that’s a normal thing people want to interrupt their movie experience to do.
Mmm, when you put it that way…
Best we can do is enshitification. Hope your standards steadily lower throughout your life.
The best bit is that Blu-ray supports “online content” so they can update the forced intros and trailers to fresh ones!
I have never actually seen that happen
I prefer my 10min of unskippable download time and watching it in 4k with a proper bitrate.
in better formats (mkv) you can start playing before download has completed. you may need to have the last part of the time, but I’m not sure about that
4K discs are so niche that this just isn’t really true, since they simply don’t bother to add that stuff anymore with the money all going to streaming. Almost every 4K disc I have just loads right into a bland generic menu with only a skippable logo for universal or whatever at the beginning. On top of that, they’re all region free. Odd that when the consumer base for physical media is smaller than it used to be, the consumer experience is better.
Now most of these 4K discs also come with a regular (often older) Blu-ray which contains the features from previous releases or whatever, and THAT’S where the bullshit you’re talking about is - lots of trailers (with it being a crapshoot whether you can skip straight to the menu, need to skip one at a time, or have to actually fast forward them), and, worst of all, defunct BD-Live stuff that in some cases you have no way to skip loading at all, even if you completely disable network connectivity in the player. None of this junk is in any of my 4Ks. Sometimes the features are even on the 4K too, if you’re really lucky.
But yeah, modern 4K discs are mostly great and still absolutely way better video and audio quality than any streaming service I’ve used - the worst thing you usually get is maybe one dumb copyright notice. (LG’s 4K players were terrible anyway though making the experience bad for consumers for a different reason, but that’s for another comment).
I have a bunch of uhd discs that are full of meandering loading crap. The HD Blu Ray era was worse, and that’s what I think drove people away. It’s obviously too little too late on the newer stuff.
The arrrs are often rips of physical media, so they’ll be setting sail too I guess
I recently bought a second PC Blu-ray writer just in case this would happen. Lucky me. I should be good for the next 10 years.
Looks like they’re still available for now in the UK but at inflated prices sent from America
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B079LTC6ML
The above supports UHD and is easy to… adapt for legitimate ripping of your Blu-ray. For backup purposes of course.
I think Panasonic still make some too but I’ve used LG ones for years.
As much as I hate that this is happening, I think once you turn to digital media, it’s incredibly difficult to go back. The convenience of having your stuff at a click of a button is just too good.
That said, if you’re into movies specifically, i’d personally still go the route of buying a disk, and ripping it to your local storage, but that’s both expensive, and inconvenient in terms of space
I’d have no issue with digital media if there was a way to actually own it. Everything is either streaming only or ridden with DRM that can only be played within their app. Blurays, assuming you can decrypt its DRM bs, are the last bastion of media ownership left.
You’ve essentially described exactly what the issue is. All these companies want you to continue subscribing, so you owning anything isn’t in their interest
“If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.”
- A bunch of pirates, probably
Yup, which is why I have a Bluray drive with libredrive flashed so I can rip full quality UHD and store the raw video on my NAS.
The convenience of having your stuff at a click of a button is just too good.
Except when you go to find your stuff, discover it’s not there, and yearn to be able to just stuff a DVD in a player.
That’s why I ripped my media onto my NAS. I have the physical media as a backup, but I don’t have to actually deal with discs. No more scratched discs is amazing.
im torn. as someone with a massive personal library, bluray was a non-starter. they never fleshed it out to the storage densities i would have required for my library. solid state storage has come so far now, it just makes sense.
someday i’ll just be able to hand a single drive with my 100tb of content to my kids. if youre concerned about ‘owning’ shit. start powning it.
Inb4 drive failure
3-2-1 backup rule
The end is near for physical media for video.
I wish there were more/better/good choices for streaming video. We already have decent solutions for audio, games and books/audiobooks, yet video seems to be lagging behind, hugely.
That’s because there is a strong tradition of rights distribution for movies and TV being totally fucked up, and it has been since day 1 of both industries. Brought to you by the same motherfuckers who gave you Hollywood Accountingtm, where a movie that cost $100 million to make and raked in $500 million at the box office somehow “didn’t turn a profit” and magically they don’t have to pay royalties to any of their writers or actors.
Especially since stuff you want to watch changes services all the time.
It’s like if your DVDs of the star wars trilogy got replaced by the Brady bunch and then told you to pay more for that privilege.
Streaming isn’t the middle ground in my opinion, rather it’s unrestricted downloadable files that you can then handle however. Streaming provides some convenience but no consistent access (see various shows being delisted or shuffled between services).
Companies would love if everyone forgot having home video, in the sense of owning copies of movies and shows they always have access to and ability to watch whenever.
Yes, I should have clarified that as non-physical/digital media. Current platforms are a rough equivalent of renting movies.
The DRM on Blu-Ray was too harsh so I skipped the format entirely. If I couldn’t put a disc into my HTPC (Linux) and press “play”, I wasn’t interested.
We got a few, and then I ended up getting a Bluray drive and flashing libredrive on it, and now I can rip Bluray in full quality. I’m probably going to go load up on more Bluray discs because ripping works well.
I don’t have an HTPC, I just stream my videos from my NAS to my TV, and I do all my ripping on Linux.
In a different, better universe HD-DVD won.
Funny that the DRM didn’t even really prevent ripping the disks… A few different players were hacked to leak decryption keys and mess with the firmware to allow backing up to a PC (or piracy if that’s your thing). I have all my media stored locally because I can’t stand having shows being removed from streaming services.
Lol, i kept foolishly building HTPCs with bluray drives hoping that someday i could actually play my bluray disks…
You can now, if you have the right drive (some don’t even need to be libredrive flashed), a few libraries and a keylist in .config. At least with VLC, mpv, mplayer.
Yeah, it sucks. But good enough to convert the video to a run-of-the-mill format.
