0. Ability to watch offline!
1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location.
1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language)
2. Ability to normalize audio.
3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection.
4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish
5. Arbitrary number of user accounts
6. Multicast streams to watch the same show across different devices regardless of if someone has an account or not (see JellyFin's SyncPlay)
7. No big organization tracking you and selling your data to the highest bidder
There's more, but honestly pirating is just a better experience. I can't tell you how many times Netflix has fucked up the subtitles so they are covering half my screen. There's tons of little issues like that that are just random and the only option is to just not watch Netflix (or pick your streaming service) that day.
Besides that, for the price of a yearly subscription you can build a NAS that can do all this for you and you get to keep the movies. Instead of having a monthly fee you can progressively add more drives and this can also be used for all your other things. Pictures, home videos, games (you can make a Steam cache), your local AI models, or whatever else you want. With $1k you can build a pretty good system, though that's 3 years of 4k Netflix, so not the cheap route in the short term.
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly but the monopoly is hard to enforce. It works because most people actually want to support the creators, not because DRM is effective or anything like that.
So you have the uncommon situation in which a monopoly (the copyright holder) is operating in parallel to a competitive black market for content distribution (pirates). And then the competitive market -- even though it has to operate underground and makes hardly any profit -- provides the better experience.
Lesson for anyone who thinks market consolidation doesn't lead to consumer harm.
Music streaming platforms (Spotify, deeper, apple music, tidal etc.) Generally work a lot better than movie/series streaming. It seems that competition between them works quite well, prices are reasonable, and more importantly, any subscription gives you access to pretty much all of mainstream music. There's hardly any content exclusive to one platform, so you can essentially get any of them and be done with it
Contrast that with video streaming, where content is pretty much exclusively tied to one platform. As a consequence, people routinely have several subscriptions instead of one, and platforms compete on library more than on price or quality of service. Overall experience is much worse
I wonder why this difference came to be, although these are very similar services (with basically the same copyright mechanism)
I have a problem with how media is carved up to make sure you have to use multiple services and maximize profit. I have a problem with the ads they want to force me to watch…and charge me to watch them. I have a problem with their ever increasing prices for worse and worse catalogs. I have a problem with, despite paying for the right to watch it, they still decide how and when I can watch.
None of those things are the “cost” of creating content.
That only explains why the price is lower, not why the experience is better.
That said, the evidence on content creation and financial incentive is quite blurry - there's some relationship but there are also lots of people who create lots of things without tremendous financial incentive. And the genesis of copyright wasn't to protect authors, but publishers who had significant costs for producing first editions compared to those who might just copy a first edition.
But also, I still will buy movies and pay for streaming services and pirate the shows on them. Why? Because the pirating experience is just better. It is also just easier to download a torrent than it is to rip a blueray. I don't really feel bad about this because I'm paying for the content like anyone else, I'm just getting a better viewing experience. Maybe only thing being hurt is the watch metrics on the streaming platform. But if they aren't considering the metrics from piracy too then they're being idiotic.
https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/hnle2o/dual_subtitles/
https://superuser.com/questions/1255487/how-to-get-vlc-to-di...
7. is only sort-of an issue, IMHO. Anything that is pirated is usually fairly benign content and I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too.
I would add: Piracy offers the ability to remember content that isn't popular enough to remain in streaming services. I just searched "Big Trouble in Little China" and Google Play wants me to pay $3.79 to rent it or the full original price to purchase it. Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?
I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list.
Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula
Thanks for your example, qrios
(Which everyone in the US should.)
US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.
"The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation
"Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
"The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege
"In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film...
"Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye
If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.
The French article is a bit better - I don’t understand German sadly.
The controversy stems from the protagonists values. They put their love for each other and their search for fulfilment above other commitments which was seen as dangerously non communist. The film was cleared by the head of East Germany but the censors still imposed a tragic ending.
I exported all my private data from Netflix and it had very detailed information on exactly when I (or anyone else in the household) watched what.
Sadly it only went back a few years. Either they do not keep older data or they pretend not to. My Spotify data seemed to be complete for all years I have used it, listing the exact time and location, what device etc, I listened to any track there ever.
Google will have negotiated with the “owner” (in this case I think Disney) for a wholesale price and then adds its retail markup (eg 20%). Disney pay the industry standard SAG/DGA union negotiated residual agreements to cast, writers and directors
Also, "wholesale" is such a strange way to look at this. There is no way the digital asset is sent to them more than once. It's some kind of strange fiction for me to imagine, "here are X downloads of movie Y at a discounted rate. If you want more, you need to come back and purchase another X downloads." It's as if a download itself is a consumable that Disney provides.
Wholesale/retail makes more sense if you think of google having to deal with consumers, providing a website/apps, advertising, collecting payments etc. whilst the movie company makes the content and negotiates deals with broadcasters and streaming companies around the world.
1. The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for.
2. Its cheap to upgrade / expand over time (if its not a all in one solution)
3. It opens a door to not just store movies/music/images, but as emulator, streaming service, or game streaming to one or multiple.
4. The content will not arbitrarily vanish.
5. Your bookmarks / last viewed / ... will not arbitrarily vanish. Do not get me started on this and how annoying it can be when a services removes content!
6. It serves not only as a device for "linux isos" or other gray zones but also as a legit backup of your own personal data.
7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.
8. Can be enhanced with programs that offer image conversion, pdf conversion etc, all private!
9. Run your own chat server for the family, no US/EU "we want to know what you are saying" issues.
10. Can act like your own VPN, to route data from your phone or other devices outside your home.
11. Provides service if you are in area's with horrible internet connection with its ability to "cache isos" at night slowly.
12. Your control over the media means you can stream 4k to your PC. Netflix kuch kuch ... No, its not 4k.
13. You can gain the FULL bitrate of the media. You do not get a washed down version of the supposed media based upon how busy a streaming service their servers are or other limitations.
14. It can be used for so many other activities like programming.
15. Did i mention home automatization?
And so much more ... People are probably doing things with NAS setups that i can not even think about.
Your not investing into a machine for "illegal" stuff, your investing into a machine that frees you as the end user from all those cloud, streaming, and other services their lackluster service. And then provides all the added benefits on top, that a 24/7 running PC can provide.
Lets also not forget the future where LLM's are a thing. Having your own open source LLM that runs at home, can be a major benefit.
But ... it does require more knowledge, especially as you step up beyond simple storage. So that is the real downside, not the money, the time and knowledge buildup.
With mine I am cracking on 14 years with some of it. It still 'just works'. I ripped all of my stuff so I can manage it as I have too much of it. The home streaming has been quite nice. I would upgrade just for '4k'. Not sure if I want it or not. One major roadblock has been finding a decent wake from power off not just s3 and works with an IR remote. 14 years ago media center was a thing so most manufactures put CIR into everything. Then suddenly they didnt. If I could get past that one roadblock I would update it all.
Making all this work is not difficult with docker once you get past the steep learning curve
> 7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.
So it means really the only solution is just buying a storage box. You can treat it as safety so doesn't need much egress, just to sync. But you should have something off site and "cloud" makes that much easier. But also, depends on how important that is. I'm not doing that with "pirated" content but I am with my content.
[0] 3 copies, 2 locations, 1 off-site. (All these are "at least")
[1] How is it easier to write a small bash script through termux to rsync to my home and another location than it is to do this with professional tools? For the love of god, it is a fucking trivial script and I can make it do whatever I want, like only backup on WiFi, only through tailscale, or even a specific WiFi SSID. Hell, I can get it to issue a command to my home server to sync with the remote server checking to make sure things match. For what, not even 100 lines in bash? It's a joke
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...
Sadly http://www.gog.com/movies now redirects to http://www.gog.com/games and the movies link that used to be on the front page is gone. Based on a comment in that announcement thread it looks like the movies were silently removed already back in 2023. I only noticed it now. They never seemed to really add any new movies and the existing ones were mostly game-related documentaries.
About subtitles, something else I sometimes want to fix is adding an outline to the text and adding a translucent background (many use a opaque background (making it hard to see the picture) or a transparent background (making it hard to see the text)).
Also, there is no reason for a paid streaming service not to implement 1 (but not 1.2), 2, 3 and 4. It's not like these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value in implementing and supporting them.
> these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value
The issue is that most of this "what has value" is just as made up as anything else. Most people don't even know what they want. They get features and then they know they want it, but often not before. So it is affecting their bottom line, but the problem is group think.
That's what separates these bullet points from the others: Others will never be implemented because they won't help them make more money.
There's a thing I hear a lot from other engineers. They always talk about value. Here's a dumb example. Why when migrating over to Apple do I have 3 copies of holidays in my calendar? I got one from Google, one from Microsoft, and one from Apple. You are telling me you can't regex that out and just display one of them for me? You don't need to remove the events, just don't show me multiple copies. Have the failure mode be showing dupes, that's fine. It's what, an afternoon's work for an intern? But pushback I get is "where's the value", by which it it is always clarified that they mean money and profits. I can't come up with that, any number would be made up, right? A poor estimate at best. Everyone recognizes this. But why is this not the same for a ton of other bullshit features? We got features on teams with budgets of millions of dollars that are clearly going to fail from the get go. They then fail but became too big to fail and so they keep sinking money into it because it turned into politics. FFS, it's engineering, sometimes ideas just fail, it's not a big deal! But you're telling me that we can sink tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into this bullshit but not an afternoon for something that clearly will make a better user experience? Before I got most of these dupes solved my calendar was just unreadable.
The same is with the rest of this. It's easy to sit high and mighty with your user data acting like people don't want these features. But the problem is you aren't even measuring that desire. If anything, you should be looking at what the most popular features are in platforms like Jellyfin and replicate them. That way you at least know there's existing demand! But the reality of it is that when you write programs you are writing an environment. There's on one-size-fits-all product you can make. You can give good sane defaults but the rest, it's just too noisy. Letting users have flexibility reveals a lot of things you'd never have been able to figure out on your own. It's very hard to know what users are frustrated with and honestly, most don't even know themselves. But open platforms allow for a small set of power users to fix those problems and make everything better for everyone else. That's the whole reason computers and smartphones have been so successful.
But the same is for any program you write. It's the same reason everyone uses ffmpeg. It's because ffmpeg didn't just build a product, they built an environment. It's the same for Jellyfin. 99% of Jellyfin users are just using the platform as is and don't touch code ever. A good portion of those will install plugins like intro skipper. But your powerusers are the real win with this system. In our out of touch business structures we look and see that powerusers are a small portion of the userbase and dismiss them and their wants because of this. But they miss that these people also drive a lot of innovation of their products. That it makes them a lot of money. But the problem is, it's hard to measure a counterfactual. You'll never have in the spreadsheets "we would have made x profit if a poweruser made y feature for us". I mean it took god damn years for the fucking flashlight app to become a native app for both Android and iPhones. Yet, it was an app available within months and is to this day something everyone uses and uses frequently. I don't think anyone could even tell you how many dollars that generated. But I also don't think anyone can really tell you how many dollars Siri generated. Or your newest reskin of iOS or Android. Or the value of fancy features like AI magic erasers and stuff.
So stop asking for value. The value numbers are just made up bullshit. It is politics. Just make good fucking products. Especially as an engineer. Your job is to make the product good, the business people's job is to make the company profitable and sustainable. Without each other, companies collapse. But when the business people take over they die much more slowly. It's not about value. It's not about better products. It's not even about the god damn profits. It's all politics. So just make the god damn product better.
/rant
1.4 Ability to edit the video so your 10 year old can watch Top Secret! without gross anal sex jokes
Compression is very different. The volume scale isn't constant, and the original sound is distorted significantly. I often use a compressor to listen to video game streams because they tend to have the game audio be way too quiet. Having the compressor on causes the game audio to become louder with some minor distortion, but distorts the streamer's voice significantly.
Compression isn't just gain adjustment - it's a specific type of audio processing that increases perceived "gain" (loudness) of the entire source audio by "compressing" the levels of loud frequencies & increasing the levels of quiet frequencies.
Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time. It doesn't reduce dynamic range.