| ▲ | godelski 6 days ago |
| Piracy also offers: 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. |
|
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is a case study in why competitive markets are important in general. 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. |
| |
| ▲ | nephanth 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | On the subject of artificial monopoly, it's interesting to compare video streaming to music streaming. 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) | |
| ▲ | psadauskas 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I really want to support the creators! But by paying for movie tickets or streaming services, very little of the money I pay goes to the creators. It mostly goes to the executives and financiers, or the megastar actors that I don't really care about. | | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Piracy gives zero money to the creators. | | |
| ▲ | appease7727 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It also gives zero money to scum-sucking studios and labels and worthless bureaucrats that only give the author a 2% cut. | |
| ▲ | varelse 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | kylebenzle 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | mensetmanusman 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not always, it has generated cult classics that have built a valuable fan base of support for many cases. Downstream it can increase in person popularity that wouldn’t otherwise exist. | | |
| ▲ | Erwin 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Ah, this is like the "trickle down" theory of piracy. | | |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | JambalayaJimbo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content. | | |
| ▲ | therealpygon 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | None of them are paying the cost to create the content for movies and TV, except for their own original shows. I also have no problem paying a company to watch their original content…that’s completely fair. I also have no problem paying toward the “cost of creating content” as you say. 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. | | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 5 days ago | parent [-] | | What do you do instead to make sure the creators are fairly compensated? | | |
| ▲ | happymellon 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Go to shows and buy merch. Ah wait, that's the other set of streaming services that also don't pass on the profits to creators... The problem here is that distribution companies have always been a wedge between creators and customers. There have been attempts to provide better ways. I subscribed to eMusic until Sony came along, raised the rates and cut out the indie bands. YouTube was great for independent creators until Google took it over and slowly squeezed the life out of it. Now it's a janky system that's milking creators as hard as possible. Hopefully we will get a new system that will work for creators until they are crushed by the system. | | |
| ▲ | therealpygon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Often this is the only way. The predatory nature of the industry isn’t much different than current laws on the service industry wages and tipping. For anyone not a big name movie star paid millions for their appearance, they are getting (comparably) below-minimum wage pay and hoping for tips (royalties, if any). The industry puts a lot of the real risk on the lowest levels who have no decisions, but they take the highest reward while blaming those people for bad decisions. That doesn’t sound fair to me. It’s also a lot like our grocery supply chain…layers upon layers, each trying to take their cut of revenue as it passes from distributor, to distributor, to distributor, to… most people have no idea how many different companies are taking a cut while the farmers are squeezed. Not much different for content creators. The problem isn’t that goods and services are expensive, it’s all the companies adding little or no value, or underpaying creators, just to maximize their own profits from the creations. YouTube sells ads, demonetizes the creators, but still run ads and keep all the revenue. Spotify just decides not to pay creators who don’t make enough while they sell ads that run before and after their music. People are happy to pay toward the creation of content, otherwise Patreon, Twitch (I know…as bad as YT but at least a decent amount goes to the creator), and other “direct” (relatively) to creator sites wouldn’t exist. | | |
| ▲ | happymellon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > For anyone not a big name movie star paid millions for their appearance, they are getting (comparably) below-minimum wage pay and hoping for tips (royalties, if any). This really gets to me, you hear about folks complaining about Spotify but they don't seem to get that before Spotify unless you were Guns and Roses, you did not get any royalties. 0.1c per song is actually better than people were getting via radio plays in the 80/90's. In fact back then you probably owed if they played your song. |
|
| |
| ▲ | appease7727 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Apart from visiting the creator and physically handing them a wad of cash, you can't. There is no way at all for you as a consumer to ensure the creators are fairly paid. Simply put, the people you're paying for access to the content take most of the money and the creators get next to none. Why do you think it's better for studios and labels to be allowed to extort artists this way? The artist isn't getting fair pay in any situation, so why would you want to make things worse for everyone by continuing to encourage this rent-seeking behavior? | |
| ▲ | bambax 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I like to watch old movies and don't think dead creators need compensation. Their descendants are entitled (maybe!) to inherit their wealth, but not to earn an aeternal rent doing nothing. |
|
| |
| ▲ | remexre 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Alfred Hitchcock's movies aren't missing from Netflix because Netflix couldn't afford to pay for their production. | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The black market is only more competitive because it doesn’t bear the costs of actually creating the content. That only explains why the price is lower, not why the experience is better. | |
| ▲ | ok123456 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The non-black market produces an intentionally inferior product so they can maximize their rent-seeking behaviors. | |
| ▲ | Glyptodon 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Creating the content is a sunk cost. 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. | |
| ▲ | godelski 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Kinda? I'm not actually sure what profit is being made if I'm just downloading from qbitorrent and never visiting a site seeing ads. 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. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | Dylan16807 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason. |
| |
| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Similarly annoying is when original language subtitles aren’t available in your region for some reason, even when the audio track of the same language is. Really puts a damper on using foreign media for immersive language learning purposes. | | |
| ▲ | umanwizard 6 days ago | parent [-] | | One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening! | | |
| ▲ | cgriswald 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Max has an anime and we stopped watching because even though English subtitles and English dubbed audio was available the original Japanese audio was always strangely delayed by days or weeks and the only way to tell it had been added was to check manually. | | |
| ▲ | zerocrates 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Lazarus? | | |
| ▲ | cgriswald 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes. We figured it was a mistake and watched a single dubbed episode and it was terrible. IIRC when I googled it I found out it was an intentional decision and of course people were talking about just pirating the original. Edit: It has been some months, but I also vaguely recall the episodes getting the Japanese audio out of order, which is why we thought it was just a mistake for that episode until we 'caught up' to the newest episodes. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | presentation 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have another problem, which is that my wife is Japanese and I’m American, and if we watch a French movie then I want the English subs and she wants the Japanese subs. Making that work with streaming services is very painful. | | |
| ▲ | PetitPrince 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Anecdotally, for a long time dual French and German subtitles was the standard in Swiss cinemas when movie was shown in original language. So your usecase is not that unusual ! | | |
| ▲ | hvb2 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Same in Belgium, top line was Dutch, bottom line was French |
| |
| ▲ | wjholden 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I had never thought of this before. What is the solution? Can any video software show two subtitles at once? | | | |
| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
| |
| ▲ | hibikir 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | And don't miss the situations where the subtitles are baked into the stream: HBO Max is very fond of just not letting you remove subtitles at all for at least a few non-english series. |
|
|
| ▲ | imoverclocked 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Until recently, 3. (poor connection) has been a huge issue for me and streaming services. When there is a download/watch later, I sigh with relief. 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? |
| |
| ▲ | qrios 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy. 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 | | |
| ▲ | callc 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This. Privacy does not matter until it does. Thanks for your example, qrios | |
| ▲ | tclancy 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others? (Which everyone in the US should.) | | |
| ▲ | qrios 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | ‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe). 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. | | |
| ▲ | zerocrates 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The collapse being the collapse of the DDR? The Lives of Others must have been made way further beyond that than 7 years. Closer to 20, I'd figure. | | |
| ▲ | arrowsmith 5 days ago | parent [-] | | TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed. I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990." (My emphasis.) So much for GPT-5. | | |
| ▲ | irthomasthomas 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's hilarious. Imagine going back two years and showing someone GPT-5? They might think the Pause AI movement had won. It makes you ponder an alternate timeline where the OpenAI brain trust wasn't dismantled Which version did you use, though? GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5-Mini, GPT-5 with Thinking (reasoning effort=high) or one of the other 18 options? Did you tell it to think harder? Maybe you are just holding it wrong? | | |
| ▲ | bambax 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Making what is essentially a router dispatching queries to the smallest engine susceptible to answer a question was maybe a good optimization from a techical and business pont of view. But branding that router "GPT5" is a huge marketing mistake, because now, every time a smaller model says something stupid (as they often do), it seems that's the best OpenAI has to offer... |
| |
| ▲ | nkrisc 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A perfectly grammatical and plausible sentence. Those words all seem quite likely to occur in that sequence. Another LLM success. | |
| ▲ | boredhedgehog 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | GPT-5 fell into a coma and missed a few critical years. | |
| ▲ | GoblinSlayer 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Linguistically it's an ok association. If you look at it unconsciously, you can find it plausible too, add 7 but in reverse. | |
| ▲ | qrios 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Right, I missed a whole decade. (For me 1989, the Mauerfall is the official end of GDR) |
|
| |
| ▲ | tclancy 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’m confused. It was a great movie and wildly applicable to what the right wants to do to the US now. What is too late? I mean it may be too late to save us/US but it still bears saying. |
| |
| ▲ | pmarreck 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Trivia about that movie: The spying devices used were authentic and from the era depicted. |
| |
| ▲ | irthomasthomas 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Interesting. There isn't one sentence in that article (English) which describes the political controversy of that movie. A single sentence mentions the film almost being banned for its 'political overtones'. | | |
| ▲ | StopDisinfo910 5 days ago | parent [-] | | The English article is incomplete. The banner is there. I guess I could try to complete it but it’s highly my work would be struck out by an angry editor feeling territorial for a reason or another so maybe not. 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. |
|
| |
| ▲ | 3036e4 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too. 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. | |
| ▲ | helsinkiandrew 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers? 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 | | |
| ▲ | imoverclocked 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I find myself wishing for a lower-overhead approach to this. 20% already gets the price from $14.99 to $12.49. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cast gets less than 50% and lawyers get more than 40% of that. If true, that's less than $6.25 to the folks that actually made the movie and $8.75 (or more) of pure, unadulterated overhead. Finally, clicking on "where to watch" shows prices within $0.20 of each other. It's not ... not price-fixing, but it kinda is. 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. | | |
| ▲ | helsinkiandrew 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The actor residuals are much less than 50%, but the remaining goes to the studio/funders who own the rights, not lawyers. 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. |
|
| |
| ▲ | boppo1 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >isn't popular enough
No that's because it's good enough to get rented regularly. Why sign a streaming deal if your IP prints money? |
|
|
| ▲ | benjiro 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > With $1k you can build a pretty good system 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. |
| |
| ▲ | sumtechguy 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > The hardware you buy for these activities, has still residual value after 1, 2, 3 year. Unlike the streaming service you pay for. 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. | |
| ▲ | BrandoElFollito 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You completely forgot to mention home automation :) Home Assistant FTW Making all this work is not difficult with docker once you get past the steep learning curve | |
| ▲ | godelski 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I agree with everything here. But I want to do a little nitpicking here > 7. Saves you from needing "cloud" storage or other cloud services.
One thing that frustrates me about cloud services is that they want to be the only host of my data. I want a 321 system[0]. That means I want a copy and I want a copy somewhere else. But most of these storage systems don't make it easy to do API calls and just rsync everything[1]. Yeah, I know about rclone but Google photos isn't storing my photos in their original quality and I don't trust them to not change the data.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 |
|
|
| ▲ | 3036e4 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| GOG used to have a small selection of DRM-free movies that you could buy to download and that would then make all those things possible to do in a way that would be legal or at least able to do locally in a way that would have a zero risk of being discovered even if it violated some EULA. Announcement from 2014: 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. |
|
| ▲ | nostrademons 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Also the trust that your favorite music will still be available to you if the streaming service goes bankrupt or cancels its content licensing deal or decides to jack up prices unaffordably or makes its player incompatible with your OS or introduces a service-ending software bug. |
|
| ▲ | goosedragons 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think my favorite thing of not even piracy, just ripping my DVDs, is the ability to watch a random episode of a show. There's some shows like The Simpsons that I don't want to watch in production order any more, nor do I want to manually select. Now I just tap some buttons in Kodi and it randomly picks a recently unwatched episode. |
|
| ▲ | account42 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or more generally: the ability to use a video player of your choice, which can have whatever features and interface that you want. |
|
| ▲ | zzo38computer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In addition to these and what you replied to, there is also the ability to downgrade the video quality in case you do not need the highest quality (e.g. in case you want to reduce the disk space and bandwidth requirements), and you might have a better UI (and otherwise use your own implementation of various software). 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)). |
|
| ▲ | happymellon 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You shouldn't need to spend anything like $1k to get yourself going with a simple Jellyfin server running on a $50 TinyMiniMicro and a 4 tb external HDD. $150? 8 months to match Netflix. Substantially less to replace two services. |
|
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Funnily enough, ability to watch offline is something the Netflix app for Windows (yes from their app store) lets you do. It is my favorite reason to install Windows apps instead of just using the browser, really handy for a trip when you have a real screen to watch movies from. |
|
| ▲ | selcuka 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Offline watching is a thing with streaming services, too. 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. |
| |
| ▲ | godelski 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > these features will affect their bottom line. They just don't see value
That's the problem. These are useful features. Look around you, people are... using them. I got a ton of upvotes for my comment. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying that because it is evidence that these things are in demand.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. | | |
| ▲ | selcuka 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Sorry, I meant that "implementing them wouldn't affect their bottom line in a negative way". I agree with you that they are useful features. That's what separates these bullet points from the others: Others will never be implemented because they won't help them make more money. | | |
| ▲ | godelski 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm still not convinced it would affect their bottom line in a negative way. 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 |
|
| |
| ▲ | whimsicalism 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | most streaming services i use do not allow offline watching on a computer, only mobile |
|
|
| ▲ | foobarian 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 1.3 Ability to make your own subtitles so your Klingon grandma can watch the movie 1.4 Ability to edit the video so your 10 year old can watch Top Secret! without gross anal sex jokes |
|
| ▲ | efilife 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What do you mean by audio normalization? Aren't you talking about compression? |
| |
| ▲ | Dwedit 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not the same thing. Normalization is scanning to see what the highest volume scale you can use without introducing clipping, then multiplying every sample by that scale. 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. | | | |
| ▲ | komali2 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Some movies have portions that are really quiet and others that are quiet loud. Depending on your taste you may prefer to not have the experience of turning up the audio so you can hear a quiet conversation, then having your ears blown out by a loud explosion or whatever. Director's tastes be damned, I'm trying to relax over here! | | |
| ▲ | jack1243star 5 days ago | parent [-] | | In audio processing, the more precise term for it is compression (dynamically adjust gain). Normalization usually means that the gain is adjusted so that the highest volume meets a certain level. (Like what YouTube does) | | |
| ▲ | lucideer 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Compression is an entirely different thing. 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. | | |
| ▲ | danadam 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Normalization increases gain of all frequencies at any given point-in-time while reducing gain of all frequencies at other points in time. When you do that then the difference between the loudest and the quietest part of the audio gets reduced. That's dynamic range reduction. | | |
| ▲ | lucideer 5 days ago | parent [-] | | True. But. While normalization is usually one-way, if you're doing DSP normalization & have a record of the level offsets you've applied, it's reversible. This is never the case for compression - you can't increase dynamic range of a compressed file (short of AI-generating something that never was) |
| |
| ▲ | recursive 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think you're describing a multi-band compressor. "Normal" compressors do indeed do gain adjustment. They usually do this without regard for the frequencies present. Only the amplitude matters for normal compressors. | | |
| ▲ | lucideer 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Not specifically talking about multiband. Normal compressors do effectively do gain adjustment - it's not really the same as a typical amp since their core function only reduces gain, then makeup is applied to the entirety to compensate - but yes the result is effectively gain adjustment. As for doing it "without regard for the frequencies present", if you compress a mix with a base guitar & high vocals, the impact of the compression on the base will be different than on the higher notes. This is aside from (/in addition to?) attack & release applied on a per-track basis & more just about the natural effect of dynamics within frequency ranges. | | |
| ▲ | recursive 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Are you referring to psychoacoustic effects? Something like perceived loudness is only determined by waveform amplitude, but also affected by frequencies present? Or maybe the vocal and bass parts have transients at different times causing the other to be attenuated when it was already relatively quiet? Other than that I'm not sure what else you could mean. Maybe we've been using different compressors. I've used a small handful of hardware and software compressors and haven't found them to sensitive to spectral content when used "normally". Meaning no extra filters or side chain configuration. |
|
| |
| ▲ | throwaway290 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sorry but you really misunderstand what normalization and compression means. "quiet frequencies" :D | | |
| ▲ | lucideer 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I assure you I don't. I'm not sure what the scare quotes are about but if you point out what I'm misrepresenting I can try to explain it a little better. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | thayne 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But compression is ambiguous because that could also refer to compressing the video stream to reduce the size of the movie. | | |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | NoSalt 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nice zero indexed array. |
|
| ▲ | kylebenzle 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
|
| ▲ | dencher 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [dead] |
|
| ▲ | Galaxeblaffer 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [flagged] |
| |
| ▲ | MobiusHorizons 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I stopped pirating in college when I got a job and was making enough money to pay for movies I wanted to watch. But I miss almost every single one of the points listed so much so that I have begun purchasing dvd or Blu-ray copies of movies and shows I would otherwise stream, and ripping the content for my own use. It is an absurd amount of work, but the end result is a better experience than streaming in almost every way. If I could legally download movies and shows (paying full price for them) I absolutely would. | |
| ▲ | kryptn 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Mind elaborating? | | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 5 days ago | parent [-] | | "Look, doing something illegal offers a lot of benefits for me! I must be a genius" | | |
| ▲ | BriggyDwiggs42 5 days ago | parent [-] | | You’re not considering that many of these points are in no way illegal to provide as a streaming service. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway290 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I didn't say it. but the comment we are replying to says "piracy offers:", so direct your complaint to that guy. I agree with you. How about launch a better service instead of pointing out how breaking the law is beneficial to the breaker. Duh it always is, I wonder why?? | | |
|
|
|
|
