Westor

Westor Lowbrood

@Westor

w+m1, spellstrike, and yips at you

  • they/them

24/sfw/PF2e/kobold/tf2/silly

log inask
Westor
@Westor
sudo-EatPant
@sudo-EatPant
Turfster
@Turfster

I will never forgive Apple for killing physical media

  • Apple removed disc drives from their machines at a critical junction in time in their fucked up race to be E V E R T H I N N E R

  • this made Microsoft go "hey, if the overpriced hipster bullshit brand isn't doing drives any longer, we don't need to go to any efforts either, so let's not pay for that bluray license"

  • which means there's no easy way to play bluray media on a computer without installing garbage bloatware rootkit third party software, so most people don't bother

  • streaming ghouls swoop in backed by vulture capital

  • everyone pats themselves on the back that "nobody's buying physical media any longer, but it's fine, streaming will solve the problem forever"

  • having gotten a big enough foothold, streaming ghouls stop offering actually interesting stuff

  • you can't actually watch a large swathe of movies and TV series any longer, because where are you going to find the physical media?

Q E fucking D

modulusshift
@modulusshift

genuinely: the only option is piracy. even if you have moral qualms. you know how it's impossible to get attention of corporations these days unless you've already demonstrated the ability to assemble your own audience? That's straight up what piracy is at this point. You know there's people at all these corps paying attention to what's getting pirated for moral outrage/hoping to get a payout reasons, but those people are also those most in tune with what demands the market isn't currently serving. If you want something to succeed that isn't addressed in the current market, piracy is the only option. Ideally then also pay for it when they make it available, but even if you don't, others will. So: Pirate stuff to save the art you most care about. Thank you.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Turfster's post:

modulusshift
@modulusshift

genuinely: the only option is piracy. even if you have moral qualms. you know how it's impossible to get attention of corporations these days unless you've already demonstrated the ability to assemble your own audience? That's straight up what piracy is at this point. You know there's people at all these corps paying attention to what's getting pirated for moral outrage/hoping to get a payout reasons, but those people are also those most in tune with what demands the market isn't currently serving. If you want something to succeed that isn't addressed in the current market, piracy is the only option. Ideally then also pay for it when they make it available, but even if you don't, others will. So: Pirate stuff to save the art you most care about. Thank you.

I'm gonna promote this to a share actually lol

login to reply
froggebip
@froggebip

our current fractured streaming hell is what prompted me to get super into piracy. between HBO and Netflix and Hulu and Prime and Paramount and Disney i'm just done, i'm over it, these companies deserve to fail

my buddy has been on the "just download TV/movies from usenet" bandwagon for a long time and I finally asked him how the hell all that works, and once you get your automations setup it's so much easier than trying to find a movie/show on any of the 3,000 streaming services. I just search with Radarr or Sonarr (respectively) and it grabs the media I want and dumps it into my Plex.

unfortunately it's not that accessible for non-tech folks, which is a big bummer

login to reply
YuushaRuby
@YuushaRuby

I mean also, disc based media isn’t like, dead, not all stuff on Netflix “originals” gets pushed to dvd but a good amount of it does eventually, and there’s still plenty of stuff not on streaming, and also most blu-ray releases are also dvd releases (if not all, I’ve personally never come across a blu-ray release that isn’t also on dvd), streaming foothold still sucks and I agree that the state of media is in a dire situation but it’s like, discs are still obtainable and being made every day, I have many many movies of recent years on dvd here at home

login to reply
Turfster
@Turfster

Sure, most of the latest non-streaming platform exclusive movies still get some kind of disc release on DVD and sometimes Bluray, but the buying windows can get quite tight for things that aren't like Pixar's Latest Whatever.
I've seen a ton of more "indie" things disappear from the market completely within half a year or less, if they even got a release.
And good luck trying to find a 30 or even 10 year old TV series for sale that isn't secondhand, or scratches/bitrot in case of secondhand DVDs.
Stores that used to have walls upon walls of media now have like, maybe 3 measly little racks, with the same megablockbusters everywhere.
I guess it all depends on where exactly you live as well.

login to reply
YuushaRuby
@YuushaRuby

I pretty much only buy secondhand and have had 0 issues tbh and have mostly been buying movies from the 80s lately! Releases and availability also haven’t been guaranteed for any given media throughout history, it’s worse for some things nowadays of course due to streaming, I use sites like eBay mostly but also have a local used goods store I go to that has an extremely large disc and tape selection so I guess I have better luck in that regard, secondhand is always the best way to get media though imo, when it comes to movies and TV series, it’s almost always cheaper and again haven’t had any issues myself! Well, one time a case was a little beat up but the dvd was in perfect condition

login to reply
Turfster
@Turfster

[quietly jealous]
The secondhand market here is... quite bad, and the local used goods stores don't even do movies, all they have is CDs and LPs.
(no, I do not live in the early 90s)
I've also gotten so many quite expensive secondhand sets that had scratched/dying discs that I've gotten quite leery of buying secondhand at all, unfortunately... which leaves me well up a creek.

login to reply
modulusshift
@modulusshift

yeah, I was kinda hinting at that with my "the current market" stuff, sometimes you really can find stuff on disc and it's fine. I watch blurays of my favorite stuff, for sure, I bought Everything Everywhere All At Once almost immediately once it came to disc. Of course, production runs are short, they don't keep much in the channel beyond current demand, etc etc etc.

login to reply
lapisnev
@lapisnev

The part that gets me is that Apple had some of the best physical media support prior to this. I buy an Audio CD, I put it in my mid-2007 PlasticBook running OS X Lion, iTunes rips it in ALAC. I plug in my iPod Mini, iTunes converts to AAC and syncs it. I now have a digital copy of the album on my iPod in two end-user actions (after some initial setup). It could not get any easier. It was great.

Unfortunately even at this point in time Apple was on their way to obsoleting physical media. If I downgrade to Snow Leopard I can plug in TWO CD-ROM drives and rip them at the same time. Newer versions of iTunes will refuse to do this, it will rip one at a time in series no matter how many drives you have and how much you mash the button.

login to reply
chaoticevilspacewitch
@chaoticevilspacewitch

So honestly I'm really happy that most laptops come without disc drives now. It used to be pretty hard to find one. And like, physical media isn't forever, CDs and other disc types degrade, even if they avoid damage.
If there's something you can't find or really want to own, download it and save it to cloud backup. Yarrr, matey!

login to reply
KamiBee
@KamiBee

I wouldn't consider cloud backup to be forever either. Maybe if you're with one of the big players you can count on not losing your files without warning at least, but there are too many times conditions of service have changed in the past to make a good option unaffordable or otherwise less appealing. I think it's also entirely possible it will become harder to obtain encryption-friendly large tracts of file storage in the future and that digital fingerprinting of files to identify illicit booty will make it a challenge to store certain things. Could be paranoia but I hear Apple is already prowling through customers' personal files to flag potential child exploitation materials, I wouldn't be shocked by that surveillance expanding its focus.

Ideally for me the best solution is a good cloud service but also maintaining a more private home physical backup option. In my household we have a shared RAID-based fileserver (so we have redundant data spread across multiple hard disks) and certain directories from my space on there are backed up to a cloud service. It's not cheap and when the hard disks in the fileserver start to fail (which I seem to remember all of the original four disks did years ago in the space of several months) you have to get onto that quickly, but we have had issues with our cloud provider and been very happy to have a solid offline setup.

Having said all of this, I wouldn't rely on them for a second but I do still have a bunch of burned DVDs, mostly TV recordings I'm not interested enough in to save elsewhere, and I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few of those end up perversely outliving me. 🙃

login to reply
chaoticevilspacewitch
@chaoticevilspacewitch

Yeah I've got cloud backup with Google and Backblaze... Google is evil in a lot of ways, but at least if they suffer multiple catastrophic data center loses, it's probably the apocalypse and my bootlegs won't really matter.
Besides, my laserdisc edition rips of the original trilogy theatrical releases are also backed up on numerous other locations, including my phone's SD card, because I am NOT losing those!
Cloud providers deciding/ being forced to patrol for infringing material would be a big problem, for sure. At that point you'd be reliant on your personal storage being disaster-proof, which I think is beyond any reasonable expectation for anyone but really rich nerds.

login to reply
Turfster
@Turfster

Yeah, that's the unfortunate problem.
You don't want to rely on nebulous systems in someone else's control that could be forced to do something about your stuff, but you also can't just keep it in your own home, because if something happens... then what?

(Also I really need to hook up a setup so I can rip my laserdiscs before it's too late, but my player is uh... old and cranky)

login to reply
KamiBee
@KamiBee

I think being aware of what you absolutely couldn't stand to lose is the right way to frame your decisions with file backups. I too have my set of things that must survive (my writing/other creative work, some photos, music/ebooks I wouldn't want to be on the planet without) and for everything else... it's just hoping the existing systems continue to work.

The home fileserver isn't a perfect solution, especially since we haven't been able to afford to upgrade anything for years and have been lucky nothing failed in that time, but I admit it does make me sleep a bit better knowing it's there. 🤭 And yeah as much as I hate having anything to do with the likes of Google, services 'too big to fail' certainly have their benefits.

login to reply
KamiBee
@KamiBee

Apple is always at the scene of the crime when it comes to technology disempowering people. Their anti-repair antics are really shocking. Unfortunately they're much better than Microsoft at convincing their customer base that everything they do is actually good and necessary and they end up enabling all the other players to make this stuff normal.

The last TV content I pirated was actually an anime I already bought probably a decade ago and still have the DVDs of. Easier to watch as a digital copy on the laptop, much easier to download a copy someone who does this all the time has ripped properly rather than scrambling around to find the USB Blu-Ray drive and then figuring out what I can install on my current machine to do what I want and then forgetting how to do any of it by the next time I want to rip something in two years' time...

login to reply