There is essentially zero piracy from these digital cinema releases. The pirate copies are generally from once it starts digitally streaming on one of the services including PPV, and when pirate copies exist earlier it is almost always someone with a camera in a theatre making a terrible quality screener.
Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.
Not sure of the GP's core message there, but I think this is kinda the point: even with all this onerous encryption on the cinema releases, high-quality pirated copies still very quickly make it out.
So basically they have this very secure scheme for getting movies to theaters, but everything else is full of holes. Makes you wonder if all the effort and cost to secure the theater distribution chain is worth it. If you're going to allow playback on devices in "adversarial" hands (streaming, home physical media playback), it's going to be incredibly difficult to restrict copying. Tightening up the one instance where the hardware and people operating it have less incentive to pirate (and more incentive to not pirate, given the risk to their theater business) seems like wasted effort.
Certainly this does make the case of a theater-only-first release nearly impossible to pirate. But there aren't quite as many of those anymore, and all this DRM must be expensive, both in the hardware/software, and in the logistics. I guess they've found it's worth it, but... oof.
>If you're going to allow playback on devices in "adversarial" hands (streaming, home physical media playback), it's going to be incredibly difficult to restrict copying.
Kaleidescape movie players[1][2] are an example of an "adversarial" environment in customers' homes but so far, their DRM is still unbroken by pirates. (10+ years of Strato players deployed out in the wild but still not defeated yet.)
The 4k 100+ GB encrypted files downloaded by Kaleidescape is considered 1 step below the DCP theater releases and are higher quality than Blu-Ray 4k UHD discs.
The downloads are often 40+ GB larger than 66 GB discs and downloadable months before physical media is available so the Kaleidescape movies stored on the customers' harddrive are very desirable files to hack and reverse engineer but so far, their DRM protection hasn't been bypassed. Kaleidescape is more locked down than the simple DVD CSS 40-bit encryption.
Sure, a Kaledescape owner could point a video camera at the screen and record it (the "analog hole"[3]) -- but those types of "rips" that suffer generation losses are not considered high quality.
That is a ridiculous statement. Nobody would even care to break this thing. Look at it's base price, then lookat their customers. It makes no sense to break it.
>Look at it's base price, then lookat their customers. It makes no sense to break it.
You're not thinking the same way the motivated pirates think. Some pirates (especially in Eastern Europe, Asia, etc) rip new releases as fast as possible to illegally re-sell or re-stream for lower prices (or show along with ads for revenue). In this way, the pirates get the revenue instead of the legitimate movie studios.
So pirate groups in combination with illegal streaming websites can be thought of as a black market financial arbitrage. So far, the video sources they used include Blu-Ray rips and streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime Video webrips.
However, the Kaleidescope players could theoretically also be included as rip sources ... if the DRM was broken. The math for profitable arbitrage isn't that ridiculous. E.g. :
- it would take only ~80 of those titles to recoup the cost of $1995 Kaleidescope player + the $7.95 rental fees for 80 downloads. All downloads after that break-even threshold is extra money for the pirates. Another bonus is pirating 4k UHD content that's not available on physical Blu-rays.
But the Kaleidescope DRM isn't broken. Therefore, the $7.95 rental downloads can't be used as a new vector for pirate releases. Of course, Kaleidescape doesn't want this scenario to happen so they're incentivized to continue paying for the DRM licensing protection.
And to recap the specifics I was replying to, it was this:
>"If you're going to allow playback on devices in "adversarial" hands (streaming, home physical media playback), it's going to be incredibly difficult to restrict copying."
Kaleidescape is one counterexample to that. So far, they have actually restricted copying with success.
The issue is the so-called "DRM" isn't just the encryption of the harddrive files. The DRM protection also includes the watermarks in the video images that survive the HDMI capture. If pirates don't want their $2000 Kaleidescape player blacklisted and bricked, they have to figure out how to remove all forensic watermarks (the invisible low-level "noise" in the image frames) so the illegal copies can't be traced back to that specific compromised player.
It's not impossible but it raises the threshold of difficulties. E.g. using differential analysis to reverse-engineer watermarking now requires buying TWO players for $4000 instead of just one for $2000; and paying for 2 download rentals instead of just 1. And add hours of analysis work on top of that. DRM doesn't have to make piracy impossible; it just has to make the cost/effort equation not attractive. For now, the Kaleidescape DRM scheme is "good enough" for the cost/effort equation to not make sense for pirates.
I was talking digital. The output has to hit a device that does something with pixels at some point. At that stage it isn’t encrypted. (Think ribbon cable to LCD, or equivalent). No reason why an FPGA or some custom hardware can’t grab that, just requires engineering effort.
> Certainly this does make the case of a theater-only-first release nearly impossible to pirate. But there aren't quite as many of those anymore, and all this DRM must be expensive, both in the hardware/software, and in the logistics. I guess they've found it's worth it, but... oof.
Yes, that's the entire point. There are still tons of theater releases, that's literally the entire business of cinemas. The cost of DRM is peanuts next to their revenue, it's absolutely worth it to them. Nothing "oof" about it.
Most importantly, the industry concerns itself primarily with the new-release window; that high fidelity copies will eventually be widely available doesn't break the model.
I suppose this would help keep pirated copies from getting out before the theatrical release date (presumably theaters are given these digital releases at least days before their first projection date).
But it seems that more and more releases are straight-to-streaming, and/or sometimes simultaneous with the theatrical release. High-quality pirated copies often show up within a day of a streaming release. Sure, many are still theater-only for a week or more after initial release.
I get that a big part of their business model for some titles relies on theater ticket sales within the first days or at most weeks after release, but all this DRM just feels like an exhausting, expensive, ultimately-losing game for them. Especially when we consider how theater-going has declined over time, especially recently.
There are no high quality pirated versions though. The streaming version and even blu-ray is compressed way heavier than these DCP files. I’d buy these cinema versions of films in a heartbeat if they were availble.
I’ve worked in film mastering so yes I am an outlier. My point was that industry guarding the DCP makes sense as the leaked pirate versions are not the same thing. In music world everyone can buy uncompressed CD, but with moving image end user can only get what is equivalent of a mp3. This includes the illegal channels. Blu-ray is say 1:40 compressed from raw data. Good enough for sure but not the theatre experience.
A 4k movie, even from a Blu-Ray, may look very nice when watched at a normal speed, but if you look at the individual frames in order to distinguish some details during a sequence with fast movements, the quality is very bad and it may be impossible to see the details that you want to see.
At the levels of compression that are typical for movies distributed by encoding with H.264, H.265 and the like, I have never seen any movie that still looks high quality when slowed down during fast action.
Where do you live? Where I live only professionals and nerds use movie playback that allows single frame stepping, it's definitely a fringe phenomenon here.
I live in the EU, but any good free movie player should allow stepping through video frames back and forth and also playing with any desired speed in frames per second.
This is not a feature that requires professional tools.
And I do not think that you have to be a pro or a nerd in order to want to see clearly many of the details of the kind "blink and you miss it".
You are right and it is an evil form of gate keeping.
Pros before bros.
Nerds are just wannabes.
The mugglers may suffer as they do not know, care or can articulate it. If they do - they are clearly nerds and we can discard them as a minority.
People conflate pro with premium. The mass market should be able to sustain premium and discount. The market might be too small for pro DCP content. But I would like the market to understand that there are 3 important segments. Pro, premium and discount.
Pro - special specific needs.
Premium - for the regular Joe who wants good quality.
Discount - for the masses.
Premium market is underserved. Unless you are willing to pay luxury prices for Kaleidescape or the likes.
It is the race to the bottom with streaming providers testing commercials. They have already succeeded with the "junk content" as the big studios wants to keep licenses for their own services.
The quality bar is set for the lowest/cheapest common denominator.
There is nothing weird about it. If a single person has the resource to decrypt and manage the logistics, then obviously DCP is the intended way a director wants his audience to experience his creativity.
As someone who's been working with cinema and video mastering, it sounds like you haven't seen the difference between professional formats like DCP and consumer formats viewed on a proper screen or projector. There's a reason we still have cinemas after all.
Even consumer equipment benefits greatly from visually lossless encoded media.
No one goes to the theater because the picture is better. It often isn’t.
Projectors aren’t maintained, or set up correctly, and audio balancing is often way off. People go to the movies to see new releases or have dedicated shared experiences
I often hear that hand waving "what the market wants". But it is more "what the market can suffer". See IPv4 vs IPv6.
I am not working with mastering as the OP. But I can see the low fidelity of streaming services. I watch my content projected to a large screen.
So I am one of those weirdos. I do not mind as I know I am a nerd. But there are more of us than you think but the penny pinchers wins as usual. "The majority do not see it". But they do. The majority went out and bought 4K TVs. They are slightly disappointed as it did not get "that much better". Most would have been just as happy with a 1080P OLED display. But only the geeks can articulate what they want.
The worst local offender is the online Blockbuster. Compression artifacts galore. But as most view content on phones the audio is stereo only. So your "sufficient" is not my "sufficient".
I get the "weird" part. No offense at all. But you are talking about optimizing for what the majority will suffer.
And it is done to save the last little penny. We could optimize for technical excellence but pride has gone out of fashion.
Even among the set of people who have something even semi-resembling a proper home theater—which is already a tiny group—I'd be 95+% would need to upgrade their gear quite a bit before they'd benefit at all much from quality higher than ~50GB-100GB blu ray rips.
(stream rips do often does look like dog shit, though—I find sub-10GB 1080p blu-ray downscales [to get the HDR from the 4k blu ray, but lower res and storage space] usually look better than raw 4K streaming rips)
> But it seems that more and more releases are straight-to-streaming, and/or sometimes simultaneous with the theatrical release
If anything, it's less and less. Studios are pulling the PVOD date further and further out for successful titles generally (Universal excepted). All the talk from Cinemacon was going back to a 60 day+ exclusive theatrical window.
Back in my day the first releases were cam rips sold on dvds for $3-5 per movie. quality wasn't great but the audio could be ripped from the devices for hearing impaired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesync
quality varied but was good enough in mid 00's probably better
There is zero piracy from projectors because there are a multitude of easier places to rip from. But close those doors, limit to only theatrical releases, and we will again see content pulled from projectors and underpaid projectionists.
The only way to prevent piracy, to actually prevent copying, is to keep content in a dark vault well away from public view.
The number is, I believe, simply peak voltage. And personally I find the measure grossly misleading: an iPhone with an 80% battery has an almost useless runtime. It definitely isn’t 80% of the original runtime.
My iPhone could handle about 2 days with heavy usage. It was reduced to a day after 1 year. Now after 2 and half years, the battery dies in about 12 hours with the same usage. The battery health is 83% according to iOS. So it’s definitely not a good indicator for real life usage.
Lots of anecdotes on cures so here is mine: had loads of warts through childhood. Received cryotherapy but they returned. In my teens got a summer job priming tobacco and within days they completely disappeared and I haven’t had another decades later.
"""In 1980, he transmuted several thousand atoms of bismuth-209 into gold (197
Au) at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. His experimental technique, using the lab's Bevalac particle accelerator, was able to remove protons and neutrons from the bismuth atoms by bombarding it with carbon and neon nuclei traveling near the speed of light.[47] Seaborg's technique would have been far too expensive to enable routine manufacturing of gold, but his work was close to the mythical Philosopher's Stone.[48][49] As gold has four fewer protons and (taking the only naturally occurring bulk isotopes of either) eight fewer neutrons than bismuth, a total of twelve nucleons have to be removed from the bismuth nucleus to produce gold using Seaborg's method."""
As expected, the preponderance of comments claim US exceptionalism: why somehow it’s a unique snowflake and it just wouldn’t work there. Another comment with the classic “we pay for drug research“ fallback (ignoring that accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of the expenses).
The US population is so indoctrinated with baseless propaganda that it will take a century for it to move to a better model.
I've lived in Canada with its vaunted universal healthcare system. While it sounds great on paper, in practice it means you'll wait forever for appointments.
Long wait times are a potential problem of public healthcare systems. The thing about private though is that if you don’t have any money (perhaps because you are too sick to work), then there isn’t even a wait time - you just don’t get treatment.
How long does it take to get you appointments here? I have waited months for simple items. I'm already waiting as long as my Canadian friends for simple things, but paying way more.
Our better model (in Canada, Quebec) is increasingly disliked by our population. The private sector is getting more popular, enough so that our government is thinking about banning it.
Many European countries found a compromise where both public and private health cares coexist.
The overall point though is not to sit on the laurels and try to hammer in "one right way" of doing it, but to iterate until you find a legislative healthcare framework that works for your country and benefits most.
The lack of progress in US on health care front is an indictment of its political rigidity first and foremost.
Universal healthcare isn't guaranteed to work well. The point is that it at least can work well and you can see examples of countries where it is working well. I suspect that people would feel very differently about private healthcare if it was their only option rather than an additional option for those with the money to spare. For example, in the UK I am glad to be able to make use of private healthcare for small things when I need to, but I would hate to be in a situation where it was my only option. (And that's not because the NHS in the present moment is a particularly shining example of universal healthcare done right.)
I use to work with a lot of Canadians and multiple of them traveled to the US for medical procedures in the year or so I worked with them. One older co-worker broke his arm while visiting family in Quebec and literally drove hours to cross the border to have his arm set there b/c of the wait time. I won't pretend to say I understand the systems in place in Canada nor have insight into why they did this, but I always found it really interesting.
Why do you think that's happening? It is just a huge propaganda campaign by moneyed interests or is there some actual benefit? Maybe just the grass is greener
> The US population is so indoctrinated with baseless propaganda that it will take a century for it to move to a better model.
I used to be one of those people. We immigrated to the USA when I was very young, so as I grew up I went extra Right/libertarian, thinking that would make me "more American" somehow. I now realize that this is very common in US immigrants.
It was the US health system that showed me the undeniable faults in pure libertarianism. It all seems so obvious now:
In a government run health system, dollars put into the system which do not end up going to patient care is called waste, it is seen as a negative and we work to minimize it.
In a privatized for-profit health system, dollars put into the system which do not end up going to patient care is called profit, it is seen as a positive and we work to increase it.
It's that simple. For-profit-all-the-things is not ideal. The main lesson I learned is that stubborn ideological purity is fraught with issues, no matter the ideology.
Not to be pedantic, but the majority of US healthcare hospital systems are actually non-profits, so they milk profit a bit differently since they aren’t allowed to have any (instead it goes to administration salaries and overheads).
Even some of the insurance systems are non-profits. It doesn’t take shareholder profit motive to make money evaporate.
Pedanticism is one of my favorite things about this website.
In this case... while my specific terminology may be lacking, if we zoom out and just compare the US healthcare system to other countries' systems, we demonstrably see lower per-capita spending and better patient outcomes. [0]
If we could agree on those facts, can you help me use the correct words to describe the issue?
Oh we are in total agreement in the outcome. But misidentifying the problem as a pursuit of profit might lead to a reform that doesn’t really fix our system. The issue is a lot of vested interests getting a cut of healthcare money, and without reforms to streamline that, we aren’t going to make progress in coming up with something better.
I wouldn't call myself a libertarian, but I do find it bewildering when people caricature libertarianism like this.
For one thing, if you go through the exercise of examining the parts of the healthcare system and ask yourself "how much is the state involved in this", I think you may come to a different conclusion. I don't know what to call our trash heap of a system, but libertarian seems obviously not it.
OK, this is interesting. Please help me correct my terminology.
On my part of the exchange, might I suggest that what you see as government involvement could also be called "regulatory capture"? [0]
What I mean is that the monied interests now have major influence on the government which regulates them, so they create "regulation," with the goal of perpetuating their own profit centers.
How can I do better from your point of view? If not libertarianism, what should we call the ideology or ideals that led to this healthcare system with an ever increasing chain of profit centers?
Like I said, I don't know what to call it. Crony capitalism probably fits, which goes along with your link.
Libertarianism is about liberty, or individual freedoms. Are you free to purchase any drug or test or service or device that you want from whoever you want? Of course not, the state is heavily involved in making these decisions for you.
Ok, so one of the killer apps that I have discovered with LLMs is to further my own personal political depolarization. ChatGPT will always make a solid argument for most any other side.
To help identify what the heck I am talking about here, here is ChatGPT Classic's take on "libertarianism vs capitalism vs crony capitalism vs anarcho capitalism" [0] I found it very good reading.
What I realize now is that I was only holding on to one aspect of "libertarianism."
> Free Markets: Supports the idea that a market free from government interference naturally leads to efficiency, innovation, and wealth creation.
If I may be introspective for a moment, I believe that the reason that I may have used libertarianism instead of capitalism, is because how polarizing "capitalism" has become in the US discourse. I feel like readers would assume that if I am making light of capitalism, then I must support communism or some equally obsolete ideology.
Sadly, you are 100% correct. Once our American brothers wake up the down-votes will start pouring in.
The numbers are inflated because you get charged hundreds of dollars for an aspirin tablet in an emergency room and thousands for a 10 minute ride in an ambulance. What is particularly sad is that to the rest of the world this is absolutely insane but if you try to explain this to Americans they'll tell you they don't want no stinking communism. It's fascinating how deeply indoctrinated this nation is.
I run Edge across macOS, iOS and Windows. Edge has some great native UI affordances (vertical tabs, collections, etc) and is a bit removed from Google.
It might have been common practice, but everyone denied it, including Arnold repeatedly. It was and is considered “cheating”, so the claim that it was normal should be asterisked. It is “normal” the way affairs in marriage are.
And his recollection of his usage seems suspect. Both his dbol and test are seriously on the low side. I hugely doubt he is being forthcoming.
To be clear I am a big fan of his and think the use of steroids is a personal choice, weighed against risks. It’s just that the post-facto fictions presented are seldom honest.
He talks pretty openly about using steroids in "Pumping Iron" which came out in 1977. He was very candid about it, probably because you would have to be a moron to look at professional body builders and think they were natural.
> It might have been common practice, but everyone denied it, including Arnold repeatedly. It was and is considered “cheating”, so the claim that it was normal should be asterisked. It is “normal” the way affairs in marriage are.
Maybe I am naive, but having an affair isn't a prerequisite for marriage. Whereas everyone in bodybuilding is on steroids, it's a prerequisite for the sport. It was back then and it still is now.
The tone and attitude of this post is basically the epitome of Jr/beginner dev. If your audience is non-programmers and one wants to be the “big shot”, ply this tact, but tech readers will overwhelmingly find this attitude cringeworthy.
My assumption is that it is engagement juicing. These seem to go out to seldom/casual users a lot of the time, and people respond by logging in and checking things out. Easy way to pump the MAUs
Yeah, this is not far fetched as I noticed this only on an account I haven't been using for a long time, and in the past FB engaged in a ton of scummy tactics to force me to log in again.
It's not that they don't have enough, it's that they try to always get more. If they no longer have anything to engage you with as you turned it all off, you will get a notification for some random post "we thought this might be interesting to you". And even if you always manually disable all possible options related to this particular notification, they will always find a way to nag you more.
