The future of video

[andrewducker]

While I was at the packing party held by erindubitably and marrog before they depart for Dundee a conversation started about TV, movies, downloading, and DVDs.

There was a general feeling that physical media was just faffy. If you habitually watch your TV on a computing device then you don't actually need a spinning platter of plastic to get it there, and in some circumstances (tablets and media players) you're going to have to convert the video into a format you can play before you can watch it.

To give an example, Julie and I are working our way through Family Guy. We watch episodes largely in bed, but also in the living room. We can either download the files, stick them on the server, and then watch them from wherever we happen to be, or we could order the box set, and then go find the disk whenever we want to watch an episode, bring it to where we are, wait for it to spin up, work our way through the annoying navigation screens, and then get to watch the episode. Unless we've gone on to the next disk, in which case it's off to find the box, swap disks, and then go do some more navigation, rather than pressing "down" and then "enter" to watch the next one.*

I admit that this isn't a life-endangering series of steps to go through. But after several years of watching TV like this I'd rather like the entertainment industry to get a clue and let me watch TV quickly and easily.*

There are some moves in this direction, with Ultraviolet, which promises the ability to securely access all of the movie files you've "bought" from wherever you are. But judging by current reports they are completely fucking things up.

I am _incredibly_ wary of DRM for anything I might want to have access to in the future**. DRM files depend on a server to authenticate them before playing, and several have ceased to exist already. Google Video and MSN Music are probably the two largest cases where media files that people "bought" simply ceased to work after the providers shut them down. Google were good enough to give people refunds, Microsoft just told people to burn the files to DVD.

I was delighted to discover someone gets it. Louis C.K. isn't just an awesome comedian, he's a bit of a technophile, shooting his show Louie on a Red Camera and then editing it on his MacBook. And rather than sell his standup show in an encrypted format it's available entirely DRM free, for $5. You pay your money, and then you can either stream it, or you can download a totally normal .mp4 file, which will play on pretty much anything (works fine on both my PS3 and 360, is supported by Android and iPads). You can buy it here.

And that, to me, should be the future. I give you some cash, you give me a file that I can then play on anything I like, in any way I like, forever, without having to check with you ever again. Damned if I'm settling for less than that.***


*Of course, if we were watching it on a tablet then discs would be absolutely fuck-all use at all.
**I justify Steam to myself because most of the things on there are games I've bought and am unlikely to play much in the future. Spotify is clearly a subscription service, and I'm happy enough with that.
***There's also the argument that they're competing with illegal downloading. I'm willing to pay for things, because I think I should support the creators of things I like. I'm not willing to pay for things that are _worse_ than what I get for free though****. That's just dumb.
****One of the (not terribly serious) suggestions was "Buy the box set, torrent the files, when you've finished watching the series delete the files and sell/give on the box set. The box then counts as a large,clunky license.

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> the annoying navigation screens,

That's my number 1 peeve with DVDs. More painful than VHS to use, as with that you could at least just fast forward. Why would I want to see an irritating, usually badly-made menu system, which to boot often contains semi-spoilers of what I'm about to watch?

[dreema.livejournal.com]

and the 'you must not pirate this dvd, pirating is theft, yarr!' messages you can't skip.

I tend to download tv eps the day after they're shown. I usually have the most recent stuff on my pc, will copy it to an external HD for watching off the ps3 (cos my ps3's wireless card is too unstable to stream and there's no network cable in the living room) then once it's been watched it gets copied to a box in the cupboard with mahoosive disc array in it.

Then once the dvds come down to a more reasonable price for the box set, they get bought and stacked on the shelf so i don't feel too badly about not paying for the tv licence.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Totally agree! I've moved more towards downloading.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Steam actually offer a fairly user un-friendly service in a very basic way.

There is no way to schedule downloads. Many users, dependent on their country and/or internet plan, will have bandwidth caps either all the time or at certain points in the day. I don't WANT steam to auto-update with a 5 gigabyte download when I log on in the evening, and I want to be able to tell it to download something after midnight, without having to stay up to do this.

One of my problems with any kind of streaming service for films is that unless it is built into the service that you can use the bandwidth at off-peak times and then watch it at a peak time, and have this simple to use and not need you to stay up late/get up early then sorry, but I'd rather torrent it since uTorrent does have a built in scheduler that doesn't need me to stay up late.

If you're competing with torrents, then at least look at what they do.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

the most basic unfriendly thing about Steam is needing the client to play games.

I didn't realise this until the client refused to work, and I lost access to my entire library.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I don't see that as unfriendly myself these days, to be honest. The manual switching between online and offline mode is a problem (if you switch to offline mode you can play most games on Steam without needing an internet connection, but you can't switch to offline mode unless you're online so if you suddenly lose your internet connection, that's a problem, at least this is how it used to work) but just needing the client itself is the same for me as needing a DVD player to watch DVDs on my TV.

That said, I really only get games through Steam these days hence me seeing it more as a device for playing games than as a service per se. If I bought games in a variety of ways then this would be problematic.

[ajr.livejournal.com]

just needing the client itself is the same for me as needing a DVD player to watch DVDs on my TV

It's not really the same, is it? If a DVD player refuses to work with your TV, you can go out and buy a different one. Whereas if the Steam client refuses to work with your computer, you're fucked because it's the only client.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

It's the only client, but they also have more support than buying a DVD player. If I have problems getting a DVD player to work with my TV then basically it's read the manual or trying buying a different one. With Steam there is a support service. Might not have helped undead_by_dawn but has helped solve issues in other anecdotal cases.

The business model for steam arguably works in consumers' favour here as far as support for the service as a whole goes, although not in a pleasant way. Steam isn't intended to sell you a product then leaving you hanging. Valve aren't wanting to just sell me a full-price copy of Skyrim then say "fuck you, our service won't work well any more." Their pretty much outright stated aim is to sell more and more things, to advertise discounts and sales, to offer discounts based on what I already have and to push microtransactions.

Of course, as a wider issue, I'd like to see returns policies covering downloadable items. I was pretty hacked off when I bought an mp3 from Amazon.co.uk and it turned out to have been mislabelled and was not the track I wanted, but mp3 purchases are final, no refunds or exchanges.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

You need a DVD player because your film is on a shiny disc. Steam doesn't have shiny discs. That's the point. All the information required to actually play Steam games is on your machine. You need the Steam client because Steam insists you need it. There is no practical reason other than Steam wanting it this way. I do follow that Steam likes to save your data online, and there's the online community, and all the awards: accessing those via the client makes total sense. But you should also be able to just play the bastard game, client or not, online or not.

This is a problem because the client borks out constantly. I'm utterly fed up troubleshooting it - which I have done countless times.
I rebought The Baconing on the Mac App store, and think I'll pretty much stick to that from here on. The App store doesn't demand to be alerted when I want to use something I've already bought. The only downside is that it doesn't have some of the stuff I could get on Steam, and it's slightly more expensive.

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

this - my phone line tends to go down a fair bit, and I am absolutely livid that I can't play any computer games without it, because you need to be online before you can switch to offline mode. And not being able to schedule downloads. gaaaah

[steer.livejournal.com]

I don't see that as unfriendly or an issue -- I mean the same would happen if your video driver, audio driver etc stopped working -- software breaks, people fix it.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

If you have bought a game on Steam and that game stops being sold at a later point and is removed from Steam, you are still able to download it on your account. There are a couple of games where this has happened.

Of course, if Steam itself were to go under - who knows what would happen? Gabe has said that people would still have access to their games if this happened, but it's not in the small print anywhere, it's just something he said.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I've always taken the view that if steam goes down for good, morally I have already bought the game so would have no problem in getting an illegal copy.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

I still buy DVDs. I rip them the instant I get them home, and never look at the disc again.
I heard about UV briefly, it looked very silly, and lo it is.
DRM just needs to die. It is a colossal irony that Steve 'King of Closed' Jobs successfully argued this for iTunes, when no other legal service was making an effort.

Steam has severely pissed me off. Their Mac client barely functions, and there seems to be near zero effort to change this. I effectively ended up reformatting my hard drive to get it working, was then plagued by network issues [yes, Steam, I really am on fucking line. There's an ethernet cable plugged in and everything]. I got it working just long enough to install the games I was likely to play before it just stopped working again. I've spent more time trouble shooting Steam than actually playing games. And of course you can't play Steam games without a functioning client.

Major distributors will start making serious online sales the instant they start giving their customers what they want. That is, good quality downloads that you can play wherever you like, whenever you like, at a reasonable price.

The level of buffoonery evident among those corporations became clear when it turned out Sony has spent more money suing downloaders than they had gained through those court actions. That, by any measure, is insanely bad management. Just the worst sort of hubris and idiocy. it did nothing to increase online market presence, which of course they made near zero effort to improve.

because, of course, it wasn't about winning in a new marketplace - it was about trying to stop that market from existing. That, again, is just illogical and plain fucking dumb.
and why is that happening? because the executives of those major media companies don't care about the content. That care about the physical object. They look at inventory - sheer number of discs shipping. In the simplest terms, executives see their product from the exact opposite perspective of their customers, who want quality content and mostly don't care about the format.

when that changes, everyone will win.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

In the USA, Amazon sell some PC games as downloads as well as boxed, and I'm unsure why they don't here.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

What do you use to rip your DVDs? I've yet to find free software that does this at all well that isn't way, way slower than just downloading the movie from the web.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

primarily HandBrake
I preferred MacTheRipper, but it's PPCs only.

I also got a free copy of Mac DVD Ripper Pro, which works with advanced copy protection.

http://handbrake.fr/
x-platform

I would stick purely to downloads, but I'm not aware of any legal, open, reasonably priced services. Feel free to enlighten me.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

What I hate is how movie and television companies essentially force me to pirate their stuff.

Because they don't deal with negotiating the international rights to shows and movies in advance, I can't just go to iTunes and pay money for a television show I want to watch. Instead I'm told that it is not yet available in my region. For most television shows this means that if I want to pay to be able to see them in English I have to wait roughly a year to 18 months for them to come out on DVD. I really, really don't want to be 18 months behind my friends on popular culture.

The same goes for movies. Often the studios negotiate the rights for the dubbed versions well ahead of the rights for the non dubbed versions. Other times they charge the theaters less to show the dubbed versions than the original versions, encouraging theaters to not show the original versions of the films. Therefore, once again I'm stuck between the choice of pirating the film or paying money to see it in French.

And, I really will pay money given the option. When Watchmen came out there were only two theaters in all of France who will willing to pay the extra money to screen the non dubbed version, so I took a four and a half hour train ride just so I could hand someone money to see the damn thing.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

totally.

I have two reactions to the anti-piracy brigade:
1: sell me stuff that I want, straight up, no dicking around
2: once I've bought it, shut the fuck up. Don't tell me how, where or when I can use it. I paid, it's up to me now.

I will very happily pay for things sold in a reasonable manner at a reasonable price.
Try to impose stupid rules, and I'll go elsewhere. If that means bittorrent, so be it.

People like Trent Reznor and the Humble Bundle guys figured out that if you treat your customers with intelligence and respect, they will pay. Even if they pay less than you'd like, they will tell their friends about you and their friends will pay. The Humble Bundles tend to make close to a million dollars every time, generating vastly more sales and revenue than the games makers would otherwise even dream of seeing.

that's what happens when you trust and understand your customers.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Agree totally here -- same goes for books -- a lot more stuff on kindle in US than kindle UK. I've ended up stealing books and putting money in a tip box on the author website before now.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Rome Girl uses a Kindle and I don't. But what she did to get around the Kindle UK blockade was call up our bank and have them change our address to a random US one that we made up.

Then, we used that debit card to make an order from the US Kindle site. Then the next day we called our bank back and changed our address back to our real one in France.

Kindle still lets us buy from the US store because their database considers us US customers.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Yes, I thought about this hack but I've already got quite a UK collection... The UK store is getting better. A whole load of old Jack Vance stuff showed up some time in the last month or two... that's keeping me happy right now.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Completely agree with you that pretty much anything other than having the thing in digital format is a faff these days. I love the fact that I have a USB slot in my TV and can just shove a USB stick in there (though there was a panic this morning when the large USB stick got lost and I'd have to spend 2 minutes copying stuff over again).

I give you some cash, you give me a file that I can then play on anything I like, in any way I like, forever, without having to check with you ever again. Damned if I'm settling for less than that.

That said, I think the "forever" is somewhat illusory perhaps. I mean about 20 years ago now my office had a collection of illegally downloaded DRM free music that we played in breaks -- basically any song we could tolerate and locate on the entire internet in 1993. (This came to about 24 songs...) OK, reasonable quality, DRM free... but au format. Not even sure my current machine will play au format -- probably will but then there's no ID3 tagging so my mp3 player would barf. Perhaps I could translate it but really I can't be fagged. Point is, once upon a time we all bought LPs which are too much faff, and then we bought CDs which are now too much faff. I'm betting it won't be too long (in terms of decades) before avis and mp3s are replaced by something else and eventually you're thinking "well, I haven't watched that in years but can I really be fagged to dig out something that can decode avi format when I can just use SUPER FORMAT X".

Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think digital formats will work out any more long-lived than physical formats were -- and I've got the essays written in wordperfect to prove it (actually, I haven't, I lost those files years ago).

[andrewducker]

au format never really caught on though, did it?

I agree that 40 years from now AVI might be considered incredibly old hat, but the sheer weight of numbers of people using it, and the fact that the programs for playing it are open source will probably keep it going. So long as things like VLC are around I suspect we'll be able to play huge numbers of different formats automatically.

A quick check shows that au files are playable by Quicktime, VLC and WMP. The format is published so if you needed to rescue some you could.

Now, transcoding to MP3 would be silly - I suspect the resolution of the files was quite low, and the quality would drop further with recoding. But you could convert them to a lossless format if you wanted, and insert ID tags from folder names.

I don't see lossless video catching on soon - but the formats for the main types are all well known (if patented for a lot of them), so data extraction should be easy enough.

I don't know how well the field of video compression is improving. Eventually, one assumes, we'll reach the point where it's effectively "done". Is anyone working on new music compression formats any more?

[steer.livejournal.com]

My recollection is that au format was the dominant convenient format originally (which is why all our songs were that format).

The "Sheer weight of numbers" argument would also apply to LP -> CD -> mp3. It happens gradually though. If some new media format offers an advantage you take it up thinking "I still have my old player so I can still play vinyl if I need to" then "Hmm... I suppose, I'll replace my record player eventually" and finally "I wonder why I keep these old things about the house". I suspect digital formats will have the same point -- and it may be that there are things in the new formats the old formats can't have (e.g. seven channels of surround sound, 3D if it takes off, some form of meta tagging to include lyrics... insert absurd feature here).

Sure, people still research video and music compression, do some good work too.

Being honest, I think with both video and music the point it's done will be lossless compression because storage and bandwidth are increasing quickly but our ability to hear differences in music is constant. At the moment if you buy most brands of music player, your collection will fit in uncompressed (unless, like me, you go for solid state drives). In a few more years the solid state drives will fit all the music you own uncompressed and music will stream uncompressed (though stations may still compress to cut their transit bill).

[andrewducker]

The difference between LP, CD and MP3 is that they had different capabilities and weren't backwardly compatible. Unless you need new software to play your new video files, and said software doesn't play the old files, it's quite a different situation.

There's no reason to ever strip out .au support from VLC, for instance. It's in there, it works, it will presumably keep working until some time after our AI descendants have converted the solar system into computronium.

[steer.livejournal.com]

It's in there, it works, it will presumably keep working until some time after our AI descendants have converted the solar system into computronium.

Yes, but the au format lacks tagging features making it inconvenient to use -- so it will never be properly indexed by my music player. Which is enough of a pain for the format for me to be "technically playable but functionally obsolete" -- as indeed the CD is -- technically I could go to the shelf, pick up a CD and play it. In practice I have never done that in the last 5 years.

Let us call this state "functionally obsolete" -- I have the capability of playing the media but, in practice, I never do this. (My vinyl is actually obsolete, I lack the means to play it.)

So, had I invested in DRM free au files that would not really have been such a smart move. No more smart than investing in DRM free CD copies of my music anyway.

[andrewducker]

True. Although if your au files were in nicely named folders you could convert them to nicely tagged FLAC files if that was your only alternative.

Or (use something like MusicBrainz, if that still exists).

There's definitely a point where technology obsoletes things. I'm just not sure that MP3 is going to go that way. It's clearly "good enough" until I upgrade my ears (and I believe the reverse is more likely to happen over time...)

[steer.livejournal.com]

Although if your au files were in nicely named folders you could convert them to nicely tagged FLAC files if that was your only alternative.

I guess if I had loads and loads I'd bite the bullet and do this.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I'm interested by the fact that my method of buying the physical copy and torrenting was discarded. It's how I do ebooks, in fact.

[andrewducker]

I can see people doing that with books (I did exactly that with Snuff). But with boxed sets the disparity in size starts to feel a bit silly, and think people care less about tv companies than they do about authors.

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

One of the (not terribly serious) suggestions was "Buy the box set, torrent the files, when you've finished watching the series delete the files and sell/give on the box set. The box then counts as a large,clunky license.

This is basically the approach taken by significant chunks of the anime-watching community. Fansubs are distributed with "Please stop distributing this once a legal version is available in the west" messages encoded thereon... but many people don't really seem to stop distributing; and yet there is a strong culture of buying DVDs of a series once translated DVDs are available. I have a lot of anime DVDs on my shelves, mostly still in their shrink-wrap: not because I haven't watched the series, but because I prefer the electronic version for convenience and style. (I generally much prefer the subtitling style of fansubbers than of DVD companies.)

My sole purpose in buying these DVDs is to get some money to the creators (which incidentally made it really irritating on the couple of occasions when I accidentally bought what turned out to be a bootleg DVD).