Comment by buran77
1 day ago
Discs are less convenient so people have slowly moved to digital sales. This worked even better for console manufacturers, cheaper to drop that disc reader, and the second hand market is effectively dead which increases new game sales.
The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy. And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy. For everything else around ownership I know I can count on Sony to still screw it up even with discs, like disabling a disc game with some online checks.
> The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy.
This is true for consoles, but on GoG for example you can download the DRM offline installer for the games you buy. So going purely digital doesn't have to be terrible on its own. But of course, for consoles it will be.
And also quality.
I wouldn't think that the copy of some movie Netflix is streaming to me will be 60-100GB over the duration of the movie. Not to mention when their services have issues and you're watching 5-10 minutes of low quality content until it settles and snaps up to full (streaming) quality.
Most people really don't care, which is a shame. The sheer quality difference between a 4k digital movie and a 4k bluray is astounding. Hell, oftentimes a standard bluray looks better despite the lower resolution since it isn't being compressed
A 4K movie uncompressed would be something like two or three terabytes depending on the format. I think Arri are the only cinema cameras that can even shoot uncompressed or losslessly compressed, the rest shoot lossy compressed video in their native raw formats.
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> since it isn't being compressed
Isn't being compressed as much. All Blurays are compressed either with MPEG2, VC1, H.264, or H.265 if it's an UHD Bluray.
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Theres no technical reason one should look better than the other.
Both should use multipass ahead of time compression with a rate control algorithm, and both should have enough slack streaming bandwidth to handle complex scenes with buffering
Even a well-mastered DVD can look better than online streaming.
What's kind of an annoying side effect of this is that you have all this fancy new display tech, like quantum dot LED (marketing term, but w/e), or OLED, but it's all pointless because you're just watching it with crappy compression, negating the quality gains.
The football World Cup 2026 is being broadcast in 1080p with washed out colors. Yet every shop was advertising 4K OLED for the best experience of watching the matches.
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> And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy.
EU or any other gov can pass a law to allow that and we'll have the option.
Or they’ll just stop “selling” copies in those territories and only allow short-term rentals or monthly subscription services.
They can try, they'll also lose out on money and have piracy to contend to.
Governments can still force them to sell same as rest of the world or have them pack their bags and leave.
One of the EU's backstop "Fuck Trump" options is to stop enforcing America's IP rights.
Maybe this USB stick full of MCU movies isn't the highest possible quality and two of the Thor movies are missing for some reason, however it cost less than €20, so who cares ? Oh it's illegal? Well my government said they don't give a shit about that until you get rid of the orange lunatic
In a world where American media companies are also trying to fuck over consumers that sort of action could probably get a rotting corpse re-elected in a landslide, that's one of the reasons it's on the backstop threat list - dry policy responses don't connect with voters, but "make as many copies of their stuff as you like" is incredibly popular.
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They did
https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...
"The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy."
I understand that this is the reality we live in, but I don't know how we have accepted it.
It's a weird trajectory to see because with the music industry people have started catching on and either support sites that offer more durable forms of ownership or have straight up reverted to physical ownership.
I remember joke “you will own nothing and will be happy”, it is less of a joke now.
It's from a 2016 essay. I'm not sure it was ever only a joke. I didn't even perceive it as a joke back then (unless you wanted to joke about companies being knobheads). It was already clear by then that that was the direction they wanted to go.
Adobe Creative Cloud became the only option for new Adobe software in 2013, 3 years before that essay. Sure, Adobe is on the forefront of being knobheads, but still.
Discs are way more convenient. You can store how many multi hundred gb games on your internal storage before you have to start triaging. Also, want to play a game you haven’t played in a while after work? Sorry, 3 hour forced update.
In the old disc era you’d just pop in the disk and start playing in minutes. You could have as many disks as would fit in your house.
Oh no, you have to stand up and walk 10ft to put it in. What a great inconvenience.