Tried to support the industry by buying a movie a watch a lot. Well, no more. If I need a pihole just to watch a movie I own, that’s ridiculous.
I’m still getting justified in my boycott of anything Sony that started in 2005, when they bricked my PC for daring to put a Sony CD in my computer’s CD player! Fucking rootkit.
Yes I’m still holding that grudge and I will not relent, for as long as I live.
Any movie I watch I make sure it’s not a Sony product, any music I listen to, I make doubly sure it’s not from a Sony studio. Any electronics I buy, I make triply sure it doesn’t contain any Sony product. Sony is not getting a dime from me ever again!
Fuck Sony!
Yes! I’ve never met anyone else who’s been boycotting Sony since the rootkit! Maybe there are dozens of us? Either way: fuck Sony!
That rootkit thing failed miserably, thankfully, and audio CDs have been DRM-free ever since.
Sure, but I’m not touching anything Sony with a 10 foot pole.
Sure, but I’m not touching anything Sony with a 10 foot pole.
That’s going to discount most of the camera market if not the entire camera market then because Sony makes basically everyone’s imaging sensors, plus a large portion of the anime genre given that company bought out Funimation.
The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams ... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what ... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source – we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC ... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake. - Steve Heckler, senior vice president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc, August 2000
quote from https://web.archive.org/web/20010201204600/http://www.nyfairuse.org/sony.xhtml
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
Wow I’ve never seen this quote. That’s something.
“It also enables the delivery of advertising content”
They already paid for the product! Double-dipping assholes
triple-dipping, they also get your data.
No no, you see. You didn’t pay for the product but the license for the product. Now it makes sense, right?
I don’t understand. Maybe a set of adverts would help me?
Piracy is now better and safer than using “real” discs. Well done, Sony.
Yeah I just straight up pirate movies now, I don’t even try to hide it from people anynore. It’s clear to me at this point that all these companies care about is getting richer by the minute off the backs of the common man, and their excuses for doing so are getting more and more pathetic.
I have friends who work in the film industry and they pirate movies and TV shows all the time.
Me too. By the time a movie or TV show actually makes it to distribution, most people who worked on it have already made their paycheck and moved on to the next project.
What capitalists are doing is intentionally sharpening the contradiction, probably with the goal of a revolution or reform in their favor (as can be seen in the USA right now). The neat thing about sharpened contradictions is that it will inevitably lead to change, the bad thing is that this is a massively organized effort with tons of planning and coordination, and The People:tm: are not ready for it.
Pirating movies is pretty good though. Mainstream media always manages to exploit labor incredibly harshly, to the point of suicide, and that behavior should not be rewarded IMO. Of course there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but one can dream. As an aside, pirated media is also incredibly convenient. There is a great community spirit in the piracy community.
I think I’ve bought two movies ever.
This isn’t a EULA in that it still allows you to use the product even if you decline…
This option is available with most modern games these days. They often ask you to click “approve” twice, knowing you won’t read either and knowing that you believe that you need to accept both to proceed. When in reality, the second one is almost always optional (perhaps even by law because of laws in the EU).
Still gross. And definitely a major dark pattern, but if people just took an extra 3 seconds to double check, they’d stop sending all of their data to these companies.
Haha no it doesn’t.
unplugs NIC
rips blu-ray with blu-ray drive running old firmware
Or… Here me out, don’t do that.
By giving them money, from their perspective, you’ve accepted their t&c. If they get data or not, that’s just icing on the cake.
That doesn’t make sense.
The t&c relate to the data. If they don’t get it, it’s irrelevant. It’s not the icing, it’s the actual cake. The hardware is the icing at best. The way these companies act it’s basically a Trojan horse unless you’re careful. The market for dedicated Blu-ray players is unbelievably tiny.
You want my money for a piece of hardware? Sure. Fair exchange. I don’t see why we should object to that. It’s the everything else that’s the problem.
borrows blu-ray instead of buying it
I legitimately cannot remember the last time I paid for a movie or TV show, or music.
Digitally, or physically.
Even if you count streaming services, its been over 5 years since I laid for Spotify… stopped paying for any kind of on demand videos before even that.
Friends wanna watch a movie at my place? Oh, I have a 10 TB library.
Oh, at your place? Does your TV have a USB port? Tell me its model number and I can figure out what codecs it can actually read.
Why is your Blu-ray player connected to the internet?
VLC on a Linux laptop. You think my Blu-ray player has the ability to take screenshots?
Yes, and I assume you wrote this message on your blu-ray player and typed it with your remote
You never heard of a capture card?
Can I introduce you to my friend MakeMKV?
MakeMKV handles my Blu-ray decryption for VLC
Never heard of HDCP?
HDCP is easy to bypass. Almost laughable really, there are tons of “Splitters” and Strippers on the market. I’ve also seem a few totally legal capture cards that can read it directly.
You can crack anything if you are remotely motivated.
Denuvo has entered the chat
Never say never. Especially since we’re only in the beginning of the AI era, AI de-compilation is starting to become feasible, AI cracking probably will too.
Does VLC report this? Kinda seems like the sorta thing that only works on actual players.
It tried to. I use an opnsense firewall which caught it. I copied my logs and submitted the domains to a popular dns blocklist and they’ve already been merged.
Thanks!
Was this like an iso file of the disk that you played played in vlc? And you’re saying it tried to ping that telemetry domain? I’m not quite understanding the context here.
Physical disc in a cd/dvd/bluray drive
So you put the physical disk in and it plays through vlc player on your pc?
If so, are you sure it was vlc that pinged the domain and not the bluray player?
Both devices made ping attempts. Not hard to confirm with firewall logs bc of timestamps and internal IP addresses.
Disconnect from the internet while watching. Close it when you finished. Restart your computer, then connect to the internet and you should be fine I think
I’m all good. I really wasn’t asking for tech support. Just sharing something with the community. Don’t worry, Sony didn’t get my data.
Thanks for the helpful thoughts though.
VLC can play blurays?
VLC plays everything
I am sometimes surprised to find new things VLC can do, it’s awesome.
Not UHD discs. Those don’t play on windows.
Not out of the box, AFAIK, but there is a plugin. I never got it to work though, because you also need some up-to-date certification file.
Yeah it seems really strange. I know some Bluray players support Internet connectivity but unless they’re also a Streaming box I don’t see why people would connect them to the internet. Really it seems like the majority of people don’t so not sure how useful this feature is.
deleted by creator
The fact that they don’t give you the option to “refuse” but rather to “skip” annoys me to such an extent. Leave us alone, you never needed to do this.
My Blu Ray player has never been connected to the web, its region free, but doesn’t do 4k-BD. My Linux HTPC is configured with an ASUS libredrive, and has MakeMKV installed. The Linux variant of MakeMKV is borked right now, in a good way! The 30 day trial period doesn’t expire!
If I wanna watch a 4k bluray I have to rip it and watch it on my PC, because I’d rather do that than get a BD player that needs internet
The author posts new temporary keys on the official forums regularly, in one of the stickies.
Havent needed them in months, I’ve been at 30 days remaining in evaluation period for 3 months.
Welp, blu ray playyæer sure don’t need no internet - gimme dumb technology plz
blu ray playyæer
Did a cat jump on your keyboard?
usually bluray and 4k players need to connect to the internet at least once in order to download the codecs, but like yea I disconnect mine from the internet right after
can we find a way to spoof this so that they think legit physical disk usage is going up?
I don’t think it’s a good metric since most people using Blurays don’t have their players connected to the Internet anyway. Connecting Bluray players online is a very niche use-case. It might be more popular if they had built-in Streaming Apps or NAS playback but many don’t and are just Bluray players.
Or just any game console? Which is the normal Blu-ray player?
I’m not really sure if they’re they’re the biggest userbase of Bluray movies. I know lots of them do but also many don’t, especially with the promotion of Digital-Only Game Systems and Also Streaming services. Most people I know who buy and use Blurays just have a basic Bluray player and aren’t really gamers.
The only reason I had my bluray player connected to the internet was because the yahoo who dropped it off at the thrift store didn’t bother signing out of their pandora account, so I could listen to ad free music. Otherwise I would never connect to the internet since all the old applications ( including a blockbuster app of all things ) probably wouldn’t even work.
Knowing this could happen, I will definitely be sure to completely disconnect from the internet the next time I turn that thing on since last time I tried using pandora it wasn’t working.
Can you share which movie this was? I’ve never seen anything like that.
Gran Turismo
Farturismo
Wait do modern Blu-ray players connect to the Internet?
Edit: it’s really cool when people do that annoying Reddit thing where they all want to say the exact same thing for some reason so they all pretend they don’t see all the other comments saying exactly the same thing too.
PS3 was one of the first affordable blu ray players right off the bat with internet connectivity
Yes but presumably it would work when not connected to the Internet. Additionally, it was not primarily a Blu-ray player. And my Blu-ray players did not have network connectivity.
BD-live was a thing going way back then. BD players had network connectivity because stuff like that was a selling point.
But it seems like you’re adjusting the question to be more “do BD players REQUIRE internet connections”. No probably not.
And off track, for some people the primary function of the PS3 might have been to play movies. BD players were several thousand dollars, a ps3 was like $700-800. There was definitely chatter along the lines of it being a Sony product would be best in class for BD playback as well.
When I first started dating my partner I asked why she had a PS2 with no games. She said it was her mum’s that she just uses for dvd.
Playstations
Surely you understood that I meant “dedicated Blu-ray players“? Come on. A video game console that also plays discs hardly counts. That would not be unusual for it to have network connectivity, which is what I’mdriving at
You can take the debate bro out of Reddit but not the Reddit out of the debate bro, huh.
fucking everything connects to the internet these days dude. You fridge, you tv, hell probably even your toothbrush what the hell comment is this? “what you are driving at” is a world that no longer exists, this smart tech shit is being shoved down all our throats as we speak.
My fridge does not. My toothbrush does not. I can also simply not connect my tv. So 1/3, and that one is optional. I get you’re being flippant/sarcastic, but figured I’d just make that clear.
A Blu-ray player plays physical discs. I can buy ones without internet. It’s not difficult. I have one right now lmao
And yes I agree it’s insane and being shoved down our throat. Which is why I am incredulous at the idea that a Blu-ray player needs to connect to the internet. Think through this a bit.
A 1080p player does not require internet connectivity but 4K/UHD discs need to phone home in order to get decryption keys on a per disc basis. There is a lot of discussion about this in the MakeMKV forums if you want to do a deeper dive.
Which is why I am incredulous at the idea that a Blu-ray player needs to connect to the internet
Is it really that hard to imagine a future where DRM encroaches further and further on us? Your fuckin blue ray player might not connect to the internet but it is still region locked.
I really don’t think you’re picking up what I’m putting down here. No, it’s not that difficult to imagine, because it’s happening. I am saying it’s bullshit and I’m annoyed about it.
my quick search for “Blu Ray players” brought up a list. 4 of the first 5 i saw were also “streaming boxes” with wi-fi. the 5th had an Ethernet port. didn’t really check further but looks like it’s pretty common now.
Let me rephrase: do they need to connect to the internet?
How else would Sony track you while you watch a legitimate BD playing on your personal, paid-for hardware, silly goose?
Maybe sorta to update keys? But I think they will also do that if you pop in a newer disc. It’s been known to cause an issue with playback of older disks, I think.
The whole process of buying media is broken.
good question, but i dunno, sorry. my guess would be probably not, based on the smart tv i never connected to the web that works just fine… but I’m an avowed and avid pirate and don’t remember the last time i paid to watch something at home :D yarrrr
They don’t really, out of all the complaints I’ve heard people make about Bluray players (Disc Recognition, Region Locking) I’ve never heard them complain that it needed to be connected to the internet. It’s an optional feature, not a requirement.
Most if not all 4k players are network enabled due to the DRM that is on the 4k medium. From my experiences, they usually need to connect to the internet to download the keys at least once before anything 4k works. DVD and BD usually work without issue though.
How goofy.
Like, I understand most people have internet at home nowadays but come on, I thought a big point of Physical Media was not needing the damn internet to work!
Mine can because it also has Netflix, Hulu, etc. built in.
Do the apps still work? The biggest issues I’ve found with Bluray players like that is that the Streaming Apps on them tend to become Obsolete and broken fairly quickly.
Some have stopped working, like SteamLink, but others still work. I know it’s just a matter of time.
Yes.
They can, many have Ethernet ports and even Wifi in some cases but there’s no practical reason to do so unless they have streaming features you want to use but most don’t, and the ones that do often aren’t updated so you’ll find the Streaming Apps on them usually don’t work anymore.
I bought a cheap one in 2012 and it has an Ethernet port.
I mean it makes sense to have them network connected like to use a receiver and networked speakers.
