They have DRM attached and need to be played on a computer that has logged in to your iTunes account and been "blessed". But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that computer offline it will be able to play those videos in eternity.
You can un-bless all your other computers (as you can only have 5 computers blessed at once) but I guess if the other computers are offline they can keep playing old downloads.
> But unless something has changed, as long as you keep that computer offline it will be able to play those videos in eternity.
I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed.
During the early months of the pandemic, we carried a Mac mini around that had a ton of downloaded content, and spent a lot of time in places with no internet service. It needed to "re-bless" itself every so often (I don't remember how often - maybe once a month or twice a month - it wasn't very often).
Our solution was to carry it with us when we were near enough to a tower. Using a phone hotspot with just a single bar of bad service, the process took 10-15 seconds.
So as far as tech/media companies go, Apple is almost certainly the least bad option, by a wide margin. But it's not perfect ;)
> I don't know if it ever was that way. If it was, something has changed
To be fair, it was a LONG time since stopped buying video from iTunes. Like 5 years at least. I subscribe to a bunch of the streaming services but instead of bothering to figure out exactly where something is streaming I just download it from the Pirate Bay where I know I can find everything right away.
4 words that explain why, if I ever wanted to collect movies, they would all be DRM-free torrents.
When the "legal" way to do it is self-evidently a scam perpetuated by corporations and governments working together against our interests, then they only honourable ways are either to watch illegal downloads or not watch movies at all.
Why eschew ripping physical media? You'll likely have a more uniform collection in terms of quality. Also depending where you are in the world, it's either legal or just as legal as torrenting media. In the latter case, it's not really enforced. It's also probably more honourable, if that's something you really care about.
You need a real computer to rip BDs. A netbook or a Raspberry Pi aren't going to cut it because of the CPU requirements. Said Pi will have no trouble running a torrent client though.
You can un-bless all your other computers (as you can only have 5 computers blessed at once) but I guess if the other computers are offline they can keep playing old downloads.