[afavour]

One of the reasons the state of smart home TV really disappoints me. Logical conclusion is we'll all end up with Netflix HDMI sticks, Hulu sticks etc etc etc. DRM means we're never going to end up with a fully open TV player.

[giancarlostoro]

I'll just opt for the Kodi / Plext TV sticks and call it a day. Or hook it up to a HTPC and call it a day.

[afavour]

Sure but pirating all your VOD content is never a mass-market viable solution.

[CuriouslyC]

It was for a long time, the thing that "killed" it was Netflix being very good for a brief moment, while at the same time many pirate sites got shut down and content creators went after people who didn't use a VPN to torrent.

Many VPN services are one click to install and $2-5 a month, and the pirate sites are very resilient at this point, so anti-consumer practices could easily drive a resurgence in this form of mass market consumption.

[giancarlostoro]

Netflix was dirt cheap for college students for ages.

[post-it]

It sure is me-market viable though.

[nemo8551]

I’m totally not saying I agree and would definitely do it myself……but yes.

100% yes.

I’ve been plex for a while but jellyfin looks like I might have a choice of service in future.

[vman81]

You can keep a copy of every track of music on spotify on a single 4U server, 20 drives or so. That's ~100TB, assuming 5MB per track. Every movie or tv show episode is another couple of PB in 720p or so.

Extrapolate the last 20 years of HDD capacity growth (around 300x), and assume that will continue, every single piece of media will fit on a single drive.

I know those assumptions aren't a given, but it sure feels like we're heading towards a world where you can just have a local copy of everything always.

[giancarlostoro]

Plex has things it lets you legally stream for free. Whats in your personal library is a whole other story.

[gjsman-1000]

The dumb thing though is that DRM... kinda works?

I know that we techies can bypass it fairly easily, regardless of type... but I do understand the argument that 95%+ of people can't bypass DRM even if they tried their hardest, it's just too complicated for them. Which in a sense makes it effective and purposeful?

Ugh.

[jagraff]

The thing is, it's so easy to get an HD DRM-free copy of pretty much any movie, tv show, etc that there's no real point - anyone who wants to share a copy of anything can do so very easily without bypassing DRM, because someone else will have already done it.

[gjsman-1000]

> it's so easy to get an HD DRM-free copy of pretty much any movie

To a techie. The amount of people who find torrenting too confusing and overwhelming or are afraid of legal consequences or don't even know it exists is, once again, the vast majority (unless we are talking about Eastern Europe and third-world countries).

Even if you could prove that the US had, say, 10 million people that torrented actively (which is, honestly, a big stretch in my opinion), the pitch to movie studios is that they should abandon DRM because 10 million people can bypass it and 320 million people can't; and 320 million people don't even know the DRM is there or something they should care about. Not a winning sales pitch there.

[cdash]

The hard part for people is not obtaining a copy of the media which DRM is "supposed" to prevent. The hard part is setting up the multiple services that makes all this convenient with slick interfaces that people are used to similar to Netflix. That would still require just as much effort with or without DRM.

[kodt]

I know there are people who sell Fire sticks on Facebook marketplace with Kodi pre-configured to use shady streaming sites on it. Or they would charge to "jailbreak" your Fire Stick and set it up for you. Many non-tech people would go this route. Not sure if these still work, but they were popular for a while.

[kneebonian]

Why can't you just plug a Linux box into your TV and use that?

Like am I taking crazy pills. I got fed up with the madness of all the streaming sticks, and putting in my password with a crappy remote and ended up dropping $300 on an old desktop from a discount computer store. Spent an hour throwing Ubuntu on it, and now bam, works like a charm.

I put the youtube, PBS Kids, and Disney+ (which we later removed) icons on the side so the kids can use it easy.

I can stream Hulu if I had an account, I can watch my Disney+, I can watch youtube, I can watch Netflix if I wanted to. Plus I can play steam games on it, set a fun screensaver. Loads of things.

The best part is I no longer have to try and put in a 12 character password with mixed case, numbers and symbols over a freaking TV remote.

EDIT: Well this blew up more than expected. Many people are pointing out the issues with the quality. I'll be honest I don't care that much about quality, most of the streaming consumption in our house is Wild Kratts, and Bluey anyway.

Beyond that though is that I have to have a slightly worse quality, (meaning orders of magnitude better than the VHS I grew up on) to be able to own my computing device, to be able to have the freedom I want to use it. It's a price I'll happily pay. If they day comes that the streamers decide it's not worth it, then at that day I'll be turning it off and going to the Uncle Ted route of things.

[duped]

> Why can't you just plug a Linux box into your TV and use that?

Because most streaming services don't support 4k HDR on Linux. And if I'm spending thousands of dollars for my TV to play 4k HDR content, I want to be able to watch it.

[pmontra]

How about a Windows box, whatever the form factor, and a HDMI cable?

[duped]

I'd rather use my TVs flavor of android than Windows, honestly. I just don't see what that would buy me.

I get running a Linux media server, don't get me wrong. But a dedicated windows machine for my TV seems like a waste of time and money when my TV can already do whatever that box would. It buys me very little.

[gjsman-1000]

To be fair, it's not the streaming services fault, because Linux (er, Wayland and Xorg) does not support HDR. We're only just starting, on the bleeding edge, to have HDR with proper color management on Linux.

[hamandcheese]

It is also the streaming services fault because they limit the resolution on Linux to 720p in most cases.

[michaelmrose]

It is entirely their fault its not that they don't support HDR its that they don't support resolutions higher than 720p

[robertlagrant]

We use an Xbox One with a remote, which works extremely well.

With your Ubuntu install, was it hard to get it to go above 720p? I see people in this thread saying that's the max.

[jeffbee]

Most of the major apps have something like scanning a QR code on the display to authorize a device using your mobile, which works well. Others can just cast to a TV, the way YouTube does. But the real problem with just slapping Ubuntu on it is you are losing HD video and often the audio features as well. It's only a good solution if you are indifferent to picture quality.

[afavour]

I could do that, and indeed I used to use a Windows machine as an HTPC until I got sick of dealing with UIs that didn’t play well with remotes (in fairness it’s been years but desktop apps for streaming services were always deeply inferior and web sites were designed for a mouse).

The larger point though is that what you’re describing is not mass market viable. If the streaming services wanted they could shut off HTPC access overnight and they probably wouldn’t even lose a rounding error in terms of users. In a future world where every streaming service has their own stick with its own ads and own DRM I can absolutely imagine them doing that to force everyone over.