The lack of physical media will just drive more people to piracy.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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it's not piracy if I've paid for it
Piracy is resilient but there is no natural law that says piracy will always be available.
There will be a TPM 3.0. All those mechanisms in XBOX Series and PS5 that are actually effective for extended periods at preventing mass piracy, like one-directional fuses and minimum software updates for new releases with per-device keys, are not going to disappear. Tech and media companies are now working together to bypass the user in trust chains, so they only have to trust each other.
In a streaming-only world, I predict there will be a time soon where pirated content is not a bit-perfect copy because the digital environment is fully locked down. Maybe an analog reencode of display output will be a workaround. But like TPM, HDCP will advance, and maybe that avenue will be cut off too.
Once we lose physical media, we may be cooked.
I am not knowledgable about it but why care about HDCP if some already cracked Widevine?
HDCP isn't DRM's ultimate form of course. HDCP "3.0" or its successor will not be so easily cracked, and Widevine is not as cracked as past protection schemes have been.
All of our non-Linux platforms will tighten DRM over time. Apple is already locked down. Android is moving to require boot-lock strong encryption and authentication to access sensitive apps, which is very difficult to spoof. Media companies will require that for future versions. Windows is on the TPM train. HDCP is just part of that "trust" chain, and it absolutely will be strengthened to match the base protection.
Edit: Didn't realize HDCP is already at 2.2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection . Some interesting developments - namely a reminder that movie studios will also use lawsuits under the DMCA to try to suppress any technology that defeats DRM.
Media is still physical. Instead of a tape or CD you're carrying a hard drive.
Or selfhosted nas
You can’t carry my NAS, it’s bigger than yours.
You don't need to carry your nas as your owned, selfhosted nas carry your data for you
Back in the day, I had just envisioned storage media getting more and more dense, to the point where we might be using some kinda holographic cube or some shit in the future to store petabytes of data.
I never thought of the entire world just constantly streaming and downloading everything around the planet on demand. The state of Internet bandwidth in those days made it hard to imagine.
Same. And HDD space was so unbelievably expensive vs the cost of physical media that it just didn't register that it might be cheaper to host it all in the cloud even if internet speeds improved. A CD/DVD costs pennies to make (a bit of metal encased in plastic), a HDD costs orders of magnitude more for the same capacity. I thought surely we'd move to more dense, optical media.
Physical media is clunky and obsolete, you can store the contents of an entire 90s era video store on a cigarette pack sized device nowadays. The solution to streamer wars is to stop pussyfooting around and just pirate shit.
*An SSD the size of a stick of gum
I have insisted on physical media for my stuff since the dawn of MP3's - in the form of hard disk drives. That's the physical media MVP in my book.
I haunt estate auctions wherever I go. Physical media in the form of CDs and LPs is at a prime. Unless it’s old classical or country the prices skyrocket. The LP could be scratched to hell, they only ever show the sleeves in pics, but it doesn’t matter.
Physical media is at a premium. LPs used to be a dollar or so each 5 years ago. Sometimes even 4 for a dollar. Now, minimum $5 each to start. Unless it’s country or classical.
Every media is physical. The question is, where is it located.
A properly backed up and sorted digital collection is superior to a bunch of disks laying around, at least if we don't consider the pleasure and pride some collectors take in having exactly the latter. But when we allow this data to be stored in a place we don't own, real and serious problems arise.
It’s not dead and never will die. It just will never be mainstream ever again
The only downside to the loss of physical media - whether it be music, movie or software - has been the inverse relationship to how much of any of those you actually own.
The only downside to the loss of physical media
and the fact that it can easily be stolen. I've had multiple large CD catalogues stolen, both in college and as an adult. Thousands and thousands of dollars of music gone.
No one has stolen my ripped music.
YMMV, but CDs are easy to gank enmasse. If it was all vinyl they would have had to take multiple trips pushing a dolly.
Really? No company has ever stopped supporting something you bought so that it was no longer usable? No lost software, hardware, games, apps? Gameservers shut down so you can’t play online? Live connections shut down so you can’t start the game? Licensing servers offline so you can’t open the software at all? No lost identifying information in hacks? No service bankruptcy or buyout cost you a purchase? You don’t see as having to pay, over and over again, to listen to the same songs that you no longer own, as a kind of theft?
All of these have a price. Maybe you could rationalize it in the legalese of some EULA that it isn’t theft when you lose any of these things, but nonetheless they were taken from you without compensation. Theft of a legal kind.
Music is really a terrible example here because the CD is both the content and the physical proof of ownership.
But, in the modern era, CDs can easily be archived and stored in bulk...so unless the novelty of physical media is a turn-on for you, turn-on for you, turn-on for you, turn-on for you, there's not much sense in carrying it around, physically, in the real unprotected world.
Much better to just rip it and carry around hundreds of albums on the phone, and keep the originals in the 300-CD changer carousel, or on a shelf, or in a musty box in the basement. Or just use a streaming sub service.
Did you reply to the right comment? My comment was about theft, not arguing about the portability of digital content. Obviously low-cost high density storage has made the greatly reduced for low density media, especially older analog types.
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What I liked about tape and CD, is that it wasn't too difficult to write/record. Before mp3s and filesharing, you could still make a copy, or a mixtape (playlist).
The main strength that physical media has, is that it is completely offline, it is physically at hand, and it can be obscure stuff you will never find online.
An HDD/SSD is just as "offline" and easier to write though. No bulky extra equipment required, the capacity is bigger, and you can erase and rewrite over and over. While I underatand how people enjoy CDs as collectables, in a purely practical sense, I don't see much value anymore.
But yeah, I do have some songs from Soulseek that are specifically from a CD release and don't exist in the same form on Youtube)
Yup, I only buy physical media so I can rip it. If I could buy DRM-free digital media, I would absolutely prefer that. But I can't, so here we are.
If I can't find something on physical media from a first party seller, I have no qualms about piracy, but I do make an effort to legally aquire what I can.
I don't pay for my media now because I'm poor by Western standards, but I did pay for some games unavailable on GOG - bought them on Steam, then downloaded a corresponding DRMless version. Wouldn't want to buy physical media just to rip, because I don't want it to occupy space, so I'd have to throw them out or resell. There are some exceptions, though - wouldn't mind certain CDs as memorabilia.
I recently got back into minidiscs and it’s great.
Hell yeah. Few things are more satisfying than sliding a MiniDisc into a drive and feeling it click into place.
I hate physical media. I was growing up with the worst type, VHS, so subconsciously I associate every physical media with VHS. lt was bulky, you always had to roll it back. If multiple things were recorded on the same tape, you had to write down where they start and you had to stop seeking at the correct time. If you copied from one tape to another quality worsened.
Okay, but now there are much better options besides VHS. And I for one line physical media. At the end of the day if my internet is out or something is removed from a service, I can still just pop in a disc.
Sorry about your experience with VHS.
And if my internet is out or if something is removed from a service, I can plug in an external drive that has orders of magnitude more capacity than a DVD, and not bother with having to swap them or them taking up too much space.
That's the whole point. I'm going to guess that the media on your flash drive was ripped from physical media at some point in the chain.
Having access to the physical media gives you the ability to do what you want with it... Want it on a flash drive? Great do it. Want it on your plex sever so you can stream it yourself? Cool. Want to put it on a modded ipod classic? Cool.
VS. The way the Music / Film industries want you to have to access this data. They don't want it on your plex server, they don't want it on your flash drive.
Mark my words when physical media dies they will find more ways to crack down even harder on us enjoying content the way we want. Hell now a days they even restrict what browsers you can use to access media.
A lot of the offerings say "Webrip", so not sure about that - also, a lot of media simply isn't released in physical form. Also, if I wanted to pay (hope I eventually earn enough for this), I would rather buy a DRMed copy to correspond to my DRMless one that I actually use. I do that already with Steam. Because a disk would either occupy space, have to be sold or thrown out, none of which are options I like.
And I can pop-in a thumb drive.
I never liked having to carry a bunch of shit around. Now i have a small device in my pocket with hundreds of CDs worth of capacity.
I don't hate it, but as someone who's had to pick up and move repeatedly it's just too much stuff. I buy digital books (would buy digital movies if buying them was actually buying them), and did buy digital music when buying it was actually buying it (back in the days of Google play music when you actually could just do whatever you wanted with the tracks you bought so long as you downloaded them).
I think part of what people are neglecting to understand is the digital media is physically stored somewhere. It's not just out there in a cloud. It has to be maintained just like physical media does. Don't store a cassette/VHS tape properly and it won't be around for a long time. It's honestly the same with CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray. I'm sure it was the case with 8tracks and Mini discs, and so on too. When the medium through which that media is housed goes, so does the media.
This discussion is pretty interesting to me because the only reason a lot of people seem to be against digital media is their view of how the license for it differs from the license for physical media. It's the same license but one of them gives the company licensing the media more control than the other and that's what people don't like. If companies would stop taking things people paid for from them, this wouldn't be an issue.
physical media will always be superior
torrents are the new physical media
both statements can be true
I like how they used a shitty cheaply made chinese cassette radio for the front picture. I can't even really fault them; all the remotely decent ones are decades old and collector's items...
Same goes for turntables, decent new ones that are selling for a couple of thousand dollars are still garbage compared to even an entry-level Technics deck from the 80s.
Some time ago, the industry seemed to have standardized on a cheap-ass all in one platter/motor/stylus assembly that's just dropped into every modern record player now. I think I started seeing that thing everywhere in the late 80s. They did the same to tape players. It's now just an entire chassis containing the play head, motor, etc where they just make a shell to go around it and a circuit board to drive it/amplify it.
Yep, that same old BSR mechanism that was invented in the mid-80s. Decent casette players use Tanashin mechanisms (or clones rather since Tanashin itself doesn't make them anymore AFAIK) and as long as they have metal flywheels and proper erase heads they're ok.
Forget about 3-Head Closed Loop Dual Capstan, though, you're never gonna find that on a modern deck.