To their credit, Denuvo has been very effective for the past year. Now instead of playing some games I wouldn't have bought anyway, I just don't play them.
I have too many Blu-rays with unskippable ads at the start. I really don't need to be shown ads for movies that came out 5 years ago before being allowed to watch the movie I purchased and own.
You can always skip the movie trailers if you have the right player. I have 300+ blue-rays and not a single one has unskippable trailers. Besides, you can just rip the disc and remove the ads.
According to this site the average lifespan of the cheapest type of bluray is 5-10 years. So a personal backup with makemkv (and maybe handbrake) might not be a bad idea.
You're talking about writable discs. Normal blue-ray discs have a much longer life expectancy than most other mediums including HDDs. Standards and manufacturing have improved too. Modern discs have a life expectancy for at least 50-150 years.
I have a collection of over 300 discs. 100 of them are 10 years or older. None of them have failed on me. And I don't have a temperature controlled room or anything like that. A lot of HDDs have failed on me during that time.
It's a shame that in the age of the internet, we still sometimes have to buy physical in order to actually own things. I like buying CD's for music that I really really like, but most of the time I just get a digital copy from Bandcamp. It's cheaper and doesn't clutter up my house. It's a shame that there's nothing like bandcamp for movies (at least as far as I know).
I completely understand the sentiment here, but I have to respectfully disagree with part of your argument.
The internet itself is this fundamentally ephemeral, thing. Our relationship to it, as a medium, has persisted for decades at this point and may continue to do so for a long time. At the same time, it lives and dies by the whims of corporations and millions of other users, and so its trajectory is largely beyond the control of any one individual. It's like this by design: properties like distributed control, flexible routing, easy duplication/destruction of data, give it resilience but also make it temporary. This also makes it a volatile place to keep things permanently, which is a real problem for a lot of different mediums.
With that in mind, there exists a lot of media today that has no non-digital equivalent. So, having a local data cache you control - DVD, BluRay, forvever moving data between online services, even a personal NAS - is the only hedge you can get for the net's volatility. And even then, that medium has a service life.
So I don't think it's a shame, per se, that things are like this now. Rather, it always has been. It's never been easier to consume (and pirate) media online, but the underlying rules have not changed.
Why not? They're cheap as fuck now, and if you have a xbox one or ps4 or newer (one that still has a disc drive), you already have a fucking blu ray player.
1080 for most disks, with 4K when marked ultra hd. It's worth noting disk video is usually uncompressed much less compressed, so it may very well look better than a stream of the same resolution.
That's far Cry 6 for me. Bought it off the epic site when it first came out and it didn't work because of the drm. (Needed sse 4.3? which my old assed pc doesn't have.)
Downloaded a cracked torrent, worked like a charm.
This topic always reminds me of one of my co-op jobs where I was working with a piece of software to develop an importer for its file format. Getting the software running properly with its licensing system took a couple of weeks. We had the license all along, but it used a license server that needed to be set up on my machine, plus a dongle that it used.
Once it was up and running, I did like the software and one day decided to also use it to produce files for a personal project I was doing for fun at home. Downloaded a pirated version and had it running by that evening no issue.
The DRM just made for a crappy experience for the paying customer and wasn't even noticed by those it was meant to prevent using their software.
Though I now wonder if that was deliberate because they'd still catch that in corporate audits (I think? Not really sure how those work tbh), so allowing individual users to easily bypass the DRM could help them build market share that they get paid for by businesses buying licenses when users say it's their preferred platform.
The DRM is there so the managers at the software developer can say to their bosses they did everything possible to prevent someone stealing the software. And the same arguments goes on case of legal issues. Although some use it as a way to force substitutions these days.
Picking a lock is not prohibitively difficult. It’s just there to provide a form of friction to make clear that you should not expect to burgle homes.
However, a world that puts every single item of any value behind bulletproof glass and deadbolts because of pervasive thieves is oppressive. And yet, that’s what we aim for when everyone decides to take whatever they feasibly can. A good world would mostly rely on honor policy.