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by softwaredoug·12d ago·view on hn ↗
Recently got a big fancy TV with 4k + Dolby Vision

It’s a lot of work figuring out what movies support the format. And all the premium upgrades to Netflix, etc get them to stream premium formats. Then it doesn’t work and you’re spending 30 minutes debugging your TV, wondering why you’re not getting the amazing new restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I totally understand why people just buy physical media.

Games may be harder given software updates. But I’d pay a premium for a physical copy of mature games I love (like Halo Master Chief collection)

3 comments
Oh, you pay for 4K? Sorry, the CDN is a bit too overloaded to send you this movie today. I hope you’re happy with 1080p, randomly dropping to 360p on and off for a dozen frames at a time during an immersive sequence.
It's worse. All hardware and software in the chain must be approved for you to be allowed to watch 4K. Your browser, OS, CPU, GPU, HDMI cable, and TV must all be whitelisted before you get 4K. Very few people meet the requirements.

And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.

The whole "make it harder for pirates to watch in 4K" makes no sense to me, like it comes out of the psychology of people who couldn't possibly understand the psychology of other people at all.

My experience is that people don't care about quality. Like there was that time I found a torrent for a movie that had 3000 seeds and found that it was shot with a camcorder in the theater and the soundtrack was in Russian but it didn't matter because the sound quality was so bad I don't think I could have understood the dialog if I knew Russian. Thing is, pirates want to watch a crap copy of a movie that's in the theater and won't even wait for a DVD quality rip, never mind something better.

This is out of touch with modern piracy. It's much easier to download the 4K Netflix version of any show than to get Netflix to deliver it to you.
Maybe it’s because theaters are terrible in some places? No sessions at times people aren’t working, expensive food, restrictions on what food you can bring in, 3D conversions no one asked for, and most importantly, no one to kick out the obnoxious talkers and people on their phones.
You have no understanding on piracy to come to this conclusion.
> I totally understand why people just buy physical media.

Not to disagree with your larger point, but physical media can also be a nightmare. Try watching a 4K Blu-ray on your computer

Because even the fucking cable needs to support DRM. I hate this tech era with a passion
You can just pirate movies.
This is how you get a movie that's really quiet for some reason and maybe in some forsaken format
Oh no! amplifiers and VLC/Mplayer!
Yeah so now whatever setup you're running it on needs VLC, which is not a given and also has its own downsides, and you have to mess with the audio for it to still maybe sound bad if they screwed it up irreparably.
so it might need to be redownloaded. I can only say in my limited experience i've only had this happen one, maybe two times, a really long time ago. and usually with cam, which is why some people are patient and wait for TS or TC rips of movies still in theaters. I've never had TV audio messed up. More common is bad subtitles!