{"id":3895,"date":"2016-11-27T12:37:49","date_gmt":"2016-11-27T02:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/?p=3895"},"modified":"2016-11-27T12:37:49","modified_gmt":"2016-11-27T02:37:49","slug":"weekly-news-roundup-november-27-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/2016\/11\/27\/weekly-news-roundup-november-27-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekly News Roundup (November 27, 2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"

So how did your Black Friday shopping go? Found a few bargains, or\u00a0did you refuse to buy in to the hype? One thing I’ve noticed that the phenomenon, for better or worse, seems to be spreading to other countries, including here in Australia. I guess retailers don’t really need another excuse to have a big sale, but if you want to find out more about just what Black Friday really means for retail, have a look at this (super long) infographic<\/a>, provided to us courtesy of\u00a0FreeshippingCode.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As for the news this week, we have a nice mix of stories for you\u00a0that will make you happy, angry, and informed.<\/p>\n

\"Copyright\"<\/p>\n

\"PlayReady<\/a>

Netflix 4K requires hardware based DRM, which means most PCs won’t be supported<\/p><\/div>\n

Starting with the angry, this DRM story will definitely get your blood boiling, especially if you’ve just recently upgraded your PC (and you didn’t choose the latest Intel ‘Kaby Lake’ CPU).\u00a0Your PC may be more than fast enough for 4K video, but you probably won’t be able to play Netflix in 4K, thanks to the sky-high (or rather, higher than Skylake) hardware requirements<\/a>.\u00a0Thanks to Hollywood’s paranoia, Netflix 4K requires PlayReady 3.0 DRM, which is only supported by Windows 10 at the moment. And also only by the practically ignored Edge browser. And also only supported by Intel’s latest generation\u00a0‘Kaby Lake’ CPUs.<\/p>\n

Miss out any of these requirements, and you’re shit out of luck. Even if you purchased a 10-series Nvidia graphics card that supposedly supports PlayReady 3.0 and HEVC 10-bit accelerated decoding, you’re still SOL, because Netflix’s implementation currently doesn’t work this these cards.<\/p>\n

Thanks a bunch, DRM.<\/p>\n

With that said,\u00a0the incompatibility with Nvidia cards at the moment may only be temporary and can probably be addressed\u00a0with a software update. And\u00a0if you don’t have the latest Nvidia card, then you probably do want a Kaby Lake CPU for Netflix 4K, as it supports accelerated HEVC 10-bit decoding. As for Edge, well, it’s and inoffensive choice while we want for Netflix to update their Windows app.<\/p>\n

Still, DRM, what a pain in the hole!<\/p>\n

\"4shared\"<\/a>

4shared can’t understand why rights-holders are wasting time submitting “bogus” take-down requests to Google<\/p><\/div>\n

Speaking of pains in the hole, 4shared has spoken of their own pain<\/a> at seeing rights-holders waste their time filing Google DMCA take-down requests, many of which are bogus, when the file sharing site has a perfectly good anti-piracy tool at their disposal.<\/p>\n

4shared says that rights-holders are\u00a0wasting money\u00a0hiring anti-piracy agencies that produce bogus take-down requests using nothing but a simplistic bot script to crawl their site for links, sometimes based on broad keywords such as ‘video’. At best, this results in links being removed from Google’s search results, but the page itself still exists on 4shared, meaning rights-holders are wasting their time.<\/p>\n

Despite 4shared pleading with rights-holders and their agents to use\u00a0the site’s own anti-piracy tool, the same rights-holders have dobbed 4shared in to the authorities, arguing that it’s a “notorious” piracy site that should be shut down. As I theorized a couple of weeks before, rights-holders may be holding off on using 4shared’s tool because they may be looking at suing the site in the future, and any “cooperation” with the site now could hamper these efforts.<\/p>\n

\"Netflix<\/a>

Netflix helping to combat piracy much more effectively than DRM or new laws<\/p><\/div>\n

But you know what they could do? Instead of obsessing over links and downloads, maybe, just maybe, the solution is already here. Affordable legal options, such as Netflix and Spotify, are already\u00a0helping to reduce piracy, and the latest report from\u00a0Australia confirms this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s worth remembering that Netflix and Spotify, especially the former, aren’t perfect. In fact, there’s still way too much content that you can’t find on legal platforms, unless you’re willing to pay\u00a0through the roof (and be limited in\u00a0where and how to play the content). If rights-holder can be more committed to bringing in more value to consumers, then piracy can be reduced by a great deal. It will never be completely abolished though, as some people will never or cannot pay for content, but these people have always existed and in the absence of\u00a0piracy, they simply consumed less content or none at all.<\/p>\n

I get it. Rights-holders want their cake (ie. being able to charge the maximum for content) and eat it too (not having piracy), but that’s just not realistic. Their business model is effectively one where they put out an overpriced product\u00a0and then force users to accept it via technical\u00a0and legal measures. And it’s easy to see why consumers\u00a0are choosing to go down a different route, whether this is piracy or Netflix.<\/p>\n

======<\/p>\n

That’s it for the week. Hope you\u00a0smiled, frowned and\u00a0otherwise felt informed enough to feel that reading this week’s WNR wasn’t such a waste of time. See you next week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So how did your Black Friday shopping go? Found a few bargains, or\u00a0did you refuse to buy in to the hype? One thing I’ve noticed that the phenomenon, for better or worse, seems to be spreading to other countries, including here in Australia. I guess retailers don’t really need another excuse to have a big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,10,5,17,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-copyright","category-high_definition_dvd","category-news-roundup","category-video_technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pzVMv-10P","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3895"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3899,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3895\/revisions\/3899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}