b e a r d
kind of crazy that a manufacturer can just "upgrade" firmware and remove features. then encrypt said firmware to make it harder to downgrade.
i just downgraded my blu-ray drive's firmware so it can now play UHD discs.
oh great and now i'm just finding out that you can't even play the discs with powerdvd. why the fuck is playing blurays on pc so fucking hard? i know it's a more niche thing to want to do but it's so annoying that it's THIS difficult, nigh impossible, when blu-ray and UHD have been a thing for so long.
@beardalaxy
I asked dad to buy me an external Blue ray player for birthday.
I later bought a single disk, only to find, that it is LITERALLY IN A LEGAL GRAY ZONE for me to download the keys needed to decode and play that disk.
What kind of bullshit is that? I WANTED to be a consoomer, and this has to be the dumbest limitation I have ever seen.
It also only affects legit customers
@LukeAlmighty @beardalaxy Who cares about the legal gray zone? Here in the US, it's illegal to backup DVDs, even for personal use (DMCA makes it illegal to crack DRM for any reason), but people do it anyway.
@xianc78 @LukeAlmighty DVDs don't have encryption, you can copy straight from them just like (most) CDs. Blu-rays do though.
Turns out with UHD it's a much more weird subject. The only chip manufacturer that was ever capable of decrypting them was Intel. They stopped doing it as of their 11th gen processors. Because of that, a lot of drives were updated to not support the format either, I think. I have a 10th gen so normally it would be fine, but the software to play Blu-rays removed the functionality too. I could try and find an older version of the software, but that means I'd be locked to only watching movies from before 11th gen came out because new keys are always releasing and only a handful of companies actually have the rights to use them.
I think it's probably pressure from movie companies to prevent computers from playing them, or asking for ridiculous amounts of money for decryption keys. It's stupid either way, and yeah... This is why people pirate.
These UHD files are like 60GB, so what I'll probably end up doing is ripping the files off of them since that's still possible, and then burning them to an unencrypted Blu-ray.
@LukeAlmighty yeah you have to buy some pricey software that has rights to the decryption keys (which are updated frequently for new movies) if you want to play them on your PC legally. Extremely dumb.
@beardalaxy
Seriously. I get adverts. I get DRM. I get making a generally horrible product. But I have never seen any other product being sold with the assumption, that it's illegal to use it.