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posted by martyb on Monday March 23 2020, @04:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-internet-treats-DRM-as-damage-and-routes-around-it? dept.

The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt Hit Pirate Sites After Rushed VOD Releases

A decision by Universal Pictures to quickly make movies available on [video on demand (VOD)] services due to the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the inevitable. Titles including The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt, which are still in their theatrical windows, are now all available for download on pirate sites, just hours after release.

[...] In common with hundreds of business sectors and individuals around the world, the spread of the virus is having a profound effect on cinemas. As preventative measures are put in place, revenues are reportedly down to the lowest levels in twenty-five years. On the other hand, services that can be accessed at home – Netflix for example – are enjoying a boom in usage.

In an effort to cushion the blow, earlier this week Universal Pictures announced that it would be releasing some of its newest movies, that are technically still in their theatrical windows, on digital platforms for rental. As a result, The Invisible Man, The Hunt, and Emma all went on sale Friday at around the $20 mark.

How well these movies will be received and in what volumes consumed remains to be seen but within hours of them appearing on official platforms, the inevitable happened. At the time of writing, all are available for free downloading and streaming on dozens of pirate sites.


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  • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday March 24 2020, @04:05PM (1 child)

    by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday March 24 2020, @04:05PM (#975046) Journal

    What really shocks me is that I see a lot of 30GB+ releases of old movies... from anywhere between 1930s to the 1950s. And I seriously doubt that the source material is even such a quality that it requires even a SD DVD file to show in all its original glory. Yet.. people upload and download them.

    Depends on what you mean by old and which movie. Really old silent era stuff, 30GB is overkill. Things improved rapidly though, and by some time around 1930 the top quality was good enough that there is some image degradation with anything less than bluray. The real problem is film grain. It takes a lot of data to encode all that noise, but if you smear it enough to get rid of the grain it looks like a shitty cartoon.

    There's also a funny time window with TV shows. Some stuff was filmed, and then broadcast from that. Then they invented videotape, and while the quality was ok for tv broadcast it wasn't anywhere near as good as the film. Re-releases of 50 year old TV shows can be much higher quality than more recent shows of 20 ~ 40 years ago, if they still have the film.

    Apparently if you get recent re-releases of the classic The Rockford Files in hi-def you can clearly see that all the backdrops are badly painted cardboard.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @10:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @10:18PM (#980099)

    There's also a funny time window with TV shows. Some stuff was filmed, and then broadcast from that. Then they invented videotape, and while the quality was ok for tv broadcast it wasn't anywhere near as good as the film. Re-releases of 50 year old TV shows can be much higher quality than more recent shows of 20 ~ 40 years ago, if they still have the film.

    Particularly in the world of animation, an especially bad time for video quality (by modern standards) was the early-to-mid 2000s.

    This is the time when many studios started transitioning from film-based workflows into digital post production. At the same time, this shift enabled a massive increase in the use of CGI effects, virtually all of which were done entirely in standard definition. Especially bad in this era is that very typically the hand-drawn stuff would be done at 24fps, converted to 30fps via 2:3 pulldown, and then all the digital editing and effects would be done directly at 30p or even 60i. The result is frequently an absolute nightmare for modern displays and video formats.