Hey, thanks for the suggestion! The website does work for me (although the web-app doesn’t, yeah). As for the project: Decentralized sharing, on-chain DRM, p2p social features and payments? The project seems ambitious to say the least. Although many of its features stand in stark contrast with what Disney, Apple and co. currently exploit, so I doubt they would ever have the motivation to join in.

I’m going to follow its development for sure, thanks again for shining a light on it.

All fine on my end…how long has this been happening to you? Might be something random or temporary.

I have no clue what Warhammer is or how to solve any of this, but I consider myself a jolly guy. Probably for the entirety of last month I’ve never laughed as much as I did while reading your post.

So hey, I wouldn’t wish harm on anyone, but if a horrible chain of misadventures like this ever happens again please be sure to share it with us. So we can comfort you, of course.

Honestly, after seeing that there’s truly no GOG equivalent for movies, neither now nor probably ever, this is the solution I like the most.

If I want something fast, I get the file through “other means”. If I like it and want to support the production behind it, I add it to a list and at the end of the year I do what you’ve said.

This way I neither accumulate DVDs nor throw them in the trash, I support the production, I make my neighbors happy and get a high quality file on top. Sometimes it’s the simplest things, thanks for the reminder and the idea :) Hopefully in the future this will all be possible digitally.

Somehow wasn’t expecting this in the context of games but of course makes perfect sense. Denuvo =/= DRM, the latter being much more broad. Thanks for the knowledge nugget!

“Wait, so you’re telling me you can watch a movie you bought without using the official app?”

This might not be very popular, but I find their games section to be lacking as well. I’ve recently tried GOG for the first time expecting a “money for an .exe file” kind of approach for every game that had its Denuvo removed on Steam. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Dragon Quest XI without DRM!

Oh boy, how naive…

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, admittedly those are all fairly niche and don’t really have up to date content but they do indeed offer a digital video file for money (apart from iTunes, I’ve tested it and can’t seem to get a DRM free video file). Who knew that GOG had a movies section!

As for my personal takeaway from your suggestions and those from others, I guess the best approach is to continue to split the “supporting” part from the “getting a file” part.

You’re right but the same argument goes for the music industry, yet they still allow direct downloads. I have phrased it incorrectly, I certainly don’t expect a solution for everything from you kind people, I’m simply taken aback by the fact that it truly wasn’t my bad googling skills that prevented me from finding such a service, it’s that for visual media there simply isn’t one.

To your other point, there are many people involved in the creation of music as well, altough not as many as those involved in movies and such. After I’ve made my purchase, may that be a DVD for a movie or a song on Qobuz, I do assume that my money passes through many more intermediaries and studios and execs that all want their cut before it finally gets distributed to the people that it took to create the content. That’s another huge can of worms. I was simply looking for a service that offered a digital file for money, just like with DVDs but without the plastic.

Splitting the “file getting” from the “supporting artists” part is my current approach for movies and such, but I fear that Prime Video isn’t a very good service for the “supporting” part since their cut is so big. But as you’ve already correctfully said, if I have to split my approach to movies, then I’ll be on the lookout for a service that offers digital purchases and that I support, which entails that it doesn’t take half of my money before it even reaches the movie studios that will want their cut too.

Yeah…thanks for the clarification, when I read the download part I expected to get a file, not just an offline viewing experience. I’ll be more careful now whenever I read that a service offers downloads, I came in from the perspective of someone buying music and thought I would get a file.

Splitting the “file getting” from the “supporting artists” part is generally an approach that I’m fine with, but I fear that Prime Video isn’t a very good service for the “supporting” part since their cut is so big.

Oh I nearly forgot but specifically Prime Video is indeed a service that allows direct movie downloads, thanks for the suggestions!

Altough…now that I’ve looked at it more closely and if I understood it correctly:

1. one can only use their proprietary app to initiate a download
2. one can only watch the downloaded content on their proprietary app, and
3. the downloaded movie expires after 30 days.

I’ll try it out as soon as I can, but if true then this is just a horrible experience.

Often times on this sub there’s always an alternative being proposed, so I’m a bit shocked that this time most of the answers are simply “no”.

I have nothing against buying what I enjoy. But I also want to use my own streaming service (be it Plex or Jellyfin), I want to watch it offline, I want to not live in fear that it gets taken away, and most importantly I want to know that atleast 50% of my money rightfully goes to the artists of said content.

As I’ve said in another comment, it’s shocking that even the notoriously copyright-obsessed music industry allows retailers to sell high quality digital copies, while the film-industry just plainly doesn’t.

Interesting concept. If I understand it correctly it didn’t truly let you own the stuff that you bought. It instead gave you a proof-of-purchase allowing you to stream your purchased content on different streaming platforms (like Netflix, etc) as long as you have that one proof-of-purchase. However, if the platforms remove your purchased content from their catalogues at any time, it would be gone. So you’re right, almost but not quite like DVD.

I wonder why the notoriously copyright-obsessed music industry allows retailers to sell digital copies (and high-quality ones), while the film-industry doesn’t.

Spotify currently does not work, apparently they got blocked and are currently arranging a new proxy.

I tested it with Qobuz. I copy-pasted the link directly from Qobuz, and it somehow managed to pull a full 24 bit, 48KHz, flac file from source with just the Qobuz link. I still don’t understand how. It works with full albums too.

Not OP, but here’s my experience: It’s very rare on my end and happens while browsing for posts that link to a website. I wouldn’t really classifiy this as high priority, since I suspect that it’s the fault of the website, and the wording of the error message in Eternity simply leads one to believe that it’s exclusively Eternity’s fault for not loading the image. Here’s an example in Eternity:

And here is the same post in the web UI:

Happens to me as well, but differs from link to link. 90% work :)

I’m glad that not even a year later we’ve completely moved past the whole “fuck spez” shtick (it do be funny tho). I see this as an absolute win, as we’ve developed our own identity and finally embraced what we really are: A defederated link aggregator named Lemmy, not a Reddit clone or sidechick.

P.s. Altough, I have to agree that we do have to chill with all this My Little Pony stuff🤣

Hey db0 and mods!

Since you’re just humans and we never know if the insults are slowly getting to you or you’re just having doubts, I want to give a voice to the lurkers in here and reiterate one thing: I feel exceptionally well taken care of in this instance! I’m extremely happy to be a part of it, I don’t even know what a downtime is and I don’t see much drama or toxicity if any at all. I’m simply loving Lemmy (yes, seriously!), I’m loving my time on it and I can just focus on following the communities I’m passionate in, which is the main point of Lemmy. I’m also aware that this does not happen without considerable hard work from the people behind it. So while I’m sure most of it goes unnoticed, I hope to at least convey with this that it’s not taken for granted or unappreciated in the slightest bit. A very big thanks to you all (and I try to donate where I can) <3

As for my personal experience, whenever a hexbear post makes it into my feed it’s mostly an overly aggressive political take or straight up trolling. It reminds me of the League of Legends kind of humour: It’s supposed to be a joke, but it’s not explicitly spelled out that it’s a joke and it attacks the individual. It’s a mix of aggressive trolling and just straight up toxicity. You just never know if you’re supposed to take it serious or not. But I personally like to have a choice if I eventually want to block them or not, and I feel like having a choice is one of the common threads between FOSS, Linux, the fediverse, self-hosting, piracy and so on.

But, while I do appreciate this, it isn’t crucial to my experience on Lemmy. So, if at any time this balance is taking too much of a toll on you guys, it wouldn’t be a big deal for me if we would “lose contact” with hexbear. Last thing I want is to slowly cook your sanity bit by bit, with each passing day a bit more, over something that is frankly not that important. I’d rather prefer you focus on what you love doing, be that doing technical stuff, improving the instance, memeing around, learning new stuff or simply discussing things with other people in peace. Life is much too short to argue with people, and over the internet it’s even worse!