[raid517]

To be fair even you guys who are ripping stuff and claiming you don't want to be dealing with DRM, are in fact dealing with DRM every time you do this. You are breaking the law. It's no skin off my nose, like I said I couldn't care less, but its stupid to say just because you rip your stuff you don't need to deal with DRM.

I just think some of you guys are very short sighted. You think 10 years is a long time and streaming technology won't catch up during that time? Well I think it will. It may not take up 100% of the market, but there will be a pivot point in the next decade (or maybe slightly longer) where streaming technology and the available media will converge into a coherent whole.

Clearly if I wasn't supposed to be using my XBMC as a streaming media source, I have been using it wrong all of these years. Up until about 14 months ago I still had an old XBox XBMC, but then with so many online streaming choices, I kind of just lost interest in it. I used to use it mostly for streaming video from my network and listening to Last.FM and my collection of networked MP3's. So for me it has always been about streaming.

I didn't know there was a 'right' way I was supposed to use it lol. Then just recently I got a UHD TV - and one of those little embedded XBMC media boxes (with a community version of OpenElec on board) and unless you were going to rip everything (which to be fair would require a massive drain on my time which I just don't have any more) I found the experience a little limited. I found myself just wanting to hire a movie, or listen to Spotify, without flipping in and out of my media player interface to do it. I tried playing with the python scripts, but as I said, even from the very early days it has often been pot luck if these will work or not. My impression of these as of 10 years ago and now is that this hasn't really changed all that much.

[nickr]

Whether ripping your own DVD or bluray to hard drive is breaking the law rather depends where you live. don't generalize.

[raid517]

Well 'in general' in most 'developed' countries it is. For those countries where it isn't, well plainly, it just isn't an issue, lol - and therefore those guys have nothing to stress about. But for the majority of the rest of us, it is just plumb silly to say just because you rip your media you don't have to deal with DRM. You do, each and every time you do this. DRM, like it or not (and personally I don't) isn't going away. But the bottom line is with all of the streaming options I have now, I can't remember the last time I have wanted to stream a locally stored file. Some of the services I have used allow the full movie to be downloaded in HD before watching, so 'buffering' for me has never been an issue. I can't speak for Netflix, as I have never used it.

But you can't take a moral stance on DRM and claim 'no we don't deal with DRM on grounds of principal' when by definition in order to use XBMC in the above prescribed manner (which as I have said, is somewhat news to me) this requires that you (or I) do interact with DRM.

It's flipping in and out of my media consumption experience that drives me a little nuts sometimes. I would rather just have a single store front, or single interface for all my media consumption needs.

Also for those who accuse me of 'just following fads' I have been using XBMC and following this project for 10 years. Look at my join date. I have just sunk £600 on a small HTPC (it was basically meant to be the Steambox, before steam decided they couldn't get their controller ready on time), so I can run it more smoothly, and maybe hopefully at some point play 4K content with it too. I would hardly call this a fad.

[Martijn]

The country where i live is highly developed and doing a backup of your purchased disc is considered legal. So i suggest that you research before doing assumptions.

As for DRM, i am not opposed to is. I'm a minor netflix user so integration would certainly be nice. Still comes the fact that bluray quality streaming is not an option. Since i hate switching bluray discs is just rip them to harddrive.

As for music i use Spotify a lot.

[sattekop]

What is your point Raid517? You write all these long winded pieces here.
Quality will come mostly from innovation. Many add-ons, skins and other Kodi/XBMC software are very clever, more user friendly then what you see of these high profile companies. I am sure they are actually pick up some of their ideas here.

Unfortunately commercial apps are not yet collaborating with Kodi. I do think that might come once the conversion to Kodi has had the first official release.

[da-anda]

I wrote a letter to Lovefilm Germany once if they are interested in getting a XBMC addon done (either their side or our side while they provide APIs, etc) and got no repsonse at all.

Also, content providers WANT TO ensure that the user experience is the very same for THEIR content on every platform - so even if Lovefilm/Amazon or Netflix would provide a binary addon for XBMC/Kodi, it won't be integrated into the UI or your library as everything else is - simply because they will enforce their UI (branding and marketing, you know). I'm not against having binary DRM addons in our repositories and also would welcome them, but fact is, that we as Team Kodi or any other developers can't create those addons without any APIs provided by those content providers. We also can't (and won't) add DRM specific code to the core, which would be pointless anyways, because what good would DRM be for if the code is public. So the content providers would have to either release closed source binary libraries (see spotify for a positive example) and a documentation on how to use the libraries in order to get addons created by other developers, or they have to provide the entire addon. Sad fact is though, that there was no interrest from them so far. So go and make them aware of your demand - THEM, not us.

[Kib]

The country where i live is highly developed and doing a backup of your purchased disc is considered legal. So i suggest that you research before doing assumptions.

Edit: sorry Martijn, I totally misread what you were saying. Never mind me. Move along now, nothing to see here.

[Ned Scott]

But moving away from any (even incidental) focus on using Kodi as a primary means for accessing illegal content could I feel only be useful in the long term. I know the official repositories don't facilitate this, but there are a great many scripts and installers that do - and while they do I suspect you are right that Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Streaming video etc. will ever come on board.

You don't seem to understand that this is not physically possible. The only way we could do this would be to reject all of the open source code and to start over, from scratch, and make Kodi a brand new and closed source application. Doing so would be fundamentally at odds with the mission statement of Team Kodi and the XBMC Foundation bylaws.

This is like asking Mozilla Firefox to block specific URLs. Even if they attempted it, the code is open source and people would remove the restriction faster than you can blink. Their main userbase would be up in arms about it and they would lose a ton of support from the community. It would be suicide for the sake of an action that still didn't prevent users from doing what they wanted.

We've had Android manufacturers who've tried to make versions of XBMC/Kodi for their specific box, and it didn't take long for people to bypass those methods either, and those guys had money ridding on their efforts.



Let me make something entirely clear: I would love it if Kodi worked with mainstream streaming services. I've been a Netflix customer for years. However, there is only so many things we can do to help that, and you are not the first one who has had these ideas. We haven't been spending the last 10 years with our heads in the sand. One of the reasons you are getting such a strong reaction to your ideas is because we've discussed these issues to death, both in public and internally.

Nothing is more annoying than someone coming along and going "I bet you haven't thought of this before" regarding issues we've tried to solve for years. On top of that, you dismiss our discussion about why those ideas don't work, and you write us off as simply being "adverse to DRM".

[jjd-uk]

The country where i live is highly developed and doing a backup of your purchased disc is considered legal. So i suggest that you research before doing assumptions.

You might want to read up on current events as it is (most likely) not legal any more. There isn't enough jurisprudence, but the legality that was there has been invalidated a few months ago.

It's certainly now fully legal in the UK after a recent change to copyright laws, see http://www.whathifi.com/news/cd-and-dvd-...une-1st-uk

[Kib]

Ah, I misread Martijn, he was talking about personal backups. These are (still) legal in our country.

[sattekop]

Interesting change in UK. Made me think. Why not symbolicy, say for 1 eufocent or pence, sell our media to an xbmc cloud library in return for lifelong access for yourself and your inheretants.

[Prof Yaffle]

Re: the UK change... two comments...

1. I believe that the major studios said some time ago that they wouldn't pursue anyone who was format-shifting. This is the law catching up with both what people do and what the copyright owners accept happens.

2. The DRM comment in that article is really interesting... if it's clearly legal to rip, then tools to rip are also legal, so the witch-hunt against DVDFab and friends can't be sustained.

... and then you get into the esoteric argument about downloading a copy of something you own, because the DRM makes ripping it too hard for many people versus a couple of clicks from numerous indexing sites.

[nickr]

Or if your bluray gets scratched, can you replace it from piratebay?

[produno]

Or if your bluray gets scratched, can you replace it from piratebay?

Well, isnt that why you had your backup?

[nickr]

I mean if you didn't have a backup.