Bought a Bluray Disc. Sony still tracks you.

"It also enables the delivery of advertising content"
They already paid for the product! Double-dipping assholes
- triple-dipping, they also get your data.
- I wonder if these people think everyone wants to be advertised to.
  
  I don't think they care
  
  No, I am 100% certain they know that the vast majority of people don’t care and some people really really hate it, but nobody actually enjoys it.
- No no, you see. You didn't pay for the product but the license for the product. Now it makes sense, right?
  
  I don't understand. Maybe a set of adverts would help me?

Yeah I just straight up pirate movies now, I don't even try to hide it from people anynore. It's clear to me at this point that all these companies care about is getting richer by the minute off the backs of the common man, and their excuses for doing so are getting more and more pathetic.
- I have friends who work in the film industry and they pirate movies and TV shows all the time.
  
  Me too. By the time a movie or TV show actually makes it to distribution, most people who worked on it have already made their paycheck and moved on to the next project.
- What capitalists are doing is intentionally sharpening the contradiction, probably with the goal of a revolution or reform in their favor (as can be seen in the USA right now). The neat thing about sharpened contradictions is that it will inevitably lead to change, the bad thing is that this is a massively organized effort with tons of planning and coordination, and The People:tm: are not ready for it.
  Pirating movies is pretty good though. Mainstream media always manages to exploit labor incredibly harshly, to the point of suicide, and that behavior should not be rewarded IMO. Of course there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but one can dream. As an aside, pirated media is also incredibly convenient. There is a great community spirit in the piracy community.
- I think I’ve bought two movies ever.

Piracy is now better and safer than using "real" discs. Well done, Sony.

I’m still getting justified in my boycott of anything Sony that started in 2005, when they bricked my PC for daring to put a Sony CD in my computer’s CD player! Fucking rootkit.
Yes I’m still holding that grudge and I will not relent, for as long as I live.
Any movie I watch I make sure it’s not a Sony product, any music I listen to, I make doubly sure it’s not from a Sony studio. Any electronics I buy, I make triply sure it doesn’t contain any Sony product. Sony is not getting a dime from me ever again!
Fuck Sony!
- Yes! I’ve never met anyone else who’s been boycotting Sony since the rootkit! Maybe there are dozens of us? Either way: fuck Sony!
- That rootkit thing failed miserably, thankfully, and audio CDs have been DRM-free ever since.
  
  Sure, but I'm not touching anything Sony with a 10 foot pole.

- Wow I’ve never seen this quote. That’s something.
- there is simply too much at stake
  OUR MONAYS!1!!!!

Why is your Blu-ray player connected to the internet?
- VLC on a Linux laptop. You think my Blu-ray player has the ability to take screenshots?
  
  Yes, and I assume you wrote this message on your blu-ray player and typed it with your remote
  
  You never heard of a capture card?
  Can I introduce you to my friend MakeMKV?
  
  Does VLC report this? Kinda seems like the sorta thing that only works on actual players.
  
  Disconnect from the internet while watching. Close it when you finished. Restart your computer, then connect to the internet and you should be fine I think
  
  VLC can play blurays?
- Yeah it seems really strange. I know some Bluray players support Internet connectivity but unless they're also a Streaming box I don't see why people would connect them to the internet. Really it seems like the majority of people don't so not sure how useful this feature is.

Haha no it doesn’t.
unplugs NIC
rips blu-ray with blu-ray drive running old firmware
- Or... Here me out, don't do that.
  By giving them money, from their perspective, you've accepted their t&c. If they get data or not, that's just icing on the cake.
  
  That doesn’t make sense.
  The t&c relate to the data. If they don’t get it, it’s irrelevant. It’s not the icing, it’s the actual cake. The hardware is the icing at best. The way these companies act it’s basically a Trojan horse unless you’re careful. The market for dedicated Blu-ray players is unbelievably tiny.
  You want my money for a piece of hardware? Sure. Fair exchange. I don’t see why we should object to that. It’s the everything else that’s the problem.
  
  borrows blu-ray instead of buying it

Welp, blu ray playyæer sure don't need no internet - gimme dumb technology plz
- blu ray playyæer
  Did a cat jump on your keyboard?
- usually bluray and 4k players need to connect to the internet at least once in order to download the codecs, but like yea I disconnect mine from the internet right after

I legitimately cannot remember the last time I paid for a movie or TV show, or music.
Digitally, or physically.
Even if you count streaming services, its been over 5 years since I laid for Spotify... stopped paying for any kind of on demand videos before even that.
Friends wanna watch a movie at my place? Oh, I have a 10 TB library.
Oh, at your place? Does your TV have a USB port? Tell me its model number and I can figure out what codecs it can actually read.

My Blu Ray player has never been connected to the web, its region free, but doesn't do 4k-BD. My Linux HTPC is configured with an ASUS libredrive, and has MakeMKV installed. The Linux variant of MakeMKV is borked right now, in a good way! The 30 day trial period doesn't expire!
If I wanna watch a 4k bluray I have to rip it and watch it on my PC, because I'd rather do that than get a BD player that needs internet
- The author posts new temporary keys on the official forums regularly, in one of the stickies.
  
  Havent needed them in months, I've been at 30 days remaining in evaluation period for 3 months.

can we find a way to spoof this so that they think legit physical disk usage is going up?
- I don't think it's a good metric since most people using Blurays don't have their players connected to the Internet anyway. Connecting Bluray players online is a very niche use-case. It might be more popular if they had built-in Streaming Apps or NAS playback but many don't and are just Bluray players.
  
  Or just any game console? Which is the normal Blu-ray player?
  
  The only reason I had my bluray player connected to the internet was because the yahoo who dropped it off at the thrift store didn't bother signing out of their pandora account, so I could listen to ad free music. Otherwise I would never connect to the internet since all the old applications ( including a blockbuster app of all things ) probably wouldn't even work.
  Knowing this could happen, I will definitely be sure to completely disconnect from the internet the next time I turn that thing on since last time I tried using pandora it wasn't working.

The fact that they don't give you the option to "refuse" but rather to "skip" annoys me to such an extent. Leave us alone, you never needed to do this.

Can you share which movie this was? I've never seen anything like that.
- Gran Turismo
  
  Farturismo

This isn't a EULA in that it still allows you to use the product even if you decline...
This option is available with most modern games these days. They often ask you to click "approve" twice, knowing you won't read either and knowing that you believe that you need to accept both to proceed. When in reality, the second one is almost always optional (perhaps even by law because of laws in the EU).
Still gross. And definitely a major dark pattern, but if people just took an extra 3 seconds to double check, they'd stop sending all of their data to these companies.

Wait do modern Blu-ray players connect to the Internet?
Edit: it’s really cool when people do that annoying Reddit thing where they all want to say the exact same thing for some reason so they all pretend they don’t see all the other comments saying exactly the same thing too.
- PS3 was one of the first affordable blu ray players right off the bat with internet connectivity
  
  Yes but presumably it would work when not connected to the Internet. Additionally, it was not primarily a Blu-ray player. And my Blu-ray players did not have network connectivity.
- my quick search for "Blu Ray players" brought up a list. 4 of the first 5 i saw were also "streaming boxes" with wi-fi. the 5th had an Ethernet port. didn't really check further but looks like it's pretty common now.
  
  Let me rephrase: do they need to connect to the internet?
- Most if not all 4k players are network enabled due to the DRM that is on the 4k medium. From my experiences, they usually need to connect to the internet to download the keys at least once before anything 4k works. DVD and BD usually work without issue though.
  
  How goofy.
  Like, I understand most people have internet at home nowadays but come on, I thought a big point of Physical Media was not needing the damn internet to work!
  
  4k players
  Are you talking about software players or 4k decks?
- Playstations
  
  Surely you understood that I meant “dedicated Blu-ray players“? Come on. A video game console that also plays discs hardly counts. That would not be unusual for it to have network connectivity, which is what I’mdriving at
- Mine can because it also has Netflix, Hulu, etc. built in.
  
  Do the apps still work? The biggest issues I've found with Bluray players like that is that the Streaming Apps on them tend to become Obsolete and broken fairly quickly.
- Yes.
- They can, many have Ethernet ports and even Wifi in some cases but there's no practical reason to do so unless they have streaming features you want to use but most don't, and the ones that do often aren't updated so you'll find the Streaming Apps on them usually don't work anymore.
- I bought a cheap one in 2012 and it has an Ethernet port.
- I mean it makes sense to have them network connected like to use a receiver and networked speakers.

At least you can watch BDs without a web connection still. For now....
Also, LibreDrive is a thing for hacking BD drives with in order to bypass DRM, but I wouldn't be surprised if that got blocked and/or taken down at some point.

Does it still work by clicking skip?
- Yes, it's optional.

What happens of you hit skip. Does it not let you play the disk?
- I would assume based on the line where it says you can go into the settings and opt out at any time that yes you canin fact choose not to accept this. But most people aren’t even going to think about it, which is what they are gambling on
  
  Politely asking the spying-on-you-box to not spy on you
- It let's you continue no problem.
  Just like most modern video games these days that have the second agreement after the EULA. They make it seem necessary, knowing 99% of people will see all of the words and just skip to the bottom and hit "accept."
  Still gross, but not really the problem that people here seem to think it is.

LMFAO. And when I tell people to take care about leaving Jellyfin public with their open API endpoint issues... Yeah Sony WILL abuse your shit... They already do it.
- I run a pivpn setup so that nothing is exposed to the internet at all. It's just too dangerous now. It was bad back in the day, but now I literally have bots trying to join any public facing Minecraft server. It's so many times worse now than it was a decade ago.
  
  I guess the bots are trying to find servers still vulnerable to the Log4J exploit. Man that was a juicy one 👀
  
  Oh man. I have an open minecraft server for my kids and their friends. Every few weeks I have someone show up to the server leaving notes or interacting with us trying to educate me on whitelisting.
  I get more "educators" than i do bots. It's actually quite annoying. I dont know what accounts these kids login with, you're not educating me. The server is literally for 6-8 year olds. It's been wiped 100s of times. I don't care. Stop. The server is grief resistant anyway. And my ban list is long (and getting at least one longer). /little rant
- Can you explain the issues with Jellyfin? Idk about any of this. What are the issues?
  
  https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
  The biggest issue is that the video stream endpoint is not auth'd. Meaning that if someone guesses the MD5 hash for a file in your library it will play. Sounds at first glance like it's unlikely to matter. Except that MD5 is generated based on the file's filepath. So if you use standard naming conventions on paths that are common (/movies/Big Bucks Bunny(2008)/Big Bucks Bunny.mkv for example being simple and easy), eg defaults for a docker container using *arr suites. Then it's possible for a precompiled hash list to check for file against your server.
  So now add a company like Sony, they can generate all their library as a hash list, hit your server with millions of requests over the course of a couple of hours and map out how much of their content you have on your server. If any of it has never had a physical release (since you're allowed to backup your own content) you're completely fucked, and now will have to prove in court that you own ALL the content. And possibly... since it's open endpoint, it could be argued that you're even distributing openly (though unlikely argument... but do you really want to chance that?).
  Ultimately if your setup is "Standard" you're asking for a lawsuit.
  Answers to "fix" this:
  Map your paths in weird folders. instead of /movies/
  <movie>
  add in a folder like a GUID, so /eH4i67ZwByjLao3z7nHWKdS5ogysm68x/movies/
  <movie>
  . Make sure this occurs INSIDE your docker container if you're using docker. Will break any precompiled hashes... though possible to hit a collision and still be "found".
  Setup fail2ban or other brute force blocking technology on your reverse proxy.
  Use a private network setup... whether VPN, SDN, whatever... tailscale, zerotier, etc... (This will break TVs that don't have vpn capabilities)
  Add another auth in front of Jellyfin. (This breaks ALL Jellyfin apps)
  The real answer would be the developers closing the unauth endpoints... But it's been an issue for over 4 years now... They're not going to fix it anytime soon as they don't want to "break compatibility", which is a pretty dumb excuse IMO.
  There's another issue where you shouldn't give accounts to people you don't trust as one user can attack another user AFTER login. So make sure you trust everyone you let have access... they can screw with your profile and do stuff you might not expect.

This is the evil shit

Are there any region-free 4K blu-ray drives available? I’m asking for a friend.

Fuck Sony for this shit

I bought some LED light that have stickers so you put them behind the tv, it also has a camera looking at the screen, it mimics its colors and it creates a good atmosphere.
I had to set it up to my wifi to make it work like wtf, and a phone app too, like wtf. After the installation I blocked its mac in the router.
For movies I just pirate them to my computer and cast them to my tv with the media share option, idk the name.