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Android Scans DVD Bar Codes, Downloads Movies
cars writes "Remember how you can scan any bar code with an android phone and it will tell you where to find that product for cheaper? A new Android application called BarTor (formerly ScanTorrent) can scan any DVD bar code and then signals either uTorrent or Vuze on your PC to download the movie from BitTorrent. How long do you think this will last?" Other features include purchase opportunities on barcode lookup, Google base product lookup, and site-level filtering.
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to people who don't want to pay for a movie? GLWT.
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For a moment, I thought that they were saying that Lt. Cmdr. Data was now using BitTorrent.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
You can install apps that aren't blessed by the Hand of Steve. This app might not stay on the store, but it sure won't go away...now where is my Windows Mobile version?
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Sounds like a nefarious MPAA plot. They've got your intent (barcode) and identity (paypal/credit card).
If the MPAA didn't hatch this idea, I bet they wish they would have.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
"How long do you think this will last?"
If there is a market and people are willing (think iTunesVideo) then I'm sure it won't take long for the MPAA to start suing.
You know, in the old days we had to go to the theater (oops, sorry, that's theatre for our friends across the pond) and sit with 200 of our closest friends to watch a movie. And we liked it that way.
Damned kids and your fancy technogoogle phones.
What's next? Video texting?
Sent from your iPad.
Will it find a version with quality appropriate to playback on the device? Ripping a DVD and transcoding it to play back on a mobile device is often more effort than I can be bothered with. Being able to just wave the device at one of my DVDs and have it automatically grab an appropriate copy would be great.
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now all they need to do is port TPB vpn service to it and voila !
Just off the top of my head, the use case defense might be for people that want to transcode DVDs that they already own to an electronic format, they can just use the scanner on their own DVDs and the "transcoding" is done automatically in the background and arrives in the next few hours.
... well maybe I can. The reality is that if I am in a store that sells whatever it is I am interested in seeing, chances are good that I am prepared to buy it. There are rare moments, however, where I might just be curious about it and will want to preview it.
Still, this sounds like a commercial opportunity for media distributors everywhere. If I am curious enough to just want to preview something, that application could easily be modified to indicate my interest in seeing it online somewhere at which point I could pay like $1 for the privilege of seeing it as a stream or something like that. It would be a sale they wouldn't likely otherwise have. More often than not, if I am merely curious about a title, I will simply pass it by unless someone I know had already endorsed it.
What's next? Video texting?
Been there. Done that, old man. We're now onto Googlefacevidtweettubing.
Everybody's doing it.
What's next? Video texting?
Nah, the only thing anyone knows how to say over that is Y-M-C-A.
Seems terribly convenient. The RIAA can use their special civil rights ignoring superpowers to monitor the channel and bill your cell phone account automatically.
The barcode recognition is the biggest feature IMHO. Imagine the apps you could build with a good barcode recognition.
Scan a list of 'to buy'. Sort of a "Wedding registry" but how many times are you out and you see something that looks like a decent product but you want to check reviews? Scan a barcode, dump it into a Google docs document.
The biggest IMHO is "crowd sourcing" grocery lists. So you go to the store and scan in what you're going to buy, punch in the price and it gets added to a database. Use the GPS to determine the store.
Get a few hundred people checking prices and you'll have a fairly accurate database of prices. Then you go home, made a grocery list and have it calculate where the cheapest place to shop is.
They may not be able to kill an idea, but they CAN kill the platform.
IMHO, these kinds of "screw the man" applications only serve to tanish the image of the Android platform. And remember, you need a network on which to run an Android phone, and in the US that means Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.
Corporate America at its finest. And if they decide that only hackers, ripoff artists, freeloaders, and other "troublemakers" are using Android, they'll drop it like a hot potato and never look back...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Well, probably only about...5...4...3...2...
The barcode recognition is the biggest feature IMHO. Imagine the apps you could build with a good barcode recognition.
Scan a list of 'to buy'. Sort of a "Wedding registry" but how many times are you out and you see something that looks like a decent product but you want to check reviews? Scan a barcode, dump it into a Google docs document.
The biggest IMHO is "crowd sourcing" grocery lists. So you go to the store and scan in what you're going to buy, punch in the price and it gets added to a database. Use the GPS to determine the store.
What you describe already exists for Android since pretty much day one: http://www.biggu.com/
It is, but pretty much any computing device enables that. this just ups the convenience factor.
Why bother
The biggest IMHO is "crowd sourcing" grocery lists. So you go to the store and scan in what you're going to buy, punch in the price and it gets added to a database. Use the GPS to determine the store.
Get a few hundred people checking prices and you'll have a fairly accurate database of prices. Then you go home, made a grocery list and have it calculate where the cheapest place to shop is.
I like this idea but I also wish you could get this to work with the local grocery store so I can scan and bag all the items then walk up and check out within seconds. A local Giant store has their own handheld scanners and this is terrific especially the bag as you go part.
now all I have to do is draw the bar code and scan!
More IT Pros Could Turn To E-Crime In Poor Economy?
Surely one can run a home brew python (or whatever) program to do the same? Or can the phone be locked down even beyond that? (serious question)
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
So are the people that you're ripping off when using this program to download stuff.
Is it some kind of joke that he expects people who pirate stuff to buy an app that lets you pirate stuff?
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Wasn't this article up like a week ago?
Or maybe someone commented that someone should make an app like this.
the CueCat people are howling.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
BitTorrent is not a place. It's a protocol. Correct usage would be "download the movie via BitTorrent".
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
If you don't want to pay what it costs, don't watch it. Wait for it to show up on TV for free.If you don't want to pay what it costs, don't watch it. Wait for it to show up on TV for free.
I want to watch the film Song of the South legitimately. The copyright owner has declined to authorize the broadcast of the film or the sale of copies on DVD, and I'm not willing to pay over $17 billion for a majority stake in the copyright owner. What's the next step?
What I never get when it comes to these copyright-infringing applications and cease and desist notices being sent about and what not...why not simply host it outside the US? How can anyone actually stop applications such as this is they are hosted all over say Europe and Asia. Outside of the US (and the UK, which I generally see as America's sidekick), there are a lot of countries without such stringent laws or where they are simply not being enforced as much as in the US.
(serious question by the way, I always wonder about this when I see copyright infringement, patent cases etc...)
PS: I don't mean big companies who have to actually be legitimate entities in order to do bussiness, I'm talking about small programs made in someone's free time
you need a network on which to run an Android phone, and in the US that means Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.
I thought a multi-band GSM phone with no subsidy lock could operate with any GSM network's SIM card. Am I mistaken?
The biggest IMHO is "crowd sourcing" grocery lists. So you go to the store and scan in what you're going to buy, punch in the price and it gets added to a database. Use the GPS to determine the store.
Get a few hundred people checking prices and you'll have a fairly accurate database of prices. Then you go home, made a grocery list and have it calculate where the cheapest place to shop is.
The problem with this is this pushes grocery stores to complete solely on price. Selection no longer matters, customer service doesn't matter, just price.
Personally, I see enough of that already. The Internet certainly has the power to transform all purchases into a simple decision based on price while taking all other factors out of it. Then, we will all be shopping at WalMart. Forget about anybody else, they can't compete as effectively on price.
Is that what you really want? Because that is exactly what we are in danger of getting.
I would think typing the name of the movie would be easier than typing a barcode. A barcode is a random string of at least 11 digits or so, where a movie name should be fairly easy to hold in your head while you type it into your phone.
One can enter a 13-digit EAN blind, using the DTMF key-clicks to let you know when you've miskeyed it. T9, on the other hand, needs a lot of manual cleaning up after it: Green Acres isn't spelled Green Bases.
Oh, very nice indeed. You might call it crowdsourcing your transcoding tasks to minimize both wasted computational power and personal time. In fact, I might go so far as to call this a "green" technology for home theater buffs. Oddly enough, I already do this. I don't own a BD drive, but I own the discs. I use the net to download pre-compressed copies that will play on both my media server and popcorn hour. Now, I'm not all good and light; I've probably got 20-30 titles (out of about 400-450) for which I don't own a physical copy. Then again, that's probably close to the number of movies in my collection I haven't ever watched (hey, I busy). The two sets only have about a 30-50% intersecion.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This is why we read reviews before we buy.
Now imagine near the price also some links to the product review.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
the solution isn't to limit technology, but to encourage non-profit cooperative... at a non-profit grocer all prices can stay rock bottom for even the highest quality goods.
plus, with the national co-op networks in place co-op grocers, and therefor the buyers themselves, can work together to encourage the manufacturers to make better products that cost less than, rather than more than, the crappier products.
[i call this the wall-mart strategy, since they're notorious for successfully setting their own buying prices and demanding changes in manufacturing practices.]
a good example of this could be: a sugarless wholegrain cereal at a co-op could cost less than a high sugar content bleached and then re-enriched cereal, or a sugarless organic peanut butter--which is naturally sweet--could be cheaper than sugared inorganic name brand crap.
this would do away with the need to waste a customers time scanning the products at every grocery store to create a customer friendly database of product pricing schemes across a city/nation.
please take note that such a system could be modified by retail agents.
also note the fact that: in most areas the majority of the grocers are owned by the same organization. in seattle it's really just kroger vs wal-mart, and whole foods vs co-ops. all of kroger's stores are strategically designed to appear in business against each other in order to influence the sales of certain items. [i am the horses mouth]
DON'T CAPITALIZE! CO-OPERATE! AND FREE EVERYTHING!
Sorry sir but you are wrong. I'll reiterate my limited econ 101 experience: we assume perfect information for markets to be perfectly efficient, so having the price across all offerings is a good thing. What you should decide is if the extra cost at the given store is worth the added benefits (customer service, locality, other factors). This is commonplace today, for example when choosing eco-friendly dry cleaning, products without lead etc. Obviously people choosing Walmart are making the choice that the added services are not worth the extra price. Not everyone has the same values (which determine price) as you.
How can you say that? If I scan something and I find out no store in a 15-mile radius has that product, won't I buy it immediately?
Seems to me this barcode scanning phenomenon would be better for consumers all around. Stores will have to compete not just on price, but on whatever consumers demand. If you want selection, then choose on selection.
I hear they're naming the next model DATA and if it is a success, another one named B4.
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
What's next? Video texting?
Been there. Done that, old man. We're now onto Googlefacevidtweettubing.
Everybody's doing it.
So you're saying you've Googlefacevidtubetwatted?
>Price is what the consumer demands. Only the stupid ones. The rest of us demand value for money, quality, reliability. Unfortunately 'the stupid ones' constitute a very large proportion of the general public, which is why we have to put up with so much shit coming out of Chinese factories. We ask for cheap shit, and they can make it. Rant over :o)
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And because not everybody has the same values, the combined data isn't meaningful beyond a way to measure the lowest common denominator.
The brutal oversimplification of 'econ 101' when applied to real world situations does not generally lead to good outcomes. People are just too complex.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
IANAL, but application hosting in another country would only be sufficient if it was a free app so he could remain anonymous. As he receives money for it, he can still be prosecuted.
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Contrary to what economists might think - money, property, business, commerce and all these things have no physical basis in reality. They are just sets of rules we collectively (for the most part) abide by. If these rules become useless to us, we can simply discard them and make new ones.
But they become so familiar some people do take them as physically real, and worth something in of themselves. They consider the free exchange of data between citizens as an attack on something, and would do so even if it were occurring in another solar system and was causally isolated from them and their business for years. This is clearly nonsense.
Price gouging IP to fund shite films that people wouldn't choose to watch if they weren't rammed down their throats with advertising isn't going to work much anymore. They are dead and they don't even know it. These are the Brezhnev years for Holywood, and the collapse will inevitably follow.
Don't blame the 'pirates'. Find a business model that doesn't involve lobbying the government to throw people in prison for the contents of their private communication. You aren't owned a living. We don't need you.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I could not agree with this post more. Unfortunately not enough people do. Healthy price competition is one thing, creating a miserable work environment and a crappy shopping experience for all is another.
Ever been to a walmart or costco on a Saturday afternoon? Is that really the experience we want spreading everywhere?
Ask yourself, how are prices so low and where is the money going? It's an obvious observation, but we're dumping out our wealth on other countries to get the lowest price, which ultimately eliminates 10s of thousands of jobs, making our economy poorer and more people dependent on being supported by government programs etc.
I lament the disappearance of small, well run shops with caring owners who make fine products and charge a fair price.
Unfortunately this trend is here to stay. Funny how the globalization of markets has nothing to do with healthy cross-cultural exchange, and everything to do with creating items Americans want as cheaply as possible, with miserable working conditions all round.
cheap imported goods are temporary benefits of globalisation - wages have been rising rapidly in India and China as the people there want a bigger share of the huge profit margin. Good examples are Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong: once, anything made there was cheap crap and each has pulled themselves off the bottom run of quality and price. This is beginning to happen in China, prices are rising. However, it's a slow process because China has a vast agrarian population to draw on who are cheap labour.
Some of the big multinationals are now looking at Africa for manufacturing and call centres, where people don't want a salary, they just want to not starve, so will literally work for just food, water and shelter.
We already have this in the UK, and I can tell you that you really, really, REALLY don't want it.
Years back people started to realise that we were being ripped off on a massive scale. Retailers used to call the Britain "Treasure Island". One notable example is car prices. There was an investigation that showed UK car prices were thousands of pounds higher than European ones. A guy from the car industry went on TV and blamed it all on being right-hand drive, import costs blah blah prices will definitely not come down, but people stopped buying new cars and eventually prices did fall by thousands to more realistic levels.
Soon shops were having permanent sales, or having one really expensive shop in London and then advertising the goods as 80%+ off in their real stores. Naturally quality fell dramatically too, and high pressure selling of extended warranties and rip-off credit agreements rose.
We are now starting to see a new breed of shop, based on European models. A less adversarial way of buying and selling, based on the seller being reasonable and fair, rather than constantly trying to maximise profit and minimise expense. I love shopping in Japan, because unlike the UK were you either feel like you "won" or were screwed over, the shops here treat you well, have reasonable prices and try to make you feel good about the whole experience.
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