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GOG Introduces DRM-Free Movie Store
Via Engadget comes news that GOG, the DRM-free game store platform, has launched a DRM-free movie store. The initial set of movies are gamer oriented, and you won't find major studio releases (yet, and not for a lack of trying on the part of GOG). From GOG: Our goal is to offer you cinema classics as well as some all-time favorite TV series with no DRM whatsoever, for you to download and keep on your hard drive or stream online whenever you feel like it. We talked to most of the big players in the movie industry and we often got a similar answer: "We love your ideas, but we do not want to be the first ones. We will gladly follow, but until somebody else does it first, we do not want to take the risk". DRM-Free distribution is not a concept their lawyers would accept without hesitation.
We kind of felt that would be the case and that it's gonna take patience and time to do it, to do it, to do it right. That's quite a journey ahead of us, but every gamer knows very well that great adventures start with one small step. So why not start with something that feels very familiar? We offer you a number of gaming and Internet culture documentaries - all of them DRM-Free, very reasonably priced, and presenting some fascinating insight into topics close to a gamer's heart. Videos are mostly 1080p (~8GB for a 90 minute film) and can be acquired for about $6. They're using h.264/mp4 and not VP9/Matroska, but you can't have everything ;). If you don't want to download that much data, it looks like all of the videos are also available in 720p and 576p.
We kind of felt that would be the case and that it's gonna take patience and time to do it, to do it, to do it right. That's quite a journey ahead of us, but every gamer knows very well that great adventures start with one small step. So why not start with something that feels very familiar? We offer you a number of gaming and Internet culture documentaries - all of them DRM-Free, very reasonably priced, and presenting some fascinating insight into topics close to a gamer's heart. Videos are mostly 1080p (~8GB for a 90 minute film) and can be acquired for about $6. They're using h.264/mp4 and not VP9/Matroska, but you can't have everything ;). If you don't want to download that much data, it looks like all of the videos are also available in 720p and 576p.
Why wouldn't they choose h.264/mp4? It's playable just about anywhere these days.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
$6 for a 90-minute YouTube video? Going to have to pass for now.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Most DVDs aren't DRM-free, either. They may well be restrictions you can live with, but they are encumbered.
Well, boys and girls, doesn't this finally solve all your complaints regarding movies being peppered with DRM by the request of MAFIAA? ;)
As GOG's collection grows, and if you find content that you actually are interested in, would you prefer this movie service over pirating?
There are more recent films that also lapsed into the public domain, due to a failure to register the copyright, "Night of the Living Dead" being perhaps the most well-known example.
The real reason why GOG doesn't include these films is three-fold:
1) There are already sites doing this (for free), e.g. the Internet Archive.
2) The quality of the original prints is often poor, restoring old movies requires great skill and is very expensive, and existing restorations are not public domain.
3) Most importantly, it's besides the point. GOG is trying to get the film industry to recognize the value of selling DRM-free movies, like the music industry did before them. Selling public domain movies would be plain counter-productive.
Here's hoping they'll succeed where others have failed before them.
MKV is a container format, not a video format. You can easily repackage the contents of an MKV file into whatever you want and vice versa.