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With 100 different streaming services asking for $15 / month for the one show/movie you watch per quarter, I can see a come back of video sharing and revival of video players.

Btw the state of video players today (bad support for hdr, Dolby vision, Dolby atmos etc) reminds me their state when divx and Dolby surround were firstly introduced. Lots of work needs to be done.



I don't think piracy needs to come back, it never died.

But I'm not expecting a significant revival of video players. Who wants to watch shows and movies on a computer nowadays? On most devices (TVs, set-top boxes, tablets, ... but also computers to a lesser extent) you're limited by the hardware codecs, a custom video player is typically not going to save you.


All of those little devices run some form of Linux.


Or iOS. But that's a bit moot. For instance my LG TV doesn't support Dolby Vision files outside a few very specific encoding profiles, there's no software fix for that.


Pretty much no media player supports Dolby Vision profile 7 as it is only used commercially on 4K Blu-Ray discs.

The newer Nvidia shield advertises support, but it is incomplete and does not suport the enhancement layer included on most Dolby Vision discs.

MakeMKV supports preserving all this metadata so I would love a solution that lets me watch my 4K Blu-Ray rips with Dolby Vision.


I’m paying for some services and yet I still find myself torrenting the same medias available on these platform.

Because of the fact that video compression is so terrible (especially with Netflix, even on highest plan) that at times it’s unwatchable.




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