The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The beginning of the end of physical media (Friends)

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

On September 29th, Netflix shipped its final DVDs, marking the end of an era in physical media. So, we invited our friend Christina Warren (aka film_girl) from GitHub to pour out a drink with us and lament the end of this golden age of access to the films we all love.

Welcome to Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show all about the Quickster debacle. Thanks to our partners for helping us bring you world-class developer pods each and every week. Fastly.com, Fly.io, and Typesense.org. Okay, let's talk. Well, we're talking obsolescence today, Adam. This is near and dear to your heart. The death of physical media by way of Netflix. Finally. I assumed that Christina would have similar feelings that we would. I don't even know, Christina, how you feel about this. It feels weird, right?

Like I haven't even been someone who's used the disc program in a number of years. But like it feels, but I still, well, well, here's the thing. I buy, I buy physical media. We invited you on here thinking you were a diehard subscriber. Come on. No, no. I mean, I was for many, many years. And then the problem was like, they actually dropped me off the plan because for a while I was paying for the plan and not using it. And then they were like, actually, you're not using this anymore. So we're just going to drop you off. And I'm like, but I would have continued paying. So they're lost there. But part of my heart felt like it was being trampled on. Like my very first love are DVDs. I consider my DVDs and Blu-rays my children. And like,

I'm only being sort of facetious when I say that. Only a little. Only a little, but genuinely, I don't know. It just feels like an end of just this really important era of filmmaking and film loving and film watching where for a time, for a brief 20-year span, you could get almost any piece of media that had been released. You could find it on disc, and you could find it someplace, and you could rent it. You didn't have to worry about were the rights expired or not, who has ownership, is it in a vault or not. It was probably released at some point, and if it was out there, you could find a way to source it. And Netflix had a great catalog for that. And what makes me sad is that there are so many titles, like thousands upon thousands upon thousands of titles that have never been brought to streaming either legally or to buy any way,

shape, or form that are not available to stream or not available to buy digitally that are just gone in vaults while billionaires decide how they can manipulate various IP agreements to suck every single cent out of what was supposed to be art. Never forget the business part of show business. But there was this moment in time where you could get everything, and now that moment is gone because there are so many amazing films and TV shows and other things that are just not available. And I feel like we've lost something. It feels like when the video stores started to close. And I just, I don't know, it makes me sad. Very sad. Very well said and very sad.

Like obscure titles like The Naked Gun, two and a half. Yeah. like obscure titles like the naked gun two and a half the naked gun two and a half the smell of fear i mean the strongest thing you got this is a sequel so big they had to add another half or that's a great one splash splash there is a mermaid in new y City. How come she's got legs? She has legs out of the water. She has fins in the water. What about a woman showing up naked in a public place, Freddy? Well, on board, of course.

Like Philadelphia. Every now and again, not often, but occasionally, you get to be a part of justice being done. Planes, trains, and automobiles. I'm reading from my at-home queue because I'm a subscriber, and I took as many as I could. You're still a subscriber to this day. To the end. To the end.

How many bonus films did they send you? Well, I had two accounts. So you got 20 bonuses? Yeah. That's awesome. That's so good. And I think they're going to send me 10 more each per account because I don't know. I signed up for the bonus 10, not just the ones that they let me keep.

One, my subscription was done whenever the 29th happened. I was waiting to last Friday. It was a big deal around my house. We all circled around the red Netflix envelopes and just poured one out, really. Yeah. And it was a sad moment. And then we watched movies and then we weren't happy again. You watched movies that you ripped off of DVDs or Blu-rays, right?

Well, I put it right into the player. Right into the player. Did you put it right in there? Unhappily, of course. Just for old time's sake. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what is your normal setup, Adam? Because I have my way of doing things.

Do you normally watch it once in the player or is it immediately rip and put on the server? What's your normal setup, Adam? Because I have my way of doing things. Do you normally watch it once on the player, or is it immediately rip and put on the server? What's your normal process? I go disc first to keep it pure. Yeah. Right? And then I go the other way. Plex is my way to do things.

You know that, right? So if some people listen to our shows know, when we last talked to you, we geeked out for just a brief moment because that was not the point of the call about Plex. And I'm just a diehard Plex user. I rip my 4K discs to it. I rip my 1080p discs to it.

My 720p's, of course. Everything's on there. Extras. It's just everything's on there. The whole thing, right? That's the whole thing. Directors, commentaries, all of it. Okay, let's talk about that for a second,

because I want to hear about your second set. Sorry to interrupt you. That's okay. This is what really kills me about the death of physical media, and especially the death of some of this Netflix stuff, is that there are amazing audio commentaries. Not all of them. Some of them, especially once they started having to turn out so many DVDs,

and you would see that people would record them before the film was even released. They were bad. But there out so many DVDs and you would see the people would record them before the film was even released, you know, they were bad, but there were so many amazing director commentaries and commentary tracks from other people involved in the film. Like this isn't a thing that like kids today know about. And that makes me so sad because as someone who was in high school during kind of this, the golden era, and then in college, like I'm not even joking when I say this, I think that I got more of a film education in some cases listening to those commentaries than i did from film school oh for sure you know where'd you go to film school um emory university okay i thought you're gonna say full sail because i wish i lived in orlando and wanted to go to full sail i wanted to be

oddly enough before i got into software i wanted to be an audio engineer for films. Never made it, obviously. But that was my plan. And then I got a podcast and it's kind of crazy. You made it audio engineer for software. Yeah, Full Sail, Jared, so you know, is a school in Orlando, Florida. And it's well known for churning out directors and editors and audio engineers around film, the film industry. So our mutual friend, DK, went there. He's a DP. DK is a DP? DK is a DP. Yeah. That means director of photography.

But you know, what I'll miss about the DVD, Blu-ray, physical disc era is something like this, a treat that you may not be familiar with on super bad mclovin what kind of a stupid name is that fogel what are you trying to be an irish r&b singer oh they let you pick any name you want when you get down there and you landed on mclovin yeah i was between that and muhammad you familiar with this movie yes love super bad are you familiar with a treat by any chance what's the treat okay here's the treat michael sarah danced for an hour straight so the the dvd the loop that you see when you put the dvd in the title screen Okay, here's the treat. Michael Cera danced for an hour straight. So the DVD, the loop that you see when you put the DVD in and then you put the title screen, it's not a loop.

It's an hour. He danced for an hour straight. What? Because they realized, well, when you ship a DVD or a Blu-ray, you have that title screen. You got that motion. Right. And they thought people would watch it for as long as it took to see when it would loop. And it never loops.

I mean, obviously, it goes an hour. Like, who's going to watch the title screen for an hour? That's awesome. Longer than the movie. Right. Those are the treats you get from that kind of media. I guess maybe you can get it potentially on Apple TV or whatever. I mean, they do some cool stuff with extras.

When you buy films from Apple TV, they do go the extra mile and give you for some of them a title screen and some cool stuff but it's not like the dvd era it's not no and and no you're right in the packaging and well that is the interesting thing because at this point um steelbooks have become its own like entity in and of itself and so it's like almost like there's collectors people who just collect to get you know the steelbooks they don't really care about what's inside of it, which is fine. I'm happy they're still making physical media for that purpose. But yeah, you're right.

Those treats. I didn't know that. And I have a Superbad DVD and Blu-ray. I'm sure I probably have both of them. Good, you got the title sequence. It's that. Oh, that's amazing. Just watch the whole thing. That's kind of an Andy Kaufman move.

Like it never loops. That's awesome. Yeah, it never loops. I love that he did that, A. And I interviewed him once. Nice guy, weird guy, nice guy. loops i love that he did that a and i interviewed him once um nice guy weird guy nice guy i can believe that he would do that but i also love that they did that and that they put that like on that they were like oh we have extra storage on the disc i was gonna say that has to bloat it up doesn't it yeah i don't know what it did physically to

the disc itself but it was like you know in the era whenever it was like well we have this new thing it's it's like software like what can we we have this new thing. It's like software. Like, what can we do with this new API? How can we take this mashup and do something unique? Like back in the Web 2.0 days. That's what it reminds me of. Like, is this this pushing of the newfound technology available to not just the film itself to make the film, but like the treat for the lovers of the films, you know? Totally.

I feel like they kind of stopped doing that. Or maybe I quit paying attention because when the dvds first came out i was like it was all about the extras all about what the menu was going to look like and then over time it kind of felt like maybe like you said christina because they had so many to crank out that and maybe it was just the certain ones they're just like yeah it's standard it was so standard so much that it was kind of like i stopped looking for it but maybe there's still people that were doing it but less of them yeah well that's the thing is like you always had your standouts like the Criterion Collection, who have always been known. I mean, they go back to the Laserdisc era, which is before my time,

but some of the best early DVDs especially were just Laserdisc ports. And even today, some of the best commentary tracks and extras are from the Laserdisc era. Criterion always did a really good job with that stuff. And some studios would do a really good job too. But yeah, then I think it became a marketing thing. And then I think you're right, we all kind of became blind to it because it just became promotional. It wasn't about the treat. It was about, okay, let me advertise this other upcoming thing to you. Let me sell you something. Oh, yeah. And like required stuff to watch before you can get to the menu screen and stuff. Exactly.

Trailers as ads, yeah. And like required stuff to watch before you can get to the menu screen and stuff. Exactly. Trailers as ads, essentially. Essentially. And I think that kind of helped. And then that coincided, I think, with streaming becoming a more viable entity. on my computer legally through iTunes or Amazon service or the way most of us did, you know, off of, you know, BitTorrent and other things and watch it on my laptop. And I think that that just, you know, people got more used to and then streaming became a thing. I think people just became used to like, I just want to watch the film. I don't care about the treats anymore, which is a shame. Yeah, totally a shame. There's just so much good stuff out there even like uh polar express is not the best movie necessarily my kids love it it's strange like are you familiar with this movie

polar express i am and the book wide to the north pole of course this is the polar express tom hanks they did like live action motion i don't know what they did behind the scenes but like the faces on these characters are strange it was groundbreaking at the time, right? Yes. Yeah, at the time it was absolutely. It was one of the very first times they used motion cap and animation together that way. Yeah. And the behind the scenes of that was like phenomenal.

Like you may not really care because it looks a little weird comparative to how you can do it now. Like it's not like Ready Player One, for example, is a phenomenal animated version of like you almost can. Like it's not. Like Ready Player One for example is a phenomenal animated version of like. You almost can't tell it's not real. I mean you know it is because it looks so. Fantastical. Fantastical. Yeah probably. In comparison to Polar Express.

You take those two side by side. Polar Express looks super weird. Right. But at the time it was groundbreaking. Yeah. But the behind the scenes of like all the stuff involved there, or even like, what's his name who plays Dr. Strange? Benedict Cumberbatch, yeah.

I think he was a tiger or something like that in a film. And there's like a behind the scenes of like him with all the diodes on his face and like in this crotch. You would never expect this actor to do this thing. And like there's a behind the scenes of, I think he's a tiger, maybe in Jungle Book or something. I don't know. He was an animal. And he had an act out, this animal. And he was like vicious looking.

And he's got like this black suit on. He's got these wires hanging off of him and all the dabs in his face. But you just don't get that unless you have the extras. Right. Like unless you have the behind the scenes and the featurettes and stuff like that. Well, doesn't that stuff hit YouTube now?

Like there's other avenues that they do post. It can. It's not collected in one co-located place for you to keep forever. That's the problem. I agree. It's not a package. But that was the thing. And also there's less of an incentive for the studios like to make them, right?

Because they're like, okay, well, people will stream it or do it without it, with or without it. Once they can get data on how many people are listening to these things how many people are watching these things this is a good software analogy too like on the one hand it's really great to get that telemetry because you know what's being used on the other hand it can kind of be a curse a little bit because there are these things that might only be used by a certain subset of users but are really beloved and if you over index on data which netflix famously does do you know i think you miss out on that like they even had for a period of time and i don't know if they're still available i found a way to rip some of them at some at one point but it was

difficult but they some of the original netflix original series they had some audio commentary tracks that they actually that netflix had you remember for the pilot of House of Cards, the director of that pilot episode did a really good commentary track and they had some commentary tracks, I think for some of the Arrested Development stuff when that came out. But then over time, like that sort of thing disappears and you have this rot and this loss of this great commentary.

I mean, it might not be that important, but it's just, you know, seeing how something was done and, um, the people cared enough to share the process of how it was made, you know? Oh yeah.

Like it's not going to appeal to everyone, but to the real lovers out there, it does. And for me, I mean, I, the reason I get so romantic about the DVD era is, as I said,

like I always loved movies as a kid, but there were only so many of them you could get. Not everything was available on home video and, you know, tapes were expensive and bulky. And then suddenly we had this way where everything, things that had been out of print for years, for decades was just available. And I felt like I had this whole world opened up to me, both seeing films I'd never seen before or couldn't see, but also being able to, you know, find out these tidbits about how it was done. And I just, it makes me sad that 15-year-old Christina in the future, living in 2023, wouldn't have that same access because it's not there the

same way. It's just not. Well, access is a very interesting point because so far we've been talking about this in terms of collectors and film lovers there's a very real group of people who are also losing their access to a large quantity of content because you know streaming is here but it's not evenly distributed i mean i moved outside of the suburbs into the sticks a little while. And I actually had to go from streaming back to DVDs. This is 2018 time range until we got better access. And I could cancel that and go back to streaming. And I was barely outside of the city. I mean, there's a lot of people in rural areas

who they got the DVD service, not because they wanted the extras necessarily, but it's like that's how they get their content. They just wanted to get it. No, you're dead on. It's easy for everybody to believe that wide broadband is everywhere, but it's not. That last mile thing, especially rural internet, especially in the United States, is a real problem. But it's also a problem in parts of the world that are harder to get to, like Australia, New Zealand, where they're just now starting to get fiber-like speeds. And yeah, these things, it's a lot to process. I mean, this is one of the reasons why I think Microsoft was smart,

and Sony as well, but they were smart to still have the disk era for this last generation of consoles, even though it would have been very easy to just go digital only. Because some of those cases, you're talking about titles that, you know, one title might take up half of your available memory, downloading patches and whatnot. But, you know, if you live someplace where your internet is not really, really great, you're not going to be able to play that game, let alone do online multiplayer. Right. Netflix did release some numbers in the run- to this. And I did some back of

the napkin math. They said that their revenue from this division specifically had gone in the last year from 200 million annual revenue to 100 million. So like literally cut in half. So you can see that trend was just dropping precipitously. But even at 100 million dollars, call it 10 bucks a subscriber. I'm not sure what the actual numbers are. I mean, we're talking about 10 million subscribers still at that point. I mean, that's not an insignificant amount of humans. That's a lot of people. No. Did you see the New York Times story that they did interviewing the people who worked at the plant where they sent out the disks?

Mm-mm. I'll find it, and I'll link it to you in this chat. But it was really interesting because they had this nondescript building in Los Angeles that they purposely did not make easily available because they didn't want people to come in and do it. And it's interesting, some of the people who work out of this facility where they've been mailing out the disks have been working there for 15 years or more. And what's great when you open the article, and I'm sure that the guys will put this in the show notes, there's this great gif, yes, that's how I say it, of how the machine

works and how it would basically just put in the disks and put everything out to be mailed. But yeah, this was a really great kind of reflection. They show kind of the inner workings of the whole thing, how this was done. It's a lot of these folks they're losing their jobs too which is sad but it's a you know it's a interesting kind of testament to something that

the employees have a more sanguine attitude lorraine segura started at netflix in 2008 and used to rip open envelopes 650 envelopes an hour when automation came she was one of the few employees who traveled to the facility in Fremont to learn how to run the machines and pass that training on to others. Now she runs the floor. But yeah, ripping open 650 envelopes an hour. That's insane. Can you imagine? That's some skill right there. That's some speed. How many do you do an hour, Adam? I got speed, but not that kind of speed. I bust through a few at a time. At least 10.

That was the limit they would let me get to at some point. If you called ahead, you can actually go to a 10 out of the time limit. Whereas on the web, you were limited to four. Yeah, that's right. If you show up to this warehouse in LA, you might be able to get a whole bunch of them. That I do have to say, I do like the way they've done this. Like they've handled it really well. It's been really classy. Yeah, they handled handled it well and that's nice to see yeah and honestly you know they tried to do away with this decade ago with quickster and that debacle

remember that oh yeah quickster i forgot all about it so you just said quickster they tried to rename it what does quickster remind me again so what what happened was, yeah, Retasteings had a rare failure where he decided that they were going to split the DVD and the streaming services and they were going to call the new thing Quickster. And this was in October of 2011. And I think that it lasted like less than a week because people were so outraged in 2011

by the idea of splitting the by mail and the streaming service. They were going to split into two different services and they were like, no, we can't do this. There was a wide outrage. The name was derided because it was spelled Q-W-I-K-S-T-E-R. So it was terrible naming as well. So it was announced in September of 2011 and then it was canceled in October of 2011. But it was just a complete cluster of epic proportions. People were so upset. And so I think that that's one of the reasons they probably held off on getting rid of this for a long time. Because when they did finally split

the two businesses, like I said, I was paying for a while and then they just slowly just like stopped charging me because I wasn't renting out discs anymore. And I forgot about it. And then I thought for a while, I was like, well, maybe I should resubscribe. And I was like, Christina, you don't ever take any discs out. You just buy them. Like if you can find it, you just buy it. So I didn't. Yeah.

That's like Apple removing the microphone jack, you know, like that's way early, wasn't it? That's right. Jeez Louise. Well, I mean, I think this was the note, right? Was that this was they were too early they were making the right decision but they were doing it in 2011 where at that time the internet situation was not nowhere near anywhere close to what it is now exactly it was nowhere near ready i mean that was when they were still trying to do

the cdn deals with the isps um which they've been successful at where you know the isps would have certain numbers of caching servers available to stream content more efficiently like the top 100 movies or whatever they weren't even doing that yet and so that was way too early for them to split and rightfully they backed away from that

but the stock went down by 25% or something like it was a massive just complete free fall people were so angry it was a massive like just like I remember that fully freefall like people were so angry it's the first time I can ever remember anyone being mad at Netflix for anything up to that point yeah because they were so beloved they were yeah that was yeah What's up, friends? There's so much going on in the data and machine learning space. It's just hard to keep up.

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That's N-E-O, the number four, j.com slash notes. What about Redbox? Redbox is weird, right? So I don't know who owns them right now. They've been sold a bunch of times. Have they been sold a couple times? Yep. I'm going to pay attention to the business aspect of it, uh i like red box because i can go get it like right then and there i didn't do too many like where i didn't need a netflix subscription before where i was

like constantly watching and red box was on demand no having to wait right that was the great thing right you will never be able to guess who owns because i did actually know this and i forgot who the owner was you will never be able to guess who the, because I did actually know this and I forgot who the owner was. You will never be able to guess who the owner of Redbox is. If you're wildest dreams, you'll never get it. It's Mark Zuckerberg. No. I was going to say, we'll pick the top five. It's not Bezos.

Reed Hastings? No, I don't know. Who owns it? Blockbuster. Chicken Soup for the Soul. Chicken Soup for the Soul? What is that? So it was a book series, and then that became a consumer goods

and media company and that became a publishing thing and then they acquired redbox in 2022 for 375 million wow um which was down from where it was redbox was an interesting thing like a lot of people blame netflix for the death ofbuster. I actually think it was Redbox more than Netflix. Netflix definitely helped speed it up because Blockbuster was bloated and had a bad customer service thing and whatnot. But then they did introduce online ordering and whatnot

in the early 2000s because I used to use it and abuse their system. I would play both of them off against one another and Blockbuster also had video games that you could rent and you could return it to like a local store, but they just didn't have the logistics engine the way that Netflix did. But I really think it was Redbox

that kind of cemented the death of Blockbuster because to your point, it was so much more convenient. You know, you could just drive up and pick up a movie and grab it and go. And the same thing to rent it. And it was a buck. You know, it was like, okay, I just want to watch this and go.

I don't care. And that was, I think, in that era when, again, like maybe the extra features and things didn a buck. And I was like, okay, I just want to watch this and go. I don't care. And that was, I think, in that era when, again, like maybe the extra features and things didn't matter and you're just like, I just, this is, we're almost at streaming. Streaming is almost a reality. We're not quite there. And this is the great kind of perfect thing

to tide us over in the middle. Speaking of a bygone era, I mean, when I was a kid, I lived at Blockbuster. We would go there all the time and just walk around. Because you'd spend more time looking for the movie than you would watching the movie. It's so crazy, right? How things change like that. You would go to a physical building and look at movies that you might not even watch any of them. You watch one or two. It was awesome, though. It was so much fun. And they had candy there you could buy.

All sorts of stuff. Yeah. No, the box art mattered, right? Like what was on the back of the description, all that stuff mattered because, you know, you didn't know. You'd have to talk to the guy at the store. We had blockbusters and stuff, but my home video store was actually called Home Video and it was like this two-story, huge video store. And they had like a marionette Pinocchio. I remember that.

And they had a massive collection of stuff, like stuff that you couldn't get anywhere else and they had video games too but they had this uh promo they started it was like five movies for five dollars for five nights if it was not a new release and they would have like a seven for seven for seven and when my mom was in graduate school she would take me to home video during the summers and I would get a bunch of Nintendo and Super Nintendo games and I would get a bunch of VHS tapes. And that's what I would do while she was in graduate school during the days. I would amuse myself by watching the collected works of Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. And I'm like nine, I'm like nine or 10 at this point. Those are advanced for a nine-year-old. No, I was super into it because I would get into something, I would talk, but that's the thing though. You talk to the video store guys, and I was a very small nine-year-old. At nine, I probably looked six. So I'm sure that they thought it was very odd that they're having these high-level

conversations about movies with someone who looks like she's six years old, but they would give you advice because that's what they did all day. It was like, you know, the movie clerks, you know, it was that sort of thing where there's these guys spending all day talking about movies with customers and you would get suggestions for things and like say, oh, well, you've liked this. You should watch this. And I would go, oh, I like this. Let me get all the movies by this director. And what and what would you do you would have there was like an almanac some sort of book that someone had of like all sorts of movie reviews I remember that's what I would use is my proto IMDB to find out like what were all the movies you know directed by a certain person and then I would go to the video store and and find

them all my small town place was called Elmo's. Elmo's. Yeah, Elmo's was the last name of these folks. And it was a computer repair shop and a DVD. Well, actually part of DVDs was VHS. Right. And they also would deliver food to you. Oh my gosh. Wow. So it was like the great mixture of like a restaurant that delivered.

Proto DoorDash. I was going to say postmates is really what it was that's amazing right legit you can order a sub or a hoagie or whatever however you want to call it or like spaghetti dinner that was my favorite was two meatballs and spaghetti dinner and two movies and they would deliver it to your house 10 miles away classic amazing right that's so cool and if you had a computer issue you can take computer in and they would sell you one or help you fix it. It was gaming. It was the coolest.

Elmo's sounds like the greatest place in the world. Yeah, it does. Elmo's, Brownsville, Pennsylvania. If you're ever there, go to Elmo's. Elmo's.co. Are they still around? Elmo's.co is the domain name, yeah. Wow.

So home video did not have a good ending. It was very sad and awkward. So Blockbuster started to encroach and open bigger and bigger stores. And they were being forced out. And so you notice they always have an adult section. The adult section started getting bigger and bigger. And then suddenly it was like the entire second floor. And then it was like more and more.

And then one day, home video became like an adult shop. I felt like that was the ending of my childhood when the video store became an adult store. They really found their niche. You know, they found their niche. What's behind that door over there? What's through there? That's exactly what I was thinking. I was like, what is all this stuff? You know, I didn't understand.

And then, you know, as the DVD era went on and they hit harder times, they had to lean more into that. But no, really, that felt like the death of my childhood when my home video store became something else. But Elmo sounds like the greatest place in the world, genuinely. Yeah, it was super cool. Good people. And I went to school with the son of the dad who and their family ran the thing. That's cool. Family run. Yeah. i love that i just

deliver spaghetti and meatballs to your house i'm curious though if like if this meat is dying though what happens with red box like does red box go away what do you think is going to happen there they're kiosks well they've shut down a lot of them i think it depends i mean they'll still be around for the big releases but they have far fewer than they used to i don't know i mean it's interesting there's always this chance of having kind of a resurgence. It will never be as big, but like you see what's happened with vinyl. You know, vinyl now outsells CDs significantly

and it's still a fraction of what it was at its peak. But I don't know. I think that's why Redbox was sold to Chicken Soup for the Soul, which makes no sense is that the whoever owned it was like yep we probably need to get out of this space yeah well what's required you got tech required you have to have a blu-ray or a dvd player so there's a requirement of like sony and all the big manufacturers of hardware to keep making the hardware or repairing the hardware

so there's a requirement of sorts like whereas the other content, are they still making them? Like when Dune 2 comes out, will there be a Blu-ray that'll have stuff on it and stuff? Yeah, usually. What's interesting for TV shows, a lot of times is they'll release a DVD but not a Blu-ray version. And they'll release an HD digital version that you can buy. And a DVD version on disc, you know, it's in standard definition, is usually widesccreen but not a blu-ray version which is really weird um there's must be some contingent still of people who are buying tv shows on dvd probably for the you know internet connectivity reasons that we talked about earlier right but it's interesting that i've noticed that that there's i would have

assumed that everything would have gone blu-ray at this point because the cost cannot be any different and the master that you're getting it off of is going to be high definition anyway but weirdly you still see in some cases things coming out on dvd not blu-ray which is odd i get upset when i rip discs and it's not friendly like there might be like 35 of the title and literally there's not 35 of them on there. Oh, they're office gate and stuff to make you mad. Right. So when you open, I use Make MKV like most people probably does.

Me too. I bought a license for it and everything because it's amazing software. But like when you, for example, the one reason I was upset by it was Cabin in the Woods. I think I can get it to go down. Do we want to go down? I could not rip it. It just would not work. It would never work.

There's 35 of the main title in there. You might be able to rip it eventually, but scenes would move in the film so much so that it ruined the film this is like not worth it like i just wonder in an era where there's still people who care about keeping i suppose like is there a way to to have friendliness i suppose to the to the rippers i'm not even sure what you call folks like us like are we rippers what what are we collectors to be able to have that copy forever on my own disc so that I can, like, what about handing it down to your people, like your lineage?

I think like collections. Like I got my dad's record collection. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Like I have his vinyl. That's awesome. How are you going to get my movies in the future? My kids. Is that necessarily malice though?

Or could it be incompetence? What do you mean? Like Cabin in the Woods. Like the way that they did that. Oh, in that case, it's though, or could it be incompetence? What do you mean? Like Cabin in the Woods, the way that they did that. Oh, in that case, I can't imagine it's not part of the plan of DRM type stuff. Yeah, it's on purpose. They're making it hard on you on purpose. Yeah, for sure. It's definitely not Plex friendly.

Yeah. Are you familiar with Kaleidoscape? Mm-mm. Okay, so the company has a really storied history but basically they make very high-end movie players and servers for like the types of people who have millions of dollars to spend on their home theater system and will be able to buy like the you know super expensive crestron like controlled you know audio and lighting and everything um setups And basically these are servers. And many times they are actually server-sized things that can act as a movie player for 4K UHD.

And there's various ways you can get the content imported. But what they used to have, their original product, and they were sued for this, was that they would let you take, it was very user-friendly, and they would let you take a disc that you owned and drop it into their system and it would rip it and rip everything perfectly and it would put it in the

library just like a flex for you and then you would have it available and um everyone loved it but they were sued and they had to change how they worked it to a certain amount um it's amazing that they're still in business i'm very happy for them know what? I can just say it now because enough time has passed, but I had a meeting with the then head of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment probably a decade ago, maybe a little bit more than that. We were talking about some of the issues around voodoo and movies anywhere, Disney's platform, which at the time was, I think, called Magic Key and whatnot. We were talking about whether or not Warner Brothers was going to sign on or not. And he was talking to me about Kaleidoscape

and he was like, I love this so much. He was like, but we're suing them. So I can't tell anybody that I have this. And that was the guy, it was Kevin Tashihara who wound up becoming the president of Warner Brothers Entertainment, like the chairman and CEO of Warner Brothers. He had to resign because of some stuff.

But this was maybe two months before he was promoted. And he was talking to me about how everybody in Hollywood who was suing this company, all of the executives had these things in their houses and were using them. That to me kind of represents like the perfect, like the friction point between these two things where you have people who love this stuff so much,

and then you have people who just only see the business goals and want to make it as difficult as possible for people to do the right thing. Cutthroat. And to me, it seems so unnecessary, because only the people who really care are going to want to go through all the effort to preserve things and have it in that quality. And the people who just want to rip and pirate things will always find a way to do that.

For sure. To me, it feels so stupid to spend your time putting in this DRM stuff for Cabin in the Woods when you could just not and let people who have bought it legally watch it in a way that will be efficient so they can watch it on their couch or they can watch it 3,000 miles away if they're on a trip on their iPad. Who cares? it, you know, 3,000 miles away if they're, you know, on a trip on their iPad. Like, who cares? It's mine. You know, I gave you the money for it. That's what I did recently. We went to St. Louis recently for the final Strangeloop conference. And part of my trip, I pulled down a few episodes, of course, Jared, of Silicon Valley. Of course.

From Plex onto my iPhone so that I could watch it on the way. And I paid for the discs. I own the seasons. And I ripped it onto my Plex server and I bought those hard drives and I maintained that hardware and I installed all the Linux and all the things.

It's all for the love. You're going out of your way more than 99% of people would. Yeah. Because you care. I mean, I feel the same way. Look, there's a lot of content on my Plex server that I'm not going to pretend like I have the squeaky clean origins of it, but there's a whole bunch of stuff there that does. I'd always joked,

I was like, if anybody ever wanted to, I know that this wouldn't be a defense, but if anybody wanted to sue me for copyright infringement or something, I would just, you know, card in all of the media that I bought, you know, and, and just be like, okay, this is the person you're suing, right? This is who you're going after. I was showing my box of 4k movies, like trying to even pick it up. It's so heavy. It's so heavy. You can't even lift it. Wouldn't that be an awesome scene in a movie though, where you like roll into the courthouse and you're like just like dropping them everywhere like look who you're suing they just splatter out onto the floor and the jury just starts applauding you you know exactly i spent more on this than i spent on my car yeah right drm has always to me been just a cat and mouse game that was never going to be

worth it for the cat i guess for the drm enforcer like it just never was going to be worth it for the cat, I guess, for the DRM enforcer. Like it just never was going to be worth it for them. No. And you know what happened? It went away for a long time when you could stream a lot of stuff and when streaming was like easy. Now, of course, they're raising prices, which makes sense. Prices should go up a little bit. I think they're some of the streaming companies are getting a little ridiculous, but they're raising prices and they're restricting how you can log in with things. Look, if Netflix wants to enforce not giving your password to 500 different people, I get it. But I pay you for X number of users a month. I pay them whatever the highest amount

of money you can pay Netflix is for their 4K account. I should not have to make sure that my Fire TV stick, which I keep in my suitcase and I never take out because I use it when traveling, I shouldn't have to connect that to my home network every three months just so the IP address is the same as where I live so that you don't cut off access. When you do things like that, that's when I'm going to go back to you know popcorn time and stuff like that like that's when that happens again right it's customer hostile yeah because when everything was less customer hostile the piracy problems went away like andy bowell of waxy.org fame every year he used to track like how long it would take for the oscar screeners to leak online and he had to stop doing it because basically the problem kind

of went away. The studios kind of won because they'd gotten everything online and made it easier for the people who wanted to watch the stuff to watch the stuff. And that's a win. But then you ruin all that by adding in all these layers and being customer hostile and making it difficult for people to do things like watch Cabin in the Woods without the scenes being messed up just because you want to watch it in a different location. Knives Out. That's another one too. I was upset about that.

Good movie. I suspect foul play and eliminated no suspects. I can only watch it by putting my disc back into the... So I've got to maintain a Blu-ray player, which is not the worst ever, but I've got to like,

it's now a hardware requirement and I have to have it plugged into the wall. So I have to maintain one outlet for it in the many outlets I have to have in my own theater. You know, I've got to like maintain certain things because I can't do things in the Plex way, so to speak. So the chapters are out of order. When you rip it, the chapters get out of order when you rip it the chapters get

out of order is that how it plays out yeah like it's strange because uncut gems is another one i gotta keep putting my disc back in to re-watch that so i re-watch the movie less even i get to enjoy the film less because it's not convenient anymore it's unfortunate it just it really blows my blood like in particular uncut gems it's just a scene switch it's like for whatever reason it cuts to the other scene quickly and comes back to the normal flow of the film. But for whatever reason, it happens in Knives Out, happens in Cabin in the Woods. And it's just a, I don't even know how to describe why they would even do it aside from you can still rip the film, but it's just out of order. If that's on purpose and not just like a software glitch

as a way of like make mkv getting around the drm and that's a an artifact of you know breaking the drm if that's on purpose somebody is cruel in that in those organizations like have you googled that because i feel like that's something that somebody probably figured out somewhere i was gonna say maybe there's like an update list of something some way you could like yeah that's what i was thinking the same thing i was like maybe there's some sort of xml file that can be appended to something so that it'll play things back the right way you really gotta want it then right i mean you can like yeah but you you don't want to have that blu-ray player forever right like you might want it right yeah and maybe there's a way and this is where i get super nerdy i'm like oh there probably

is a list and maybe there's a way you could have that list text file or something, check it to update. Exactly. And, you know, run in the background as a daemon when you're loading your Flex server. I don't know. But that would annoy me. That would be nice if that would happen. Enthusiasts find a way, you know, like life on Jurassic Park. It finds a way.

We gotta do something about this. I'm pretty sure our washing machine is pregnant. I don't even know how that's scientifically possible. Life finds a way. So if you're listening to this and you know what Adam's going through, because if it's on Knives Out and it's on multiple movies doing this, like somebody's been mad enough that they figured out how to get this thing to work right. And I've never been so committed to where I go and find this list.

Yeah, I was going to say, no, those are both Lionsgate films. So that's the same studio, which means they're using the same stuff. See, she's on it. Look at that. You know the studios. Okay, so you're really a film buff. Yeah, no, I didn't even have to look that up. That's the embarrassing thing about that is that I did not even have to look that up.

I was like, no, they're both. First, I said Paramount. I was like, no, it's Lionsgate. They're both Lionsgate films. I will say, though, I'm very happy that 4K discs never have that happen. Yes. Never. So when I rip a 4K disc, and that's why I happily buy 4K.

I will buy it all day long. Because one, I get 4K and an 8-ep. So if I want to, I can skip transcoding or I can have both versions of it or whatever. It never happens with 4K content. So I just like Top Gun recently. I watched it for the first time in my own home theater i waited yeah uh i have a 120 inch screen oh my god christina it's a microperf it's a um stewart screen okay custom size for my room 120 inches i've got uh do you have a kaleidoscope thing no but i looked it up and it's 13 000 well they start at like 4 000 but yeah yeah well this one is 22 terabytes it's the kaleidoscape strata c plus terra prime bundle that's what this is for 1399

yeah it's it's a lot it's for a very specific class of user yeah I'm not like a million dollar person by any means but I definitely enjoy it to the point where I put a screen I got a 4k projector you'll drop some coin on it I was going to say what projector do you have because your custom screen sounds great but what projector do you have it is if I can recall correctly

it's the Epson let me look it up real quick yeah I was going to say Epson makes good projectors from what i understand ls 12 000 is what it is the epson ls 12 000 is a 4k native pro uhd laser projector and i got on a decent discount too it's like four grand that's a discount yeah i was gonna say i'm looking this up right now i'm like i'm like yeah okay this is a five thousand dollar projector like this is not a joke yeah it should have been five and it being four it's a legit home theater i was gonna say like this would be very similar to what they would have in like a movie theater well pretty close and i have theater seats you got seven seats in my theater oh my god i'm just

bragging i'm bragging a little bit now you're flexing i love this for you this is amazing this is awesome and i have a a Denon head unit for the receiver. I've got Klipsch THX speakers in wall, one behind the screen, the center channel, and it's vertical versus horizontal, sadly. Left, right, and I've got one pair of Atmos and two subs. Two subs? Oh, yeah. One for each foot?

I mean, what's the point of having two subs? Having been a single sub owner in the past i will never be a single sub owner never going back the way to go is dual subs yeah it's like left and right it's so cool god i wonder how much it would cost i live in austin so if ever you're in the town stop by i will definitely stop by but you should talk to the alamo draft house people about this i wonder how much it would cost for you to be able to get in with the studios so that you could be hooked up to whatever the movie theater chain system is of getting the files so you could just natively show stuff. Hook me up. Start charging admission.

I was going to say, you should contact the Alamo Drafthouse people. They might be able to help you because I know that the cost to rent out a theater is way less than I thought it would be. And so it might be one of those things where for occasionally you might be able to be like, hey, if I want to spend 200 bucks, I could get a movie that's in theaters and actually watch it in my own theater while it's out there. You might be able to swing that. That would be cool for a birthday or something. That would be cool. Yeah, it would be cool because your setup sounds like it's probably would be within spec i'm guessing right of what some of the films that they deliver are it is uh you know i only did that after this is like after many many years of my life dreaming like i didn't

just suddenly be like let me just spend all this money doing this like i i started reading crushfield magazines at like 10 years old or whatever and i learned all about home theater and gear and equipment and channels and all these different things through crutchfield uh the crutchfield brand is amazing i still buy like almost everything i can from crutchfield my tvs i buy from crutchfield most speakers through them my subs were from crutchfield so sometimes you price things out because like i'm gonna spend two grand more when i can get it for a grand less or whatever like i'm not gonna do every possible thing but i love crush field they're always amazing it's a great brand they're not sponsoring this of course crushfield.com but they're amazing and i learned everything and so i've been dreaming since i was super young

about over my life eventually getting to like a home theater level. I remember like with my very first credit card, the JC Penney credit card, I bought a frappy little 5.1 system, like JVC or something like that from, from JC Penney on my credit card. And that was my first setup. JVC makes good stuff, man. But over the years,

just over time incrementing to better and better and better. Yeah. You've built up. Yeah. No, that's amazing. And I love this and I love that you've built this out. I've always wanted something like that.

I've never been as dedicated as you are to wanting to like make that a goal, but I love that you've been able to do this. That's amazing. Like, I love that. And, and also like as somebody who also 10 years old reading Crutchfield and loving all that stuff,

like it's, that's really cool to see somebody who, you know, as a kid, like you wanted these things. Now you have it. And you have like literally when people say, Oh, a home theater system no you're like no i actually have like uh you know i actually have a home theater like it's pretty close it's actually a theater

my kids so i got a seven-year-old and a three-year-old and they sit down with me and watch films not all things like we'll watch the grinch and like kid stuff the super mario brothers movies on there we just got the 4k version of it recently because we bought it through Apple TV when it first came out We could not wait and be watching the theater. That was amazing I'm like these kids love that film and I love things was just amazing Amazing version of it and so we bought it on Apple TV and then it came out on disc and then we finally got the 4k Version of it so we have that on Plex now, thankfully And it's just so amazing to watch 4K content on a 4K native laser projector on a phenomenal screen.

That's not what the show's about, but it was pretty awesome. And I designed it all. I didn't obviously design the screen, but the whole room is I chose every component specifically. After many years of research and what I can afford and what would fit in the room and what would make sense and all that good stuff. It's been a labor of love to get to that point because it takes work. So I'm here with Ian Withrow, VP of Product Management at Sentry. So Ian, you've got a developer-first application monitoring platform. It shows you what's slowed down to the line of code. That's very developer-friendly and is making performance

monitoring actionable. What are you all doing that's new? What's novel there? Traditionally in errors, what's the strength of Sentry is we've taken not a stream of errors and said, hey, go look at this, like all these error codes are flowing into says, we actually look at them, we try and fingerprint them and say, hey, we've actually grouped all these things. And then we give you everything you need within Sentry to go and solve that error and close that out. And that's, I think, driven tons of value for our users. And traditionally, if you look at performance, it's not that thing. It's looking at certain golden signals, setting up

lots of alerts, maintaining those alerts, grooming those alerts, and then detecting them. And then maybe you have a war room and you try and look at traces, or maybe you realize, oh, it's this engineering team that owns it. And maybe they'll look at logs, whatever they have available. Performance is very rotated on detection and then isolating to where the problem may exist. And root causing is often an exercise left to the user. Good performance products provide a lot of context and details that an experienced engineer or DevOps professional can kind of parse and make sense of and try and get to a hypothesis of what went wrong. But it's not like that

century error experience where it's like, here's a stack trace, here's all the tags, oh, we see it's like this particular segment of code, and Ian did the commit that changed that code, and do you want to fire a dear issue and assign it to Ian? It's not like that crisp kind of tight workflow that changed that code. And do you want to fire your issue and assign it to Ian? It's not that crisp, kind of tight workflow that we have here.

This is breadcrumbs. Right. And we said, hey, maybe there's no reason why we couldn't do this for performance. Let's try. Okay. So you took a swing. You tried. Describe to me how that trial works.

If I go to my dashboard now and I enable APM on my application, what are the steps? Largely because we kind of encourage you to go and set up transaction information when you set up Sentry. You probably, as a user, probably don't need to do much. But if you skip that step, you do need to configure to send that data in your SDK. And what happens is we start now looking at that information.

And then when we see a what we call a performance issue, we fingerprint that. And we put that into your issues feed, which is already where you're looking for error issues, right? It's not a separate inbox. This is the same inbox, the same inbox. Yeah. Now, we obviously give logical filters. And if you just want to look at those, we do that. And for newer users sometimes we detect hey you've probably never seen this before we can kind of we do things because we know we build for for math market that bring your attention to it but it's the same workflow you have for errors today so you don't have to learn something new uh to take advantage of these things so you asked the experience so

last fall we did the experiment the first one, which we called M plus one. And we didn't know how it was go, honestly. But people liked it. Like we kind of know people like it when they start tweeting and saying nice things about it. And so, yeah, it got traction. Very cool. So if your team is looking for a developer first APM tool to use, check out Century. Use our code to get six months of the team plan for free.

Use the code changelogmedia. Yes, changelogmedia. Six months free of the team plan. Check them out at Sentry.io. Again, Sentry.io. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.I-O. I did want to ask you though. So you mentioned like buying stuff on Apple TV. So I still do this because they have sales all the time. And I am nothing if not someone who spends money indiscriminately on stupid stuff. Do you also buy digital copies of things? Because I find that I do. For things that I really love, I get the 4K UHD disc and I'll rip it. But for a number

of things, it'll just be easier if it's five bucks or something to get it on Apple TV. Because I find their 4K, it's not obviously as good as watching it ripped. But I find the quality is, in many cases, if I'm not, because I don't have a setup like yours, it's indistinguishable from what I could have. So do you buy any digital copies of anything or are you strictly physical? I'll buy digital copies when I

can't wait, essentially. So in the case of Super Mario Brothers, we wanted to watch that again because the kids just loved it so much. So we're going to rent it. And I think to rent it was $20 and to buy it was $25, I think. So I'm like, why would I not just spend $5 more to own it digitally? And I use Apple TV exclusively in most cases. However, I will say I recently bought an NVIDIA Shield.

And I think that's pretty awesome too. The Shield is better than an Apple TV. The NVIDIA Shield is a great device. That's what's in my theater. And it's pretty awesome. an Apple TV. The Nvidia Shield is a great device. That's what's in my theater and it's pretty awesome. Yeah, the Nvidia Shield is a great device and what's nice about it is that you can use the Apple TV app on it, the Android app on it. That way you can still access all of your Apple content that way. Yes. I was happy when Apple did that they were like exclusively against any other platforms and they they realized well we're now a production house we need to be everywhere so distribution

is key right yes we're not just the device itself we're also the production house so we have to be everywhere we have to be everywhere no when they made that that distinction i was so happy too because i was somebody who's like i mean mean, the Movies Now service that Disney owns and a lot of studios participate in, but not all, not Lionsgate, not Paramount. There are a couple of other smaller ones. It means that your libraries will reflect back on one another.

So if you buy it on Google Play or on Amazon or on the Microsoft thing, it'll also be in your iTunes library and vice versa, which is nice. But there would be a ton of stuff that I would have. Obviously, the 4K stuff would all be in nice but there would be a ton of stuff that i would have obviously the 4k stuff would all be in itunes and there'd be some stuff that'd only be in itunes or apple tv whatever and i was like okay i don't want to travel with an apple tv for this stuff you know

i'm gonna have to find a way to rip this and then i was like when as you said when they realized they were a production house too and they had to have wider distribution and they brought that to all of the other devices, I was like, okay, thank you. This is good. Yeah. Here's the things I concern myself with is I recall an interview with Matt Damon talking about the change of the film business. Essentially, the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream. And technology has just made that obsolete. The movies that we used to make,

you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release. And six months later, you'd get a whole nother chunk. It would be like reopening the movie almost. And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make i have to split everything i get with the exhibitor right the people who own the movie theaters so i would have to make a hundred

million dollars before i got into profit the idea of making a hundred million dollars on a story about like this love affair between these two people yeah i love everyone in the movie but that's a that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies the kind of movies that i loved and and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter there's a couple things i worry about one how does like the end of physical media change humanity's relationship with the content both for games and for films etc but then also how does that really change long-term the business of filmmaking because you have to essentially come out you only invest in blockbusters yeah or you kind of get this position where you can only really

bet on the winner so you take less there's less innovation there's less risk so you you sort of have transformers which isn't a bad film but like it's only about blow them up car chases killing people or whatever like there's like one shot to get it right essentially going back to the well and just doing what's safe every time right yeah exactly and you get rinse repeat and you miss out on things no i think you're exactly right and i mean i would argue that this is one of the reasons why netflix uh has you know stagnated a little bit is that they do everything from a data driven perspective and not from more of an artistic perspective. And so if you just follow the numbers and you just give everybody the cookie cutter Marvel stuff like that's great.

You can make all the money off of it. But where does that leave those small films that could actually grow into something huge? Right. Like some of the most beloved films of all time took a long time for people to really get to know and love. Like The Wizard of Oz was not a hit when it was released. It lost money for Warner Brothers, actually. It wasn't a flop, but it was not the hit that they thought it was going to be. And it was only when it was re-released in the 40s and then in the 50s that it became this cultural, iconic thing where everybody in the world knows it, right?

Yeah, I have the same concerns you do. I think it was on Hot Ones when Matt Damon was talking about that. Yeah, that's what it was, right. And it gave a perfect answer but i do worry about that because we used to have movies with 20 million dollar budgets and we don't anymore it's either micro micro budget or super huge you know it's like you know like two or 200 million like there's no in between and that sucks because there are a lot of really good smaller films that and that's how you get new ip right like the barbie movie i don't know if either

of you saw it was really fantastic not yet but that was even though it was taking existing ip it obviously was also kind of a new thing and the screenplay is fantastic and how they were able to thread the needle between being obviously a consumeristic kind of play, but also winking and nodding and kind of making fun of the very thing that is, you know, at its core really worked so well, nailed it. But like that film, I think the budget was like maybe a hundred million, which two decades ago would have seemed huge, but now it was kind of, you know, more small and it's gone on to be the biggest grocer of the year. And it's one of those things where if you just saw the pitch and if it didn't have like Barbie attached to it, if you just saw the pitch of the storyline, I don't know if that would get greenlit. And that's disappointing because obviously the audience is there for it.

Right. Yeah. You mentioned Knives Out earlier. Like that's another example. That was a smaller film. And that was a surprise hit for Lionsgate. They did not expect that to be the hit that it was I'm surprised it was such a good storyline I mean it's just a great storyline right but again this is an original story and studios used to always have the thing they're kind of like venture capitalists where they would

okay it's going to be the one big hit like the five big hits we get a year will pay for everything else and that's just you know the cost of doing business and now it's like there's this expectation that everything has to be the big hit and you don't get to take chances and look sometimes the smaller films flop and they don't do anything sometimes they wind up having a second or third life and sometimes you know they turn out to be the silence of the lambs which was released by a studio in bankruptcy in March, the worst time of year to release a film. Yeah, it had an Oscar winner attached to it, but the storyline was not something you would think would sell to audiences. And it goes on to be, at the time, an incredibly high grosser for an R-rated film and, you know, wins massive Academy Awards

and is like just one of the considered one of the greatest films of all time. And again, bankrupt studio, you know, put that out like there's a part of the business that you can optimize for. And that makes sense. But there's some stuff that just I think just happens and you have to take artistic chances on and that have to be about more than money. And that's to me what has always made movies great is that there can be room for both. And I worry that we're getting away from having room for both. Yeah. This is the beginning of no physical media.

Yeah. Right? I think so. Like, Netflix DVD has been the largest distributor in the last decade, probably, five years at least, of physical media. Probably decades, honestly. Okay. I mean, I know it's been decades long. I mean, because you can still purchase. But distribution. I'm saying it would be probably them and Redbox. physical media probably decades honestly okay i mean i know it's been decades long just i mean

because you could still purchase but distribution i'm saying it'd be probably them in red box right like there would be the two that would be vying for it in terms of yeah who would be buying the most copies of stuff it'd be those two yeah i still stream too like i'm not watching everything i ever watch on plex it's i'm not that kind of person like must be ripped must be on plex to watch no it's not like that. But for the things like Silicon Valley, Jared, you know how often I reference this. If I didn't have that on Plex... How often do you reference it? I would be upset with life.

To be in a world where you cannot own Seinfeld all the seasons, that's right. Yes. To go back and watch, for whatever reason, but Larry David's thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yes, Curb Your Enthusiasm. I'm not fully through that because I haven't watched it all but I went and bought it all my case you know what I'm gonna watch I want to watch it on my own time the

studios will eventually take it away they want to control it so while I can I'm gonna get it on Plex but you know this is the end of it though this is like the beginning of the end of that era and it's sad it is it is sad homicide life on the street which is one of the greatest tv shows of all time is not available streaming anywhere it is available on dvd um and i have it ripped to my flex that's like another example like these are these things that like you're right we're gonna lose so much without all this stuff it's sad and i don't think it's just like two old people yelling at the cloud, right? No, I'm a buyer. I'm a lover of film and I purchase the things in almost every case possible.

And, you know, I'm a fan of physical media. I'm a fan of the fact that my dad's records were passed down to me. And I think that we're in an era where that's just not a possibility anymore from here on out, basically. Like the ownership of it is gone. We sort of rent everything and the ownership is not there. No, I think you're exactly right. And it makes me think a lot about how important it is for us to also start archiving these digital things and to think very seriously about how we make archives of these digital things DRM or not, just because it would be much easier for those things to go away, right? Because there will come a day when there are films or TV shows or other things that are never going to have any

sort of physical release. That's already happened in some cases, but there will become a day when that is going to be more common. And it will be important for us to start to preserve these things digitally. And I've thought a lot about digital preservation for a long time. I think that's why organizations like the Internet Archive are so important, not just the Wayback Machine, but a lot of the work they do because there's so much stuff out there that's in our culture that only exists

in certain formats, like old software. You can think about iPhone apps, right? There are whole generations of iPhone apps that we will never have access to again because they were 32-bit and they run on old versions of an operating system that you can't run in a VM anywhere. And there's not like a library of those IPA files. You know, some people might have hoarded them, but it's not like they're preserved someplace where you can download them all. And that sucks, right?

Like you said, your dad could pass down his vinyl collection to you. You could pass down like maybe your video game collection, you know, to your kids. But they're not going to be able to do the same with their kids. And that that makes me sad. And, you know, I don't know what exactly is the answer, but it's more like as a humanity, do we just care less? Does that sort of instill a lack of care or a lack of longevity or a lack of long-term thinking because like we're a lot of corporations are quarter by quarter people think you know in the present you know moment for the most part not tomorrow then the

choices they're making aren't generally aren't for well i'm doing this today because of two years from now kind of thing like does that just make us more transient and less care i just care less i mean i think it does but i think that that's to our detriment right because think about all the things we would have lost if people hadn't been smart enough to microfiche newspapers and preserve other records and i mean even talking about film you know one of the coolest things that i ever had the opportunity to do was i got to go to Sony's facilities where they were doing restoration of old film and some stuff that, you know, they were worried had been lost and the amount of care and work that would go into that preservation and scanning in every single frame and then, you know, detailing it and getting

that into that 4k quality. Like there are people who do this work, the archivists out there. And I so appreciate the work they do. I wish i guess we could as a culture maybe have more of a discussion about that like look i'm not asking to keep the physical media around i get that it doesn't make sense from a space level and and whatnot you know we might have an attachment to it but i get it but can we at least like keep the the permanence of what it represented can that still be part of our culture going forward where at least we have we can still move forward but we still have a legacy right if I could digitally buy anything I would buy today on an actual disc I suppose if this was like a societal agreement to some degree where let's say the most recent

really interesting film I bought that I just had to get was Top Gun Maverick. Captain Pete Maverick Mitchell. I was a huge fan of the first one. I wanted to wait till I was in my home theater to watch this latest one. Like I resisted the theaters and I was like, I know I'll eventually get here. And we just built our house in this last year and moved in in june so it's it's a new thing if there was a way i could buy that digitally and get a version that would like run on a known operating system like plex for example like a movie operating system

if there was a digital artifact i can like also purchase that i would have forever that wasn't like a drm thing it was like an MKV file thing right then I would be you know okay with evolving I'm not against evolution what I'm sort of against is what that represents to some degree for the future like how will my kids re-watch these films we've watched with their kids 20 years from now I mean it's not very far away 20 years is not very far away you know it's really not and no no you're right it's like what do we have like urls that are not gonna resolve anymore like exactly you know like to a playlist like what are we supposed to do yeah i mean and it's also just it's historical in a way when my life is gone and the things that i

care for are no longer cared for are they just digital dust at that point? Like sure. You still have the hard drive. Maybe you have to learn how to manage ZFS on Linux. There's still access. I mean, these are open source tools, but like,

do they just go away? You know, if aliens come and find us, like, what are these, what did Adam care about? And there's no physical thing to like grasp. Then I don't really exist.

It's almost like erasing people in a way, you know, it's a version of that. grasp, then I don't really exist. It's almost like erasing people in a way. You know, it's a version of that at least. It's an erasure process. If you can't determine what I cared for based upon physical evidence, like did I exist at all? Maybe, maybe not. That's a really amazing existential question. I like that. It's too deep. It's too deep for, maybe it's just deep enough. I think it's just deep enough. Films are a part of who we are i can remember watching boiler room and i've always

been in a sales type role and back in the day i thought boiler room was the best like ben affleck saying we don't hire brokers we train new ones okay before we get started i have one question is anyone here passed a series 7 exam i have a series seven license good for you you can get out too what why we don't hire brokers here we train new ones like that was a classic line and ben athelett didn't have a big role in that film but like that was a good or glenn gary glenn ross was a just a i was gonna say i was gonna bring that up that that's the quintessential one yeah coffees for closers put that coffee down coffees for closers only those are movies i grew up on they're part of like you know when you peel back the layers of adam that's you're gonna find in there glengarry glenn ross you're gonna find boiler room and a couple others that sort of define me cold trickle

days of thunder like these are films we grew up on it's's part of history. Anyways, well, we had to talk to somebody that could feel what we feel when hearing this news. So Netflix last Friday, September 29th, shipped its last disc. And that's the beginning of an end for physical media. And we had to commiserate with somebody that they can feel the same pain we felt. We're glad you could do this for that. Thank you very much for letting me reminisce and uh and feel sad but also you know good memories too um before we end what was the last disc that they sent you or was what was the last disc that you requested this is not gonna be the best list ever by any means but uh it's an example of like my interests i suppose splash was in them i really got into a24 i love

their films recently the under the skin the witch under the silver lake v for vendetta hot summer nights call me weird but the purge the very first one it's just a it's the beginning of a really interesting film style it comes at night first reform first reformed, and, you know, Zombieland, and Meet the Parents, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Like, just a random mix of interesting films.

I love it. And they're still going to send you, like, your box of extras. You'll have to keep us updated as to what those are. I think so. I mean, I did follow the email and the link

and said, I'm interested. Send me the extras. We'll see. I think they meant that we're not promising. I forget what language they use, but like, it's not a promise. You may or may not get this. And I said, hey, I'll opt in if I can. Considering the fact that you like actually called like them up so that you could.

Get the bigger plan. Get the bigger plan. I have a feeling that if anybody anybody's looking at stuff they'd be like okay yeah this is this is a guy that we're actually yeah we should give it to the people who are like die arts yeah i was gonna say like you're on a list somewhere of like a very very important like user so i'm sure i'm sure they'll send you stuff hopefully but i guess this is goodbye netflix goodbye dvd at least not net Netflix. Prop bar. DVD.com. Yeah.

Yeah. That's crazy. Well, thanks, Christina. It was fun having you. Yes. Thanks. That was awesome. And thanks for talking through all the details and sharing it. Like you got so much knowledge behind you.

I just, you're similar geek to me, but geek you're in so many other ways. I love it. And you've got some rich history as well. Things I would not even expect you to know, like which, like Lionsgate, you call that out. That was like, I know those things, but I'm not like, it's not in my RAM. It's in like long-term storage somewhere for me, you know, for you, it's like right there. Quick access. I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I love, love being back on and, you know, talking about my favorite thing other than tech, which is, you know, movies and actually really the intersection of these two worlds is my very favorite thing of all. So thank you for letting me do that.

Absolutely. Bye, friends. That's it. Our goodbye to this golden age of access to the films we all love. Are you feeling what we're feeling? Or do you have a take that you want to run by us? Leave us a comment. There's a link in your show notes. We love hearing from you. Thanks once again to our partners, Fastly.com, Fly.io, and Typesense.org. And to Breakmaster Cylinder for cranking out new beats for us on the regular. By the way, we'll soon be

releasing full-length albums for your streaming pleasure under the artist, Changelog Beats. Next week on the Changelog, news on Monday, an interview with Marcin Kulik from Askinema on Wednesday, and Kaizen 12 on Friday. Have a great weekend, leave us a five-star review if you dig it, and let's talk again real soon.