Android app lets you scan DVD barcodes, then auto-torrents them to your PC
Wired's Threat Level blog has the story of Torrent Droid, a new Android app that lets you scan DVD-case bar-codes with your phone, looks up the title, and remotely starts a torrent download of the title on your home machine. The use-case on Threat Level is a someone out shopping, shooting bar-codes of DVDs and having them ready to watch when he gets home, but I immediately thought of how useful this would be in conjunction with your personal DVD collection and a media-center PC under the TV. You could just barcode all the DVDs in your living room, have the Media Center torrent them, and box up the discs and stick them under the stairs. Yes, that's still illegal, but it'd be far more convenient than ripping the 1000-some DVDs currently cluttering up our tiny flat.
Android Program Scans DVD Barcodes, Starts BitTorrent DownloadAlex Holmes says users can be out shopping, for example, at the local Wal-Mart buying diapers for little Johnnie. Johnnie's dad can hit Wal-Mart's video section, use the G1 Android phone camera to snap a picture of a DVD barcode and voila: Search results of where the flick could be pilfered for free would immediately be sent to Johnnie's dad, who could then download the vid to the webUI of uTorrent while he's combing the aisles carrying a crying baby searching for the right pacifier and diaper rash treatment.
Johnnie's dad arrives home, and the free flick of his choice is ready to view.
the latest
latest episodes
That is, if you tend to shop in stores 12 hour drive away from your house.
You know I at least find the idea of torrenting what you own at least semi-legal, but the baby scenario is just plain crazy. Why would anyone make movies then? Or more exactly, why would a store have been on display, in a bargain bin, or even out to see? Making semi-technical things this easy for the masses is what causes stuff to get on the radar in the first place....
(and yes I have torrented the occasional movie, but I don't use it like blockbuster. I actually PAY for both blockbuster and netflix.)
Sweet, would work well for music too. And in the near future you could scan the barcode of ANY product and simply fab the thing at home!
I have to agree with post #2 bcsizemo. There was day before most of the kids on here were born when we received commercial free movies via satellite dishes. The huge 10 foot kind. Well, needless to say this caught on in a big way in the seventies and eighties, and this did not go unnoticed by those who peddle movies around and own movies to be peddled.
Eventually, the signal was scrambled obsoleting a ton of hardware. But never underestimate the ability of someone to reverse engineer something especially if it saves a few bucks a month. Legislation was passed and it wound its way through the courts eventually enforcing the right to impose restrictions on such devices and making them illegal to own/sell.
Of course, the DMCA automatically casts a giant umbrella over such things today. But what this auto downloading does is attract needless attention of people who find profit in restricting such clever things.
Really, this is grandstanding already.
I find the idea of this program abhorrent. Ripping copies of DVD's or music you own to format shift, i have no issue with (even if it IS illegal in my country).
Blatent use of this technology, in fact, the intended use of this program according to the developer, to make it easy to pirate things you do not own(nor have a license to copy), i DO have a problem with.
What would be a better use of this kind of tech, would be snap the barcode and have your phone automatically get reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, and data from IMDB, to allow you to decide if it's something you really want.
Or possibly the best use, have it scan the barcode and send a request to your home computer, to tell iTunes to buy/rent it, so it'll be downloaded by the time you get home.
What would be really funny is if the developers tried to sell this android app to users for money.
From a technical point of view, the image recognition feature is pure wankerism. It'd be almost as easy for the user to have a textfield where they enter the ISBN or what-have-you. It would be a million times easier to program. And way more accurate to boot. Automated processing of emails would be even easier, thus making it accessible from any computer, not just a photo phone. Consider me unimpressed.
Make it easy for me to download to OWN a movie as it is for me to BitTorrent it.
Make it easy for me to watch it anytime, anywhere on anything that I own, TV, computer, iPod, telephone, toaster oven, etc. Do not encumber it with DRM.
Offer it at a price I like. US$5.00 for example.
And I will buy as many movies as I want, happily paying that reasonable fee to OWN those movies.
Until then, I will only buy previously viewed DVDs from the several independent used media shops in the Boston/Cambridge area, rip and strip the movies to my computer in a format suitable for me to watch it anytime, anywhere on anything that I own, TV, computer, iPod, telephone, toaster oven, etc.
Your DRM, your lawsuits, your futile attempts to control what I choose to do with MY property are useless.
Mac The Ripper, Handbrake, FFMPEG, Roxio Toast, etc., makes your media my bitch.
Your bought and paid for legislators can pass all the laws they want.
They can legally mandate a DRM lock down on all the hardware they want.
It won't help.
Remember Macrovision "strippers" that sat between two VCRs? I sure do. I have one.
I can buy a region free/Macrovision free NTSC/PAL DVD player for US$40.00 from any number of places here in Boston. Even though it's "illegal" to sell such an item in the US, as I understand it.
I can buy that DVD player as easily as I buy a Coke from the 7-11.
You can't stop the future. You can't even slow it down. You can get with it and make money, or you can get run over by it, get crushed and get forgotten by history.
It's your choice. Choose wisely.
Side-stepping the legalities of this for a moment, it is a rather slick solution!
Personally when shopping, I prefer to make a note on my PDA and then search for it manually later. I like to browse for stuff in stores, but actually buy it on-line.
Now this brings up a fairly self-evident idea for an iPhone app:
Snap a picture of a CD or DVD bar code, and it opens iTunes on your phone and searches for the media in question. From there you can either download it to your phone, or automatically send the iTunes URL as an email so you can deal with it when you get to a device with more robust Internet connection. Of course if the item is not on iTunes it just emails the UPC and description (and optionally your current location(GPS) so you have a record of where you saw it) as an email.
Actually now that i think of it, all your really need is a digital camera. Take a picture of any UPC and use your computer at home to find it.
That is of course if store security does not wrestle you to the floor and try to feed you your camera first! ;{)
It's slick but... now we have auto-piracy? (I hate the term "piracy" but it is the commonly understood term)
This does NOTHING to help the cause of those of us pushing for sane copyright and empowered/sane digital distribution. I echo the call above- make it this easy for me to OWN an uncrippled digital copy of the movie, at a reasonable fee, and free of geo-locked price-gouging bullshit, and you've got my money.
Protip :
"Voila" means "There !"... "viola" means rape.
In practice, it's far quicker to download a paid for movie from a vendor than it is to torrent them.
Their servers are always much faster and you don't run the added risk of malware coming along for the ride.
The problem is that iTunes charges £10.99 for a film that is available in a supermarket for £5.99 on disc.
hey Cory - TorrentFreak was the source of this story, not Wired :)
http://torrentfreak.com/torrent-droid-scan-barcodes-get-torrents-090311/
I think I would rather have an app that would do something similar, such as enqueue for instant play on Netflix, or check it out online from my local library (if available). I like the idea of the app, but finding a torrent and eating up my media server b/w doesn't do much for me, considering the quality of some of the torrented movies people have shown me.
Its funny, but while I don't like torrented/ripped copies of movies (quality sucks), whether I will sit through 10-20 minutes of a low quality copy determines whether I will buy it or not. What motivated me to go out and buy Kung-Fu Panda was watching a lousy copy someone had uploaded to YouTube. I watched about half of it, and then stopped because the playback quality was horrible. But I knew I liked it enough by then to take my kid to go see it at Imax, and buy my own copy at a store. That never would have happened without somebody "pirating" it- instead, it would have made its way to our media server via Netflix about a month or two later, and then been quickly forgotten.
I've seen many people mention a "reasonable fee" in this sort of argument. If you agree that the content owner/producer has the right to charge people for copies of their work, why don't they also have the right to choose what to charge? To me it reads like "I'll pay them a fair price providing I get to choose what that price is".
Charging an inflated price would be immoral if we were talking about things like a monopoly on a staple food, water or education. But DVDs, new albums, etc. are luxuries that we can all live quite happily without. If you agree that copyright infringement is wrong and think that a company is charging too much, then don't buy the product. I don't see why copyright infringement suddenly becomes OK if they're charging a price that you don't want to pay.
More on topic: I would actually pay for an app that lets me snap a barcode/key in a product number and would take me to a review site. Whenever I'm tempted to buy something expensive (a Wii game or up) I end up standing in the store for ages trying to navigate reviews on Amazon or gamespot on my phone's crappy browser.
I don't have a phone that can handle a proper app store, but I'd buy a nicely designed java app that did the same thing. Does anyone know of one?
Would be awesome if it worked for (e)books aswell. You're in a bookshop, scan a barecode, check wether your favorite library owns the book, place a reservation or ask your library to buy it...
Or you're in a library, scan a barecode, and buy it from your favorite e-bookshop...
I really can't see how this could, in any way, be legal.
[quote]
You could just barcode all the DVDs in your living room, have the Media Center torrent them, and box up the discs and stick them under the stairs.
[/quote]
Or you could learn how to convert DVDs down to good quality avi files yourself and have much more fun. Teach a man to fish, and all that jazz.
If phones could scan barcodes ...
1) scan barcode
2) key in the price
3) the phone posts the price to a website, and retrieves other price info ... prices for the same product at other places nearby and/or your favourite shops, a graph showing historical prices (so you know whether it's cheap/expensive now), prices of similar products, etc.
Everybody shares all these price info uploaded to the website. Plus the websites uses an open API to pool it's data with other websites. Something like usenet.
"Can't stop the signal"
I think I just described shopsavvy. Unfortunately it only seems to run on iPhone/Android. Not living in America or Europe, I could wait 2 years, and ownership levels of these high end phones wouldn't reach 0.1%. There'll never be any price info for local retailers in 3rd world countries. What we need is user-updated data, and something that runs on cheaper phones. Even if I had to key in those 12 digit barcodes manually ...
enough with the "OMFG piracy" vitriol already.
it doesn't matter if piracy is right or wrong, or if it changes the landscape of film making or not. it doesn't matter if the incumbent media industry goes under or not.
the simple fact is that piracy cannot be prevented.
there is no amount of engineering, lobbying or legal wrangling that can stop mass piracy. the MAFIAA can sue, bribe, intimidate, and murder everyone they can get their hands on and it won't make a lick of difference because piracy cannot be stopped.
piracy is a guaranteed mathematical certainty. the sooner everyone embraces that fact, the sooner we can all get on with our lives.
@Teh Chris
Murder is also a "guaranteed mathematical certainty" (really, it's more of a top-shelf, virtually certain induction, but so is piracy); that doesn't mean it's futile to have laws against it, or that enforcing those laws doesn't reduce the murder rate.
As Electro and BCSizemo point out above (#2 and #4), you can make piracy a big hassle - that doesn't stop it, but it does make it less frequent by making it more inconvenient and through fear of punishment if caught.
Of course in the case of piracy, unlike the case of murder, the social costs (and in some cases the costs to the businesses involved) of enforcement far outstrip the benefits. Even in the case of murder, we at least try to have a judicial system which guarantees that the bulk of the burdens are borne by the guilty by including protections for the innocent. In the case of DRM locks, it's primarily the paying customer who pays the costs. So down-with-DRM and down-with-abusive-enforcement doesn't have to mean 'yay for piracy.'
I'm from the VCR-age but today my shopping pattern is not like it was then. Why would anyone today buy a movie from looking at a DVD cover? Why not from a computer where you get full character bios, trailers, reviews, links to previous and similar movies etc.? I don't think "pirates" look for new movies in the DVD section of their supermarket and are eager to have the torrent started asap. I think they already downloaded the movie by the time the DVD is in stores, saw the trailer online, read imdb, perhaps even went to the cinema. This is just a stupid invention designed to provoke.
I don't like to gloat, but I download torrents with SymTorrent on my Nokia S60, using my flat-rate data plan.
Okay, I do like to gloat...
This seems like a another excuse not to let people use their phones/cameras in stores.
Thanks.
Thanks so much.
If phones could scan barcodes ...
Actually, there's a whole host of things you could do with that...
* Avoid particular ingredients for health, religious or taste reasons, without squinting at the tiny ingredients list.
* Track your calorie / fat / salt intake without squinting at the tiny tables.
* Add up your food miles.
This type of thing could definitely help save the newspaper! I've long held the opinion that newspapers could get on the web not via your computer screen, but with a sensor and code on the printed page. Ads are actually useful sometimes! Android, iPhone app: use the camera to take a picture of a code on the newspaper to either take you to a webpage, buy an item, or put it in storage for later browsing. Go through the JC Penny ad on Sunday and do all your shopping from home, then just drive to the mall and pick up your "order," try things on, and buy what you like. Yeah, I know, you all use amazon, but people STILL live like that, I swear!
It's analogy time! This analogy aims to show how IP law has distorted our moral understanding, and very likely our perception of reality.
The modern attitude to our infinitely available resources is reminiscent of the scene at the end of Restaurant at the End of the Universe when the Golgafrinchans decide to use ordinary leaves as currency. Right now the IP industries, unable to accept that technological development has reduced the monetary value of their product to zero, are trying to burn down the all trees in the world.
At some point we must all accept the that world has changed, is changing, and will continue to change, with absolutely no heed of our beloved business models. When the old models become untenable, we really have no choice: we adapt, we create new models and new ways of doing business. To do anything else, to ignore the obvious, to continue to work even though the work is futile, or worse, to fight the inevitable advances, can only harm us and those around us.
For the record, I have never torrented music or movies, nor do I go to the cinema or buy DVDs or CDs or even MP3s from IP delusionals. I cannot, in good conscience, provide funding to causes that do so much harm, nor will I help them justify their twisted aims by breaking the laws they have bought.
We still have the right to say "The price is too high, I won't pay it".
Audio and video are no longer scarce commodities. Pricing needs to reflect that. Just like the printing press made books much cheaper, digital distribution makes media distribution much cheaper. And yet they're still trying to sell at pre-printing-press prices.
What means the "stick them under the stairs?"
Not so much the post itself, but I find it interesting how the Attempt to restrain business models to ideas that no longer work vs adapting to new ones that work is a little like the Creationism vs Evolution debate. Science and evolving ideas of he market deals with theories or models of various processes that conform to what they happen to observe, frequently these don't hold up forever, and with newer technology we observe phenomena that the old theory or model cannot account for, so we change our model. Monolithic business models did work for a time, but like Creationists instead of adapting we strangle those who present change to what is accepted and 'right' through social pressure, & laws where the ink is barely wet. Interesting correlation, and I am sure to be proven wrong at one point or another but guess what thats cool cause I sign up to having new models and evolution/science people as my homeboys.
A few kids downloading some content they wouldn't have the money to buy anyway is one thing. An adult who makes enough money to have a cell phone, car, and house can dang well afford to at least pay for a rental of the content.
You might just as well walk out with the DVDs under your arm and not pay for them right there.
When you can actually afford to pay for content, you should. Not paying hurts the creator and the retailer, not just the fat cat producer.
Is it me, or do most of the pro-piracy arguments (you can't stop it, the costs of doing it are miniscule, it's too easy, it would cost too much to do it the legal way) apply just as well to spammers? Yet piracy advocates seem to have a universally adversarial attitude toward spam and robocalls.
Well my point from #2 was more along the lines of making things easier for the masses makes it a more viable mark for big business and government to crack down on.
I half way agree with the "make it cheap enough" argument, but frankly if you are going to torrent it...I'll just rent it and rip it.
Personally I think you are starting to see the same thing happen to video games. You are having more and more indie games coming out at a "cheap" price. Maybe $5 to $20 dollars, which is reasonable. There will always be a place for more expensive dvd's, just look at the economics of it. Something like the new Star Wars trilogy is going to need to sell TONS more media+movies to compensate for the cost of production versus something like Pi... (Not to say that Pi isn't a great movie, but the point is perceived quality vs. cost of production).
Similar things have happened already in the pc world. Like overclocking. I remember when you needed basic math and an understand of fsb relations to make the most out of it. Now you just pop into the bios and punch in some numbers... But it doesn't mean more people are doing it, it just means the manufactures figured out how to offer it as an upgraded feature and charge more.
It's you Jere7my.
This is a bizarre invention, surely?
If you're given to torrenting all your movies, then I wouldn't have thought you were that likely to be browsing the DVD racks that avidly?
Also, and so the "piracy" debate trundles on. I'd really like to see a few more shades of grey in it. I think that there is a difference between opposing nonsensical and restrictive copyright practices which prevent "remixing" whether this be fan fiction or music mashups (or whatever) whereby a reader/listener has taken anothers work and produced something new and supporting someone who (dubious taste aside) has downloaded the latest Coldplay album just to listen to.
I don't question that the web has changed the way we consume a lot of culture forever and producers should do more to embrace this than crying pirate! at everything as often they are wrong. As I say, reusing somebody elses work is culturally valuable and can give extra life to something - see gaming mod culture. Things like DVD region protection are ridiculous especially as portable viewing devices proliferate and it seems unfair to attempt to stop people from using something they've already purchased in a different way.
However some of the arguments that I see about why we shouldn't pay for recorded music confuise me a little.
For example the mythical £15 CD. CDs, generally speaking, haven't been £15 for absolutely years.
Artists will make all their money from touring. I've seen this backed up with statistics about the vast increases in live revenue (one of the long tail sites, if I rememember). However, they then have tables showing the top touring bands (Rolling Stones, Madonna, etc, etc,) who will undoubtedly skew the figures because they do massive tours with high ticket prices to many people. I've been to gigs with a £4 entrance fee with 3 bands and 29 other people watching. I suspect, given that at least one of the bands'll have travelled, they won't even be covering their costs...
And they deserve some recompense. Surely one of the ace things about the web is that it make culture less homogenous (long-tail-arooo)?
The idea that stuff should be free over the web due to there being little to no cost for production seems a bit erroneous too. It's, surely, the cost of RE-production that is nothing? Even the falling costs of making music/video is fairly negligible, people obviously still want to watch blockbusters (or they wouldn't download the Dark Knight) which like it or not, cost money to produce! Hell, if you're any way good and devoting a lot of time to it, surely it's not unreasonable to expect some pay?
Like I say, on the other side the debate is even less sophisticated. "Piiiiirrraaaaattttee!!!!!" Can't there be some attempt to work together and work in hippie harmony?
Sorry about the slight o/t
Chris Tucker has got it. Imagine if, instead of spending money on CSS and then even more odious forms of copy protection for Blu-Ray, the studios had spent those resources on making it easier and faster and cheaper to download movies and transfer them from device to device. Imagine also that they realize sales numbers will go up if the access is easier so they can lower the net price to the consumer. (Ie, my wife has already bought two books on her Kindle in just three days of owning it. Definitely an uptick.)
There's no way anyone with money would bother going to thepiratenova.scarysite.biz to torrent an unknown file if they could get it at higher quality more easily and more quickly for $5 from warnerbrothers.com. As long as Warner didn't bother copy protecting it and trying to charge $10 and then $10 more if you want it on your iPod then $10 more for your set-top box, then $10 more for ...
Just make it a reasonable cost, don't restrict the consumer's usage, and people will buy it.
I've bought MP3s before but would never even dream of buying DRM'ed content. Never. I own hundreds of CDs and not a single AAC file. I don't tolerate restrictions on my copying the files to different devices, backing up the files, and playing the files down the road on currently unimaginable devices.
As far as I know, there's no legal way to buy a permanent copy of a movie online. If there was, I would do it. But instead, it's either a torrent or a DVD. Give me an un-DRM'ed h.264 file I can download for a few dollars and I would be all over it.
DCulberson, AAC files do not generally have DRM, and it's not a proprietary format. All of my ~1000 CDs are ripped to AAC, because it offers a better audio quality than MP3s at the same bit rate. iTunes primarily (soon to be exclusively) sells non-DRMed AAC files.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding
emusic is non-DRM vbr mp3. Also, due to the way it's subscription works, if you like jazz or other music where albums have single 45 minute tracks an album can work out at about 20p! I'd say that's win.
@sirdook
murder and piracy are not the same thing and you know that.
but lets pretend that they are and take that crazy logic all the way:
if piracy is a life affecting moral problem (like murder), and if piracy is stealing and there is a moral obligation to stop it, then anything that has the potential to affect a corporation's profits is also stealing, regardless of the actual impact on said profits.
therefore, if you use a cellphone instead of a having a house phone, you are stealing telephone service. if you check books out of a library instead of paying for them, you are stealing books. if you use recycled materials instead of paying for all new ones, then you are stealing aluminum and plastic. if you use daylight to light your home, then you are stealing light. if you drink water from the tap instead of buying it in bottles, then you are stealing water. if you take the bus instead of buying a car and gasoline, then you are stealing transportation.
it is our duty as good citizens to maximize the profits of the corporations that make our modern world possible. to do anything less is stealing.