honestly most arguments against digital media are just misdirected complaints against lack of digital customer protection or complaints about states not getting their shit together building out infrastructure

the lack of digital customer protections is also fucking up physical media

no digital customer protections means that there’s activation limits on your software

no digital customer protections means your drive model is no longer able to play new disks

no digital customer protections means an update rendered being able to play any disk inoperable

no digital customer protections means that your secondhand game causes your console to get online banned

no digital customer protections means that not only are you prevented from making copies of your digital media, it can even land you in jail

@charlotte anyone who thinks physical media is a panacea should try and listen to an SACD

this isn’t really a novel concept in any way btw

and the copyright lobby is also artificially inflating the prices of anything that could be used to copy media with legislation that charges a flat fee for every writeable storage medium, any device that can copy or print, etc

DVDs and BDs are region locked. Consoles use special optical disks that are Not Quite like regular DVDs and BDs to the point where they aren’t interoperable. your DVD PC games come with rootkits.

At the same time optical media has become both too size limited and slow to run games directly off of them. requiring installations to the internal hard disk at which point it becomes a physical hardware dongle and allowing you to skip (parts of the) download.

each of these has been going on for many years at this point. dvd rootkits were at its peak in the late 00s, and installing games from their physical media to play them has been around since your home micro started having a hard drive

and the disk-as-a-dongle thing has also been around for an extremely long time

the thing is that

the stuff that you want from physical media, minus like physically putting the game in the console i suppose, can be achieved easier digitally, especially on consumer-hostile devices like consoles. lack of consumer protection means that it will never be implemented because it would financially be a bad idea to the company implementing it.

All major consoles have some sort of lending functionality (usually within “one family” and that directly implies that it would be feasible them to let you sell the game also. this is under the assumption that it makes sense to buy bits of data that are trivially duplicateable, or that the maker should even be involved in the sale

@novenary games often also have updates which the disk can only contain a snapshot of (usually not even that)

@eri i have sacd rips and they are already annoying

@novenary @eri good adcs and dacs are based on delta-sigma modulations apparently but helpfully nothing in between uses dsd

@novenary @eri i mean like

if you talk into a decent microphone apparently the audio gets sampled using ΔΣ-modulation and then turned into PCM

all of the processing you do with the recording happens with PCM

and good DACs then turn the PCM back into ΔΣ format and output it. much easier to make a high bit depth sound signal from it than PCM simply because you simply cannot make resistor ladders accurate enough?

@novenary @eri anyways it’s really unclear where DSD fits in any of it. on a SACD player they surely could surely pack in very high quality DACs and just ship raw 24 bit 96kHz PCM on there. The PCM bitrate is lower and i think quality wise the two are considered equivalent. And while ripping was never intended, you can actually much more easily play high res PCM audio on pc

@charlotte @novenary at least you can play them in your ps3, so finally i can do something with that old thing

@novenary @charlotte i prefer theta-delta instead

@eri @novenary shifting into ranges that humans can’t hear but we can

@charlotte @novenary that explains why nobody else cares about the fucking coil whine