Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters suffers outage on New Year's Eve due to IT stupidity

[thewayne]

Alamo suffered outages at four theaters, two in the NYC area, plus Denver and San Francisco They blamed Sony projectors, which is curious as Sony exited the movie theater projector business in 2020: you'd think that Alamo would have phased them out and replaced them since they would have represented a severe service liability if they were to break.

At any rate, the problem seemed to be computer security/encryption certificates tied to the movies they were showing. Not all movies were affected. The distributor was scrambling to recreate certificates with longer expiration dates and - however they go about it - 'reprint' and re-issue the movies to the theaters.

The movies are shipped as encrypted files, then the certificates are needed to decrypt them. The certificate ties into the projector so the file decrypts as it is being played. DVDs and Bluray players do the same things, that's why you sometimes need to do an update to your Bluray player to play the latest titles: certificates have been updated and your old certs won't decrypt the newest stuff.

Apparently all was well on New Year's Day.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

Comments

[disneydream06]

Ain't technology grand?
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Problem is the encryption is pretty much a requirement: movie theaters are an absolute front line for movie pirates.  They'll get jobs in theaters and literally set up cameras in the projection booth.  Without encryption, they'd directly copy the movie files.

[disneydream06]

Some people are complete Turds. :o

[white_aster]

>that's why you sometimes need to do an update to your Bluray player to play the latest titles

....the PLAYERS need updated? I did not know that. ...ok, yeah, no, that's yet another great reason for me to stick with dvds as long as possible. Cripes.

[silveradept]

Yep. Because of the decryption certificates and protocols, buying a used Blu-Ray player, especially for a model that no longer receives support updates, is going to make it damn difficult to play your discs unless you know how to hack it all together and then upload such material to your player. Yet another piece of planned obsolescence, thanks to companies believing they should get a cut every time someone shares a thing with their friends or family.

[white_aster]

Good to know! Cripes. I mean...I support artists and such, I buy things legally, but when I've legally obtained something and the industry actively organizes things so that it is more inconvenient to use the thing I have legally obtained...that's where I get annoyed. If I buy something, I want it to work, without my player making me show ID and a blood test to prove I'm a legal owner. The movie/TV industry puts all these things in place, that risk voiding my ability to use my own property...and they don't even work. Can verify, piracy is still a thing, copies are still readily available. They can play whackamole with specific avenues all they want, but it's never going to be enough. And ironically, their increased desire to make it more difficult/expensive for people to access things legally just makes it more likely that they'll go find the very easy pirated copies instead.

:grumps: :is old person, yells at cloud:

[thewayne]

There's a very funny movie by Joe Dante called Amazon Women on the Moon.  It's a collection of shorts with a couple of recurring themes.  One of the shorts is called, IIRC, Video Pirates.  And it's swashbuckling 18th century pirates who capture another sailing ship loaded with the latest video releases.  They pop a VHS tape into a player (it's an old movie now) and the FBI warning comes up and the pirate captain goes "Oooh!  I'm so scared!" with some very nice quavery voice acting, and the crew erupts in laughter.  This movie had some amazing talent and clever stuff in it.

[white_aster]

Heh heh, classic!

[thewayne]

It is not very often, we've had our BR player for over a decade and I've never updated it and I've bought new releases as recently as a month or so ago.  But it CAN happen, and they normally have an update function buried in their menus for that purpose.  Of course it has to be configured to connect to the internet via an Ethernet cable or WiFi if your player has it to do the update.  My player has an Ethernet port, but I do not leave it connected.  I might have updated it when I got it, and that would have been the only time thus far.  But if you buy a disc and it doesn't play, that may be the reason: I don't know if it will give you an error message or what it will do if your cert is too old for that disc's encryption.

[white_aster]

Good to know, but also good to know that if I ever HAVE to buy one, to get an actual new one. But sheesh, this "oh, just connect all your devices to the internet for always, surely nothing bad will happen! :D :D :D" b.s. just gives me hives. It used to be because my internet was crap, which meant every time it blipped things would just stop working, even if there was NO REASON for me to need an internet connection for that action. Now it just annoys me because "my devices are spying on me" used to be a conspiracy theory, now it's just, y'know, Thursday. I do not like it, sam I am....

[thewayne]

Completely agree!  It's been PROVEN time and again that devices spy on us in numerous ways.  I'll never plug a TV into the internet.  I have an Apple TV device to handle all my streaming, I have a weather station device plugged into my router, aside from that the only things that connect to my router are computers.  I have no 'Alexa'-type devices, no intention of getting any.  If I want music, I'll turn on my stereo and select something.

[white_aster]

I'm the same way: I dread the point where my TV dies, as there are so few models that DON'T have smart capabilities that you can't really control nowadays. And there seems to be this bad tendency to make everything internet connected/have an app when it really, really doesn't need to. I just want to turn my tech on and have it work, quietly, doing absolutely nothing that I didn't specifically tell it to do!

[thewayne]

Last year or the year before, LG posted that they made more money on the consumer info that they gathered and sold FROM their TVs than from the TVs THEMSELVES!  Yeah, this homie don't play that game!  You can still find dumb TVs, it also wouldn't take much work to plug a TV into a router so that it sees it is connected, then tell the router to block that address from any access.  Apple - at least as claimed - does not sell user/usage information to third parties.  Compared to Google whose sole business is an advertising enabler.

[white_aster]

>LG posted that they made more money on the consumer info that they gathered and sold FROM their TVs than from the TVs THEMSELVES!
I am not surprised. >_

[silveradept]

Such an annoyance. DRM makes everything objectively worse, and yet, nobody is willing to give it up and accept that there might be some piracy going on because not everyone who wants to see their stuff is going to pay the price they've demanded for it.

[thewayne]

I just updated my Movies To Buy list to get a copy of Death of Stalin because I'd have to rent it to stream it.  I suspect I might be able to get a used copy fairly cheap at this point, and I think it might have repeated watch value.

[silveradept]

Yep. Buy the media, then rip the media and keep it safe somewhere. Then you have your own digital copy to use as you would like.

(For a short amount of time, physical media used to have digital copies with various web stores. Wonder if they've all gone out of business at this point.)

[thewayne]

A lot of physical media still have digital versions provided, don't ask me why but people still like watching movies on phones and portable devices.

[silveradept]

Yeah, but they're all probably the kind that are "it's a digital copy with this specific service, invested with DRM so it will only work, and you only have access to it as long as this service stays in existence, so good luck having it still at your fingertips in the next three years!"

[thewayne]

Yeah, that is the kicker.  Your digital copy is streamed.  Maybe there's an offline viewing option for watching on an airplane, but I've never looked into it.

[silveradept]

They do exist, but it's very much "you download it to your device and okay it in our app only because otherwise, the DRM doesn't decrypt and you get to stare at the encryption company logo for hours on end."