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Some of us remember when this happened, and most folks either ignored or actively hated the idea.
The PA divx player became a recurring character I thought, I'm surprised searching their site only comes up with three comics.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/archive/search?tag=86&sort=old
The first one (IIRC and according to the search)
Is Don_Dickle the gallowboob of Lemmy? Been seeing them everywhere
Fucked around, found out.
What's hilarious is that divx was the most popular pirate format back in the day before they went commercial use and xvid replaced it.
I think that was deliberate, and some pirate cheekily named the file format after a hated junk DVD format
Yeah I remember it being called "DivX ;)" so DivX with a wink.
Ah the good old days when mplayer was needed to handle the partially corrupt divx files on 800mb CD-Rs with missing I-frames, and audio sync issues right and left.
I remember this. I absolutely hated the DIVX format, and was rooting for it to die.
Consumer hatred works.
People could have dumped Netflix and all this other shit and forced better products...
Gradual enshittification is the only way to launch a product now.
You gotta launch a product that's good. Better than the existing competition. But this happens with some serious seed money or angel investor. Essentially, some naive rich dude.
But eventually it needs to make a profit.
They know that eventually the product will have to be as bad or worse than what's already around...but they will have to boil the frog or else people will jump immediately as soon as the next thing comes around.
That gives the founders plenty of time to enshittify and bail before it turns to complete crap.
IIRC, they were just normal DVDs, with a layer which would gradually become opaque after exposure to air, turning them into garbage.
That was an entirely separate disposable rental DVD company
That video is why I was so confident in saying FlexPlay was a different product lol. He's one of 11 subscriptions I have on YouTube
Yeah that 5 part series on the RCA Vinyl Video format had me hooked. Like "why did you make this dude?" then "why am I watching this?"
There's just something there about all of the mistakes that companies make when developing technology in there. Sunk cost fallacy, being too soon in some respects and too late in other respects, "Not Invented Here" syndrome, all of the mistakes being made in developing one product.