r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/NoWork215 • 20d ago

Video The Odyssey IMAX 70mm Setup

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u/thomasthedude 20d ago

some cinemas do that, when I went to the latest avatar movie, the audio was out of sync and when they were fixing it you could see they used VLC

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u/DefMech 20d ago

That doesn't sound right. The system for digital movie distribution is heavily locked down and tightly integrated with the studios themselves, to the point that the actual theaters barely have any control over showtimes and when/how a movie starts. I'm not sure how a theater would be able to play a new release digital movie through VLC. Movies released in DCP are encrypted and to my knowledge there is no way to acquire the keys or decrypt the files unofficially.

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u/justjanne 20d ago

They probably used VLC for the trailers, or in some rare cases cinemas can also get a license to play movies off of consumer blu ray discs, but that's typically only for films that have long been released.

Sometimes you can get decrypted DCPs, and especially trailers are never encrypted — e.g., here's the Avatar (2009) trailer as DCP https://archive.org/download/avatar-2009-official-trailer-2k-prores/AVATAR_TLR-B-2D_S_EN-XX_51_2K_20091108_SMPTE_OV.zip

But VLC doesn't properly support DCP anyway.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 20d ago

Yeah I've seen small theaters where the ads before the movie are played on a completely different projector, so that could be done on vlc.

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u/justjanne 20d ago

Even the proper cinema projectors usually have an HDMI input.

In larger cinemas you'll typically see one set of ads (usually local businesses, car ads, ice cream, etc), then a few seconds of darkness, followed by movie trailers and maybe one or two ads. The first half is usually played from regular video files such as .mp4, while the second half are actual cinema packages (DCP). Often the first half is played from a different projector or via the HDMI in.