I didn’t think I’d spend hours reading about this today, but some things surprised me:
- Just using a Playstation sounds like it won’t work or will be a huge time sink.
- Blu ray optical drives are way more expensive than I thought
- The copy protections on Blu rays are exceptionally annoying, to the extent where there is really only one closed source software – MakeMKV – that can work around them. This post goes into some interesting details.
- Finding a drive that is known to work with MakeMKV is a pain. There’s a brand called Pioneer that seems promising but they have stopped producing bluray drives
went out of business last year. I have no idea which model works, and it’s common that secondhand sellers will swap enclosures and pass it off as a different model. - Sometimes you need to flash the firmware on the drive to make it work with 4K UHD discs.
Anyway I was going to try ripping a Blu-ray that I bought recently, since I couldn’t find a quality rip anywhere, but I’m pretty turned off from the whole prospect at this point.
Anyway I’m not really asking for a specific reply, I just thought this topic was interesting and I’m curious what people think about Blu rays and optical media in general. Does the future seem bleak? Are we going to be stuck with shitty WebDLs for most new content? Or is physical media here to stay?
There are some external/portable USB blu ray drives that work with MakeMKV and cost like $30.
Care to suggest a model? I haven’t seen anything that cheap.
Yes, my old LG external drive bought at Best Buy has worked fine ripping Blu Rays for years.
I got the dune 1984 uhd and I can’t even play it on PC let alone rip it.
I recently got into the rabbit hole of digitizing my DVDs after discovering that disc rot is very real. I bought an LG blu-ray external driver, followed steps to flash firmware, bought a MakeMKV license to support the software, and bought a NAS to run a RAID 1 configuration to hold the backups of the DVDs.
I do think with Netflix buying out Warner Bros, optical media will take a hit. But companies like the Criterion Collection keeps optical media alive. Also CDs are alive and well when it comes to music.
How are you storing the DVDs? Bit rot is unavoidable, but optical media should be much more resilient to it compared to magnetic and flash storage (~100 vs ~10 years)
They might be referring to the Warner Brothers disc rot issue announced earlier this year (affecting some mid 2000s dvds). Ideally, things are made well and last a long time when stored properly.
I’ve stored them in a TV cabinet for years. Nothing special. I’ve created a Jellyfin server so if I was burning my DVD and blu-ray already, I may as well back up to files. And to point out austinfloyd’s comment, disc rot was the other reason to back up the DVDs.
Also don’t go with an Asustor 1102TL. I can’t access the BIOS so I can’t flash open media vault. I had a whole plan to have an automated Borg backup script running on the NAS but alas, I guess not. If someone can prove me wrong, please let me know.
I bought a modified BD drive from a person who was flashing libredrive supported firmware and then got a registered copy of MakeMKV.
It’s been stupid simple for me to rip any BD or 4K disc that I can get my hands on. If you choose the “backup” option it spits it out to a folder structure which then use mkisofs to create an iso of things.
Honestly my biggest problem is constantly running out of hard drive space because I want to keep the original, uncompressed isos. What’s nice though is once i have the iso I can pop it back into MakeMKV and just extract what I want. I can then run that through Handbrake and compress to my exact specifications.
Is person still around? Or any lead to find similar person?
Sadly no. He packed it up about 6 months ago. However if you can get your hands on an ASUS BW-16D1HT, you can flash the firmware yourself. I could have done that but he was offering it for a negligible difference and it was just quicker to do that method.
Does the BW-16D1HT offer good performance for 4kbluray playback as well as ripping? Looking at it it seems price competitive with the stand-alone players, and if it is good it would make financial sense to buy a dedicated pc and enclosure as an alternative to stand-alone player assuming it can drive HDR and Atmos
I’ve honestly never used it for playback but since it can rip 4K at 2x-4x playback speed I would assume it’d be just fine. The issue is the system you build would have to have a card that can output Atmos bitstreams as well as HDR.
As for ripping performance I’m over 500 DVD, BD, 4K and it’s doing great. You do have to give it 30 minutes between 4K discs to cool down.
Look on the makemkv forum for Libre Drives and what models are usable.
ASUS BW-16D1HT is a valid drive for libre drive and is what I use and can be sourced on Amazon. The pop it in an external enclosure if needed and flash the firmware for it on one of the pinned posts.
I personally don’t pirate, but want to power my media server with the movies I buy, libre+makemkv does the trick for me.
Pioneer is a well known Japanese electronics company, they are still going strong, but have exited the optical disc drive business.
So no, Pioneer has not gone out of business, they have however changed focus from optical drives.
Got it, thanks for the correction. I had never heard of Pioneer before; I must’ve misinterpreted what I was reading on the forums.
I had never heard of Pioneer before
How old are you? 😅 I think their name is bigger in the audio business, they made/make audio equipment, car stereos, CD Players, etc but you certainly don’t see their name as often as you used. But then, people aren’t really buying home/car audio equipment like they used to.
I think optical media is a dead platform. Hence, there is an apparent lack of interest I think in implementing alternative solutions. I’ve had success with MakeMKV using the docker container approach, but never tried to rip UHD.
The Corpo-inspired future is that you should not get to own any of your media outright. They will decide when you can stream it and to which devices. Piracy is quickly becoming the only viable option if you value your freedom, and it’s a very unfortunate state of things.
I think optical media is a dead platform
I disagree. You can still find almost every new movie with a disc release. If you actually want the highest quality home video, this is still it.
I really hope streaming doesn’t become the only option, because even with >1Gbps internet, streaming services generally do not deliver as good of quality as I can get from something like a bluray. Even HBO and Netflix have very noticeable lossy compression.
Even in terms of story, the content is no longer optimized for quality. It’s optimized for watchability which generally refers to the ease of viewing even when you’re not completely paying attention.
They somehow found a way to even further commercialize and mass produce the moving picture.
The watchabilty thing actually makes stuff nearly unwatchable for me because I like to, you know, pay attention to the movie I am watching. They have to make the characters so one note and cliche so that half-brains can pick up what’s happening in the film. They beat you over the head with everything but don’t bother closing up plot holes because they think you weren’t paying enough attention to see them.
As always, the Arch wiki helps us out a fair chunk here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Blu-ray
Best of luck it seems. What a shitshow
I’ll give it a read! I wouldn’t have expected much relevant info on the Arch Wiki.
The copy protections on Blu rays are exceptionally annoying, to the extent where there is really only one closed source software – MakeMKV – that can work around them.
Not quite, RedFox formerly SlySoft (RIP) used to market their own Blu-ray ripper and it worked quite well. What it used to do is on-the-fly decryption so you’d run it in the background and could use any other software to read the decrypted Blu-ray (e.g. using Handbrake or whatever). It did also have an option to just rip to a file IIRC. Unfortunately they randomly disappeared so their software is pretty much done. (some background on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedFox)
That aside they always a competitor, DVDFab, that still exists today. Their Passkey software is the rough equivalent of what the old RedFox/SlySoft software used to do but they also sell a standalone Blu-ray ripper if that’s more your thing (see https://www.dvdfab.cn/).
But yeah, in some ways you’re stuck with MakeMKV, DVDFab, and maybe some others (?).
I’d have to dig it out but I actually bought a Blu-ray drive a while back that was on the list of drives compatible with these rippers but honestly it’s been a few years since I’ve tried using it. Most times someone else already ripped a Blu-ray I’d be interested in.
Speaking of - If anyone knows offhand, how do people do this stuff on Linux? Does the Linux version of MakeMKV work well for this and/or are there other tools (?)
MakeMKV works great on Linux. I used it to backup all of my blurays and DVDs without any issues.
I don’t have first-hand experience, but I’ve heard that the linux version of MakeMKV does work; though I’ve seen some issues reported in the forum. MakeMKV is even available on nixpkgs.
Because Blu-Ray is the format for enthusiasts and collectors. A burned one don’t have the same collection value, and many times even the same content since you don’t have extras or alternative version of the movie. USB or Streaming is just more convenient for mosts.
Still would be nice to see more FLOSS support in this sense. We used to make custom art for our burned CD in the 90s.
I always prefer dedicated physical media for the stuff I really care and/or can afford: people underestimate the value of something you can easily show, gift, play, sell, etc. Digital contents don’t have this intrinsic value in our physical world, so I don’t think physical media will disappear in the next future.
If the basic version of MakeMKV isn’t enough for you and you don’t want to register for the full version, Handbrake is a good alternative.
Is there some version of Handbrake or workaround for BD copy protection? This is the excerpt from the site, and matches my understanding that it isn’t a circumvention tool:
Supported Input Sources:
Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.
I believe that Handbrake externalizes the handling of BD encryption to an separate external library (libbdplus IIRC) for various legal and logistical reasons. You’ll need that installed too if you want to decode encrypted discs.
The Arch Linux link mentioned by SomethingBoring in another comment details needed set up for BD+ copy protection and AACS libraries. Once these are set up, Handbrake and VLC will read from disc properly.
Very interesting. I followed BD circumvention on the doom9 forums from that link decades ago, but it looks like the VUK database method is more reliable now.
Does the future seem bleak? Are we going to be stuck with shitty WebDLs for most new content?
For mainstream content and somewhat well known content, both regular BD and 4K BD rip are widely posted shortly after release.
You do have some truly niche content and non-english content where it’s difficult to find BDRips / BD Remuxes, but you can usually access older DVDRips. If you’re into this kind of content (as I am), you might as well just buy the BD (or stick to the DVDRip which is fine as far as I am concerned).
might as well buy
Not unless the artist is selling directly
Not unless the artist is selling directly
More often than not, for niche and/or non-english content, this is indeed the case. I also don’t see the big deal with supporting a smaller publisher.
I think there are probably enough collectors, AV nerds, and people without consistent high bandwidth unlimited internet to keep physical going for a while. It’ll just be niche, like vinyl, I suppose.
It is kinda weird that optical stopped advancing. You can fit more data on a MicroSD card than BluRay. You can fit something like 240 blurays on a consumer HDD (and much more if you further compress).
I don’t know about MicroSD longevity, but I’ve heard BluRay and in particular M-Disc can last 100-1000 years of something crazy. So for archive, it might still be a good option.
If you own the disc just download someone else’s rip, why waste time and energy reripping it, studios still think it’s illegal.
I was going to try ripping a Blu-ray that I bought recently, since I couldn’t find a quality rip anywhere
