I didn’t think I’d spend hours reading about this today, but some things surprised me:

  1. Just using a Playstation sounds like it won’t work or will be a huge time sink.
  2. Blu ray optical drives are way more expensive than I thought
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Sometimes you need to flash the firmware on the drive to make it work with 4K UHD discs.

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?

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    5·
    8 hours ago

    I ripped a ton of my stuff back in the day, guess I’ve been lucky, every generic BD drive i’ve used just worked.

    But once you get past the “works” hurdle, the real struggle begins.

    It’s slow, like really slow. Assuming you can find the right titles and convince makemkv extract them, it’s a start the process and go brew a cup of coffee slow. But hey, I’ve got time and you don’t need to watch it … mostly.

    Depending on the disk, it’s still either crap quality or it takes up an ungodly amount of space. Even a decent sized drive buckles sooner or later if you’re generating 20GB images.

    Unless you’re up on your network game, your streaming sticks/tv’s can hardly handle the throughput to stream the video.

    So you encode the video. HEVC (which is getting dicey starting january as the royalties go up and processors stop support hardware decoding) or hopefully AV1, which still has spotty support in places. and the re-encode? The easy software isn’t free, the free software isn’t easy, but FFMPEG isn’t that hard to work with.

    OR, you find an ISO provider and download it.