> Some drives need to have their firmware flashed in order to enable ripping of UHD discs
I love their summary of what the patched firmware does:
'A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself “revoked”.
(...) Change the optical drive embedded software in a way that the drive becomes a “primitive” device - one that just positions a laser, reads and decodes the data. Make a drive free from “policing” functionality, a drive that just passes all data from the disc to the user.'
This probably counts as "circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work" under the DMCA and is thus illegal.
Agreed. If you want to (physically) own a movie or TV show, use MakeMKV, or just torrent/IRC/usenet it. It really seems the rights owners want you to go that route.
Otherwise if you just want to watch a movie and don't care that it might not be available at a later time, use a streaming service, it's by far the most convenient.
> If you want to (physically) own a movie or TV show
I find this phrasing quite fascinating. What does it even mean to "own" a movie? If you torrent or rip it, you now simply possess a copy and with the ability to watch it without any artificial restrictions, but I'd hardly say that you "own" it at that point.
I find it so depressing that our legal system does not even have the concept of an individual having access to a movie such that they can play it for themselves conveniently without restrictions. Even when you physically own a DVD there is no "sanctioned" way to watch it without being forced to watch the commercials and legal disclaimers at the beginning.
Which reminds me of the irony always repeated in these threads, that the folks who rip or torrent the film never see these legal disclaimers and only the folks who obey all the "rules" and don't need to see the disclaimer are constantly exposed to it.
Why can't we have nice things? This world is so distopian.
They don't want you to own anything. The industry has collectively decided we should move to an "AAS" model for everything and everyone is just playing the long game now. I hate it...
For the first time in about 10 years, I recently found myself with some physical DVDs I wanted to format-shift (show the kids some old movies on an iPad).
It was surprisingly hard to do the homework on the "best" way to do this on a Mac -- I ended up using MakeMKV to rip + Handbrake to encode, but it was hard to find a robust recent technical discussion of what the pros do.
At one point in this process I was looking at the Internet Archive's copy of http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/ which has just quietly disappeared from the Web? It was a bizarre experience.
No annoying upsells, no subscriptions and you can use the officially provided beta key (valid until the end of a month, a new key gets released every month) to check it out.
This is also the *secure* way to continue playing Ultra HD Blu-ray movies - run away from anyone's advice when they include the phrase "don't update Windows" (paraphrased). Haven't we learned to patch our system yet?
Anyone reading this, I'd recommend the Pioneer Drive if you can swing it. It does not support UHD decryption (yet) but the reliability is so much better than the LG drives and the other drives (which I think are just rebadged LG). I got a LG drive manufactured in June 2021 and by September it was dead. Got a second drive from a different vendor (mfg July 2021) and it also started to falter. (returned it while I still could). There are tons of complaints on the makemkv forums but it is still a popular drive for the price(if you wanna risk it).
My flashed LG drive, the slim laptop case size one, had been working fine for me. I sometimes don't feel like streaming or want storage space temporarily and playback using VLC. Mine is an older manufacturing date though.
It is not necessarily illegal in the USA. It's not necessarily legal either. Pasted from Wikipedia:
U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices. For example, space shifting, by making a copy of a personally owned audio CD for transfer to an MP3 player for that person's personal use, is not explicitly allowed or forbidden.
Existing copyright statutes may apply to specific acts of personal copying, as determined in cases in the civil or criminal court systems, building up a body of case law. Consumer copyright infringement cases in this area, to date, have only focused on issues related to consumer rights and the applicability of the law to the sharing of ripped files, not to the act of ripping, per se.
MakeMKV even has an integration with VLC that lets you just play Blu-ray discs without ripping them first. I don't know if that works for the UHD ones.
It works well but the more annoying issue is that UHD has hdr built in and tone mapping is still very much under development. It looks fine but, for example, can't use Dolby Vision directly. To get a complete experience, you need to rip first.
That looks very much like an old DVD ripper (even the site) that was a joy to use. I don't remember the name, but if MakeMKV is as good as that, it'll be great.
The stupid thing is that this might be illegal in some jurisdictions. With any DRM scheme you'll end up having to break the law at some point in time to consume the content you legally purchased.
Considering the size of bluray rips, let alone UHD ones, TPB downloads are usually a significant step down in terms of quality vs directly ripping a disk.
Not really. Even though you can get excellent quality h.265 encodes, it seems the MP3 generation's hearing is so impaired that compressing the hell out of audio and losing tons of audio quality is too common.
What's the point of a beautiful 2500 kbps h.265 video if they're going to kill the audio quality by squashing it to 128 kbps?
I bought a flashable drive specifically for this reason. I both love having physical releases and the convenience of a Plex server when I just want to throw something on.
As an alternative, AnyDVD HD can trasparently strip the encryption off a Blu-Ray disc. I haven't tried it with any Ultra HD discs but it works extremely well for traditional Blu-Ray.
Why bother? I did the whole shebang, bought a reader, a new processor, a compatible OLED tv and everything, I could only read a UHD bluray at 30fps if I used the integrated intel card, so had to do crazy config changes to boot correctly without my nvidia, with no HDR and that worked only with an expensive PowerDVD software.
So I gave up, googled rarbg and can get the same stuff in perfect quality in a few minutes. UHD killed legal "dvds" for me, it's so stupid.
I have used this software and it is great. You don't really have to register for the software you can find the "beta/trial" key on their forum and keep on reinstalling and reusing makemkv.
*clap* thanks for the pointer on IINA. I'm a long-time user of MPV (that's prob what I'll stick with on Windows…) it's good to have all these super useful interface improvements~
> For users who use an older compatible platform and want to keep the Ultra HD Blu-ray playback compatibility on the PC and with PowerDVD, we suggest you continue using the 7th - 10th generation Core i series of Intel CPUs and motherboards that support the Intel SGX feature. You should also consider not updating the OS (e.g., upgrading to Windows 11) and related Intel drivers to the latest versions in order to keep the Intel SGX feature from being removed from your PC. You should also ensure your platform meets all the other playback requirements of Ultra HD Blu-ray as the playback solution:
https://www.cyberlink.com/support/faq-content.do?id=19144
Wow, the official solution is to use old hardware and software. I'm sure that's a great idea :)
Sarcasm aside, I wonder when corporations will realize that until they offer proper easy and affordable solutions, people have little incentives to actually jump through the official loops and simply not pirate content. I hope to see this realization sometime in my life, but maybe I'm too optimistic.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
Exactly; Steam is so successful because they make it easier and quicker to buy games than it is to pirate them, and reward you with features for doing so (achievements, playtime on your profile, screenshot storage). Also, piracy of games specifically is less appealing when you might just download a free crypto miner or custom RAT on the side (remote administration tool).
Indeed. It's a great service even though it suffers from the same problems as everything based on licensing. People who don't like it must not remember the days where you had to download and apply 5 incremental patches to video games before you could play online. I would buy games on Steam just to get the library management and automatic updates.
The truth is most copyright holders offer absolute garbage service to consumers and the only reason they're still in the market is it's illegal to compete with them.
Streaming services, especially in Europe, have already shown this.
First there was Netflix, and everything was on Netflix. Then a few publishers decided they didn't want to share their pie with Netflix, so they started their own streaming service and pulled their content from Netflix.
Next, you have multiple streaming services and surely, piracy goes up and the pirate just throws the pie out the window. Nobody wins.
You know, I've heard Gabe's comment several times and part of my earlier comment was based off it. But I actually disagree with the
> not a pricing problem
part. Probably because I come from a third world country (India), I am extremely sensitive to avoidable costs. If you can get something for free, you can be sure that the average Indian is going to spend effort for it, me included. (This makes more sense in context to how weak the rupee is which can likely be extended to other 3rd world countries but that's another topic.)
For example - I have never purchased a music subscription even though I spend a much larger amount on food/rent and could comfortably afford one. Why? Because YouTube is free.
I think the big problem is that there are so many different forms of DRM, content media/formats, and playback devices that even a fairly educated and highly technically literate user can't be sure when they buy something about exactly when or how the DRM will rear its ugly head and bite them.
I'll never understand the stupidity of studios/streaming platforms (DRM/Widevine). DRM only hurts legit customers, period. Any TV Show or Movie you want to watch is going to be on Torrents/Usenet within hours at most of release, their DRM has completely and utterly failed to stop piracy, instead it punishes paying users.
I still remember a good decade ago getting a DVD from Redbox and trying to watch it with some friends. Tons of unskippable ads, FBI warnings, etc. Partway through the hell of enforced watching I started a torrent, before we got to the title screen it was done and we watched the downloaded version instead.
Furthermore, look at the state of TV today with all the streaming platforms. I'm excluding "live" TV because I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that cesspool. Having to jump between streaming services/UIs/UX/etc is terrible. "What platform was that show on?", "Wait, weren't we watching this on service X? That's why it lost our place in the season", "Oh, did they remove Y show?", and the list goes on.
It's incredibly sad the the best TV experience is some combo of Plex/Jellyfin+*arr-type software. Music piracy is practically non-existent in my friend groups (the same could not be said 10+ years ago), Spotify and friends did that. Not any laws, not any enforcement, not any crackdowns, etc, no a /paid/ service beat music piracy. Why? Because it was better, it was easier, and it had everything. As long as we only have a choice of disjointed services and platforms TV/Movies will never be better than piracy.
Things like Amazon Channels and Apple TV (yes the app, not the device, not the service, come on Apple...) are somewhat of a step in a better direction but Plex is still bar none. No ads, instant playback, no BS.
Sometimes it really is easier to torrent a show and know you will see it ad free and without buffering than to find it on any given streaming service and suffer the ads.
Recently I've seen even ad free, paid or unpaid, streaming options that still force ads into their shows at the beginning or the end. There is a new Nerdwallet ad that says, "Enjoy this ad free break before getting back to your show - brought to you by nerdwallet" I almost screamed at my tv when I saw that. If your name is plastered on the screen and the show/movie I'm watching is disputed to display it its an ad...
I literally took a screenshot of the top banner of Imgur the other day (I tried turning off all my blockers because it kept failing to upload images in an album, it didn't end up helping) that said "Enjoy an Ad Free Day brought to you by the Toyota Corolla Cross". Similarly I wanted to scream "That's not what that means!". Not that I'd be caught dead listening to the radio but from other's or from a long time ago I remember "enjoy this ad-free hour provided by X", if I have to hear your name then it's not ad-free.
Even that might not be worth it. Most major league sports in the US are subject to blackouts (which I think is utterly ridiculous when the venues were closed due to COVID: it's not like I could go see the game live if I wanted to). Worse, and insanely, the major league sports apps I've used enforce blackouts even when you're streaming over the Internet.[0] That's right: for $122 per season, you can't watch all your own baseball team's home games. I can imagine the content licensing contracts they have which prevent them from allowing it, but as an end user, I couldn't care less. The outcome is that it's a terrible deal for the people who'd otherwise be their best customers.
Sports are conundrum for sure and one of the only valid reasons to watch "live tv". Personally I don't care for sports but my parents do. The landscape there is pretty terrible as well IMHO. Cable or Satellite are probably the best picture while something like YouTubeTV is probably the best experience (but damn that picture is not good, at least to me it looks blocky often and there are a ton of artifacts on the picture). Game blackouts are something that I just don't understand to this day, like I understand them but how are we still living in the dark ages (pun intended)? IPTV is another option but it's temperamental and has similar picture issues to YTTV in my experience.
TV/Movies can be solved with piracy. Sports can't be solved with money or piracy.
I'm convinced the inability to easily play Blu-Rays and similar on computers is a major contributor as to why the format hasn't had the same traction as DVDs and may have accelerated the removal of disc drives from devices. Such a self-defeating move.
And I'm convinced the hassle of Blu-Ray DRM or any kind of modern DRM is why I, and many others, still pirate movies and TV shows despite being able to afford to pay for them.
I disagree. Streaming killed the disc. High speed internet facilitating digital downloads, alongside a desire to make laptops smaller and lighter, killed the disc drive.
I own a 3D Blu-ray player. I haven’t used it in about two years, since the nearest Redbox went away. I only used Redbox because it was cheap and more convenient than waiting for streaming releases. Now that many movies are released in theaters and on streaming at the same time, I don’t know if I’ll ever use it again.
Physical media is on the way out. Records continue to be manufactured for nostalgia (and better audio quality, for those that care), but that’s about it.
I can say that I have never bought into BluRay, I don’t own a BluRay compatible optical drive to play them, and as far as I know we do not own any BluRay discs. I have mountains of DVDs and still prefer it in terms of purchasing movies. Bandwidth and access to other forms of digital media has allowed me to skip BluRay. I understand the resolution is better but it’s not a strong selling point for me.
As a side note with the original DeCSS DVD code now considered a virus by many antivirus vendors I basically reject DRM technology everywhere I can.
I pay for Netflix, but that’s a recent thing. The kids watch YouTube. That’s it for my household. No local news, no over the air free HD TV. We cut the cord and never looked back. If its not on Netflix I guess we just wait or go to a theater (rarely) or don’t watch it.
I ripped my first DVD in college approximately two decades ago. I’m not oblivious to new technology nor am I some type of techno-Luddite; the selling points of BluRay are just weak imho.
I buy BDs so that kids can watch long form kids movies without needing to know about YouTube or Netflix or Prime (I mean they do, but they are now allowed there yet). I understand this will not last, but as far as I am concerned, longer they are away from total junk that Youtube offers, and from curated crap available via Netflix and such - the better.
If someone from netflix is reading: I would very much like to self curate (e.g. whitelist) which movies are are available when signed in via kids profile. Not blacklist, whitelist. Only show series and movies that are allowed.
Yeah, Blu-Ray is pretty much PS3-PS5 and XboxOne/Series or you're old/"untechnical" enough to think that you need a standalone disc player to watch movies (but heck I've overheard grannies talk about Netflix,etc so even the old gen is starting to catch on).
That said, I'm not entirely sure that cord-cutting overall is a good thing. For my kids we've practically always had Netflix (and Youtube) and almost ignored regular channels with me consuming news mostly via online newspaper articles.
This really hit me when I separated and ended up living at my brothers for a short while a couple of years ago. Their family had a far bigger presence of news in their house due to watching linear TV news every day.
See here in Sweden we have fairly decent tax-funded public broadcast news (even if it's under attack and hated on by some parties), while much of it is fluff (and most of which I'd personally grasp with reading a couple of articles far quicker) it did strike me as something that I might leave as a dis-service to my kids in not providing an environment of learning about the outside world.
Most people don't watch TV or movies on their computers. They watch them on big-screen TVs with streaming built-in (or attached to streaming devices like Rokus, Fire Sticks, or Apple TVs) in their living rooms, or on mobile devices like tablets and phones.
My guess is that the movie industry is purposefully killing off PC viewing. Bluray players and TVs are much easier to assure content control on. I'd also guess that in general they don't care about bluray, period. They want everyone to stream, where there's no "ownership."
It's difficult to even play on your TV at times. I had rented a Blu-Ray from the library, popped it into my standalone player, connected to my TV, and recieved a message that my player wouldn't play it because it was out of date. What.
I can agree with this. I got a bluray burner and I could rarely get blurays to actually play properly or at all. Somewhere between software, licensing and drm , I now have basically a paperweight. An old ps3 does the trick though
I only buy Blu-ray that come with a digital code. I activate the code, it shows up in iTunes, and I give or throw away the Blu-ray. Although this is usually around Black Friday where you can get Blu-ray for $5-$10.
It's same reason you don't see DVD-A or SACD discs around. Who would buy such things when you need an expensive standalone player, especially in the age of streaming? They didn't learn.
I honestly don't get it, everyone knows that this will not stop piracy, there's no benefit whatsoever to it yet it has significant disadvantages for paying customers.
That's because piracy is the excuse, not the reason. DRM is very successful at what it should do: Protect the content middleman from the device makers (not the end users).
They can, for example, enforce market segmentation: You bought the DVD in the USA and play it in the EU. Legal, but DRM stops you. Wait for the EU release and pay the different price.
If the content middleman screams piracy, react as if a politician screams child porn. They want something else, but cant' get it without invoking the bogeyman. Hordes of (starving artists/concerned parents) will provide the necessary rope to hang themselves on command.
Disney CEO: "We want a DRM system that will make piracy impossible. Can you do it?"
Developer: "That's impossible, it can't be done."
Disney CEO: "My son is constantly asking for $70 games for his playstation/xbox, so I'm not convinced DRM is impossible. Could you do it if we paid you $300,000 per year? Or do you have nothing to offer the company?"
Developer: "Well, when you put it like that, I'm happy to try. We can certainly make something that doesn't have the holes previous systems had, and that will slow down piracy, initially."
Disney CEO: "Ah, so it might be possible after all...."
1. Stopping "casual" piracy, that is, stopping a tech illiterate person (most of the population) from simply copying it to another tech illiterate friend (they don't want a repetition of the K7 mixtape era).
2. Create a walled garden were you have a monopoly that you can abuse to extract better deals from other stakeholders.
It doesn't outright stop piracy, but making it more uncomfortable to play back on PC means people would either switch to streaming or buy set-top players.
Big tech long ago decided that the PC is a problem to them and they want to move to locked-down gadgets.
DRM has nothing to do with piracy of even control over end-user. It's all about media companies having leverage over hardware manufacturers of TVs, computers, game consoles, etc.
So media companies want extort money from hardware manufacturers. Manufacturer might choose not to pay, but then most of movies and Netflix (FullHD, 4K) wouldn't play on their devices.
Once in a while, some DRM does work in buying some time for the copyright holder. Denuvo has sometimes led to games taking longer to be cracked, in some cases for a few weeks or even months, enough to perhaps capture some of the initial rush of purchases for a video game. Of course, there will be consumers who don't want to buy games with DRM as well.
The currently model for digital media (film, music, etc) just doesn't work. Instead of preventing piracy, figure out a new way of making money for artists (not the organisations and administrators). Artists ought to be rewarded not the organisation and admin.
Thing is the organizations and administrators around artists are huge.
In the current world, they are no longer needed, and they know it. But they still have power. So they are doing everything they can to keep up their revenue streams. If they admit to progress, if they try and make a working ecosystems, they are working on something which, at best, requires massive downsizing for them.
So instead they are flailing about looking to construct ecosystems that still have a place for them.
Most customers don't know what DRM is, how it works and how/when it fails.
It's reasonable for a non-technical person to agree with a solution that claims to prevent piracy because they have no idea how these things work and their trade-offs. They don't mind it because they don't see themselves as pirates given that they just bought the media and are unaware of how the DRM scheme can backfire on them despite not being a pirate.
Very few people would agree to DRM if the DRM scheme explicitly had a disclaimer "we can, for any reason, prevent you from playing this in the future even on the same hardware that successfully plays it today".
The desire to support the unreasonable demands of the film industry here has led to the perversion of the x86 architecture to add all sorts of peculiar DRM functionalities, and has precluded firmware components from being made open source; as I have previously written about here [1], which links to forum posts by an AMD engineer:
I'm sure I don't have to explain to you that the essense of DRM requirements in the OEM PC market is that the owner must NOT have full control of the machine if that includes being able to tamper with or disable any of the DRM mechanisms.
At the end of the day if Intel was going to support this kind of thing AMD also was pretty much going to be required to make such a deal with the devil, or have a product that can't compete with Intel. If Intel is losing interest in supporting video DRM, perhaps due to shifts away from physical media, it's likely to have a positive effect on both Intel's platform as well as other platforms which feel the need to support the same DRM platforms.
I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? Ideally I'd like to see reform of copyright law to favour corporate giants a bit less, but given how much of a hand those same giants seem to have in the laws that get written I'm not hopeful of that any time soon.
I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.
And to think that Sony was once on the good side, even going to the Supreme Court to defend the VCR. But once they bought a studio, the Hollywood goons took over.
The owner should still have full control and be able to disable DRM support. If that means you can't play certain movies afterwards that is fine, but the control should be there.
Having full control means that you could also partially disable DRM support. Say, perhaps, by enabling the part that determines an encryption key and decrypts the video, but disabling the part that checks whether the video is being sent to a compliant display rather than to an unencrypted file.
You cannot have effective DRM without taking away full control from the user.
It's the same problem I was facing trying to play Netflix Ultra HD on my AMD CPU. Fortunately Netflix now also works without Intel SGX so I can watch my stuff on my PCs now.
On the other hand: It is still not possible to play Amazon Prime Ultra HD on AMD CPUs and probably also on the new Intel 12th gen as of now.
The one thing I hate about these limitations is the amount of detailed knowledge that is required to know what is happening. As an average consumer I would have never thought of such bullshit. I only read about the problem wehn I had already bought my CPU...
If you torrent the content directly, it plays on all hardware and can be used offline or easily shared to friends via USB/AirDrop/etc. You also get a wide choice of players.
Everything good on the streaming sites is quickly available via torrent, and VPNs are like $5. Don't continue paying the media cartels for abuse.
WebTorrent + RarBg is where things are at now. Hopefully we will see more and more descentralized or anonymous search databases with Tor, Freenet, IPFS or similar technology to finally end the "Piracy Wars".
For a while I was running my second monitor over DVI. And putting Amazon prime on it cause the video to go blank.
I know why (I think there's some bs about not running HDCP over DVI even though it's basically HDMI in most Configs)
But it was bizzare to actually see it.
According to [1] Netflix supports "Safari up to 4K on macOS 11.0 or later"
Of course, you also need to be on the 'premium' plan, have a fast-enough internet connection, be watching 4K content, have the T2 security chip, have an HDCP display, and so on.
On Windows, you can, with a giant gotcha. Netflix need you to have all connect screen 4k to play ultra hd on Windows. I don't know if it is different if the screen is buildin.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: DRM only hurts your legitimate customers. Anyone who had any interest in pirating your content will find a way around DRM -- whether that's a technical solution or whether it's just downloading a copy from someone else who has the technical knowhow to bypass DRM.
However it's your legitimate customers, the ones who actually paid for your product, who suffer.
Readit News
https://www.makemkv.com/buy/
Some drives need to have their firmware flashed in order to enable ripping of UHD discs:
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19113
I'm not affiliated with the product other than having used it to rip my entire disc library. It can also rip DVDs and regular blu-rays.
Once ripped, they can be played back with VLC, mpv, or derivatives. (On Macs, IINA is very good.)
I love their summary of what the patched firmware does:
'A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself “revoked”.
(...) Change the optical drive embedded software in a way that the drive becomes a “primitive” device - one that just positions a laser, reads and decodes the data. Make a drive free from “policing” functionality, a drive that just passes all data from the disc to the user.'
- from What is LibreDrive? at https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=18856
Otherwise if you just want to watch a movie and don't care that it might not be available at a later time, use a streaming service, it's by far the most convenient.
I find this phrasing quite fascinating. What does it even mean to "own" a movie? If you torrent or rip it, you now simply possess a copy and with the ability to watch it without any artificial restrictions, but I'd hardly say that you "own" it at that point.
I find it so depressing that our legal system does not even have the concept of an individual having access to a movie such that they can play it for themselves conveniently without restrictions. Even when you physically own a DVD there is no "sanctioned" way to watch it without being forced to watch the commercials and legal disclaimers at the beginning.
Which reminds me of the irony always repeated in these threads, that the folks who rip or torrent the film never see these legal disclaimers and only the folks who obey all the "rules" and don't need to see the disclaimer are constantly exposed to it.
Why can't we have nice things? This world is so distopian.
It was surprisingly hard to do the homework on the "best" way to do this on a Mac -- I ended up using MakeMKV to rip + Handbrake to encode, but it was hard to find a robust recent technical discussion of what the pros do.
At one point in this process I was looking at the Internet Archive's copy of http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/ which has just quietly disappeared from the Web? It was a bizarre experience.
No annoying upsells, no subscriptions and you can use the officially provided beta key (valid until the end of a month, a new key gets released every month) to check it out.
U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices. For example, space shifting, by making a copy of a personally owned audio CD for transfer to an MP3 player for that person's personal use, is not explicitly allowed or forbidden.
Existing copyright statutes may apply to specific acts of personal copying, as determined in cases in the civil or criminal court systems, building up a body of case law. Consumer copyright infringement cases in this area, to date, have only focused on issues related to consumer rights and the applicability of the law to the sharing of ripped files, not to the act of ripping, per se.
What's the point of a beautiful 2500 kbps h.265 video if they're going to kill the audio quality by squashing it to 128 kbps?
So I gave up, googled rarbg and can get the same stuff in perfect quality in a few minutes. UHD killed legal "dvds" for me, it's so stupid.
Deleted Comment
Wow, the official solution is to use old hardware and software. I'm sure that's a great idea :)
Sarcasm aside, I wonder when corporations will realize that until they offer proper easy and affordable solutions, people have little incentives to actually jump through the official loops and simply not pirate content. I hope to see this realization sometime in my life, but maybe I'm too optimistic.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
The truth is most copyright holders offer absolute garbage service to consumers and the only reason they're still in the market is it's illegal to compete with them.
First there was Netflix, and everything was on Netflix. Then a few publishers decided they didn't want to share their pie with Netflix, so they started their own streaming service and pulled their content from Netflix.
Next, you have multiple streaming services and surely, piracy goes up and the pirate just throws the pie out the window. Nobody wins.
1. Create incredibly addictive tv shows
2. Release episodes once a week, with a huge cliffhanger
3. Release in Europe/UK one week behind the US
A growth hacker couldn't create a better incentive for piracy if they tried. Anyone know why this is a thing?
For example - I have never purchased a music subscription even though I spend a much larger amount on food/rent and could comfortably afford one. Why? Because YouTube is free.
I still remember a good decade ago getting a DVD from Redbox and trying to watch it with some friends. Tons of unskippable ads, FBI warnings, etc. Partway through the hell of enforced watching I started a torrent, before we got to the title screen it was done and we watched the downloaded version instead.
Furthermore, look at the state of TV today with all the streaming platforms. I'm excluding "live" TV because I can't imagine why anyone would subject themselves to that cesspool. Having to jump between streaming services/UIs/UX/etc is terrible. "What platform was that show on?", "Wait, weren't we watching this on service X? That's why it lost our place in the season", "Oh, did they remove Y show?", and the list goes on.
It's incredibly sad the the best TV experience is some combo of Plex/Jellyfin+*arr-type software. Music piracy is practically non-existent in my friend groups (the same could not be said 10+ years ago), Spotify and friends did that. Not any laws, not any enforcement, not any crackdowns, etc, no a /paid/ service beat music piracy. Why? Because it was better, it was easier, and it had everything. As long as we only have a choice of disjointed services and platforms TV/Movies will never be better than piracy.
Things like Amazon Channels and Apple TV (yes the app, not the device, not the service, come on Apple...) are somewhat of a step in a better direction but Plex is still bar none. No ads, instant playback, no BS.
Recently I've seen even ad free, paid or unpaid, streaming options that still force ads into their shows at the beginning or the end. There is a new Nerdwallet ad that says, "Enjoy this ad free break before getting back to your show - brought to you by nerdwallet" I almost screamed at my tv when I saw that. If your name is plastered on the screen and the show/movie I'm watching is disputed to display it its an ad...
Live sports.
[0] https://www.mlb.com/live-stream-games/subscribe/offseason
TV/Movies can be solved with piracy. Sports can't be solved with money or piracy.
The pirates offer superior product, every time.
I own a 3D Blu-ray player. I haven’t used it in about two years, since the nearest Redbox went away. I only used Redbox because it was cheap and more convenient than waiting for streaming releases. Now that many movies are released in theaters and on streaming at the same time, I don’t know if I’ll ever use it again.
Physical media is on the way out. Records continue to be manufactured for nostalgia (and better audio quality, for those that care), but that’s about it.
In 2010 I had several 1TB HDDs, fast broadband, and a 32GB USB stick. Getting a blue ray drive for my PC wasn’t worth the hassle.
As a side note with the original DeCSS DVD code now considered a virus by many antivirus vendors I basically reject DRM technology everywhere I can.
I pay for Netflix, but that’s a recent thing. The kids watch YouTube. That’s it for my household. No local news, no over the air free HD TV. We cut the cord and never looked back. If its not on Netflix I guess we just wait or go to a theater (rarely) or don’t watch it.
I ripped my first DVD in college approximately two decades ago. I’m not oblivious to new technology nor am I some type of techno-Luddite; the selling points of BluRay are just weak imho.
If someone from netflix is reading: I would very much like to self curate (e.g. whitelist) which movies are are available when signed in via kids profile. Not blacklist, whitelist. Only show series and movies that are allowed.
That said, I'm not entirely sure that cord-cutting overall is a good thing. For my kids we've practically always had Netflix (and Youtube) and almost ignored regular channels with me consuming news mostly via online newspaper articles.
This really hit me when I separated and ended up living at my brothers for a short while a couple of years ago. Their family had a far bigger presence of news in their house due to watching linear TV news every day.
See here in Sweden we have fairly decent tax-funded public broadcast news (even if it's under attack and hated on by some parties), while much of it is fluff (and most of which I'd personally grasp with reading a couple of articles far quicker) it did strike me as something that I might leave as a dis-service to my kids in not providing an environment of learning about the outside world.
Most people don't watch TV or movies on their computers. They watch them on big-screen TVs with streaming built-in (or attached to streaming devices like Rokus, Fire Sticks, or Apple TVs) in their living rooms, or on mobile devices like tablets and phones.
My guess is that the movie industry is purposefully killing off PC viewing. Bluray players and TVs are much easier to assure content control on. I'd also guess that in general they don't care about bluray, period. They want everyone to stream, where there's no "ownership."
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They can, for example, enforce market segmentation: You bought the DVD in the USA and play it in the EU. Legal, but DRM stops you. Wait for the EU release and pay the different price.
If the content middleman screams piracy, react as if a politician screams child porn. They want something else, but cant' get it without invoking the bogeyman. Hordes of (starving artists/concerned parents) will provide the necessary rope to hang themselves on command.
Disney CEO: "We want a DRM system that will make piracy impossible. Can you do it?"
Developer: "That's impossible, it can't be done."
Disney CEO: "My son is constantly asking for $70 games for his playstation/xbox, so I'm not convinced DRM is impossible. Could you do it if we paid you $300,000 per year? Or do you have nothing to offer the company?"
Developer: "Well, when you put it like that, I'm happy to try. We can certainly make something that doesn't have the holes previous systems had, and that will slow down piracy, initially."
Disney CEO: "Ah, so it might be possible after all...."
1. Stopping "casual" piracy, that is, stopping a tech illiterate person (most of the population) from simply copying it to another tech illiterate friend (they don't want a repetition of the K7 mixtape era).
2. Create a walled garden were you have a monopoly that you can abuse to extract better deals from other stakeholders.
Big tech long ago decided that the PC is a problem to them and they want to move to locked-down gadgets.
DRM has nothing to do with piracy of even control over end-user. It's all about media companies having leverage over hardware manufacturers of TVs, computers, game consoles, etc.
So media companies want extort money from hardware manufacturers. Manufacturer might choose not to pay, but then most of movies and Netflix (FullHD, 4K) wouldn't play on their devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo
In the current world, they are no longer needed, and they know it. But they still have power. So they are doing everything they can to keep up their revenue streams. If they admit to progress, if they try and make a working ecosystems, they are working on something which, at best, requires massive downsizing for them.
So instead they are flailing about looking to construct ecosystems that still have a place for them.
It's reasonable for a non-technical person to agree with a solution that claims to prevent piracy because they have no idea how these things work and their trade-offs. They don't mind it because they don't see themselves as pirates given that they just bought the media and are unaware of how the DRM scheme can backfire on them despite not being a pirate.
Very few people would agree to DRM if the DRM scheme explicitly had a disclaimer "we can, for any reason, prevent you from playing this in the future even on the same hardware that successfully plays it today".
The desire to support the unreasonable demands of the film industry here has led to the perversion of the x86 architecture to add all sorts of peculiar DRM functionalities, and has precluded firmware components from being made open source; as I have previously written about here [1], which links to forum posts by an AMD engineer:
At the end of the day if Intel was going to support this kind of thing AMD also was pretty much going to be required to make such a deal with the devil, or have a product that can't compete with Intel. If Intel is losing interest in supporting video DRM, perhaps due to shifts away from physical media, it's likely to have a positive effect on both Intel's platform as well as other platforms which feel the need to support the same DRM platforms.[1] https://www.devever.net/~hl/intelme
"Why has my playback gone silent?"
I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.
The owner should still have full control and be able to disable DRM support. If that means you can't play certain movies afterwards that is fine, but the control should be there.
You cannot have effective DRM without taking away full control from the user.
I totally agree with you, for what it is worth.
Also I don't think that this has an effect on Intel's Management Engine ?
BTW, older AMD CPUs (of the Bulldozer line) are still performant enough, and don't come with a likely backdoor in the form of IME / AMD PSP.
P.S.: It does really suck the effect that this has on GPU's openness... (and so performance for very specific use cases)
And isn't the IME only a few decades old ?
(Of course Microsoft with its "trusted computing" and the NSA with its job to backdoor everything that can be likely had a hand in that too...)
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On the other hand: It is still not possible to play Amazon Prime Ultra HD on AMD CPUs and probably also on the new Intel 12th gen as of now.
The one thing I hate about these limitations is the amount of detailed knowledge that is required to know what is happening. As an average consumer I would have never thought of such bullshit. I only read about the problem wehn I had already bought my CPU...
Everything good on the streaming sites is quickly available via torrent, and VPNs are like $5. Don't continue paying the media cartels for abuse.
This isn’t as true as it used to be. The torrent scene seems a fraction of what it used to be.
Presumably it’s still fine in private sites but I wouldn’t know.
I know why (I think there's some bs about not running HDCP over DVI even though it's basically HDMI in most Configs) But it was bizzare to actually see it.
Of course, you also need to be on the 'premium' plan, have a fast-enough internet connection, be watching 4K content, have the T2 security chip, have an HDCP display, and so on.
[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
However it's your legitimate customers, the ones who actually paid for your product, who suffer.