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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Best Buy is trying to make it a trend for retailers to stop selling physical media, with Target only selling them online. A lot of tech companies now have basically exited from optical media, with fewer weighing their options.
Physical media still has a place but it’s on slow-burn right now, where we’re seeing major players dropping out from bothering with them, so in the oncoming years, we’re going to have to rely on grabbing them out in the wild or hope third party manufacturers keep it alive.
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
