Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

I prefer DVD to Blu-ray because

  - Ripping DVDs I own is simple and reliable.

  - Ripping my Blu-rays is complicated, error-prone, and expensive (custom software, custom hardware)

  - I'm macOS-based and there is no first-party Blu-ray player for macOS.

  - Third-party Blu-ray apps are awful and unreliable and they jank through ripped Blu-rays.

As a result, I stopped buying Blu-rays because ripped DVDs provide the security/longevity of physical media with the convenience of digital accessibility.

View on HN

"Custom hardware" just amounts to having a Blu-ray Drive, and they're not really expensive (or do you think $20 is expensive?). You have a point on software, but MakeMKV can be used for free for as long as it's called beta, which appears to be forever at this point.

For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that. Lately I've been buying 2160p discs when they're available (and if I don't have a 1080p already... unlike the other jump, 1080p→2160p is not significant), and for a couple years now, ripping them in MakeMKV has been equally as trivial as 1080p discs.

Maybe your concession could be that most 1080p disc releases bundle a DVD with them. ;)

Still worse than using the dvd reader inside a laptop

I haven't had a laptop (or desktop) with a built in DVD reader since 2015.

Some of us may have them :)

I just use a SATA Blu-ray Drive in my desktop. Works great.

If I understand correctly for UHD discs it amounts to having not just any drive, but having a supported drive flashed to a supported, sometime old, firmware version such that MakeMKV is able to dynamically overwrite the drive firmware (ie, root the drive) before ripping the disc. The whole process also depends on downloading encryption keys from a server that are per-disc, so if that goes down or stops being updated that could prevent you ripping your discs again in future.

MakeMKV is incredible but the whole process seems fragile and very complex.

Pioneer drives work out of the box with no firmware update.

Good to know, but flashing an e.g. ASUS drive with LibreDrive firmware is also no as complicated as the GP makes it out to be and supported drives are easy to find.

In addition macOS probably means macbook, where they either don't have drive bays or only dvd drive bays.

You can always get an external SATA to USB adapter or enclosure, no?

> For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that.

Heh, for me the quality of VHS (not bootleg) was good enough. The main reason I eventually switched to DVD is because DVDs don't need to be rewound, were cheaper, and seemed more durable.

Second or third generation bootleg VHS was often quite poor, as were worn out VHS from rental shops. Plus SD digital encodes from the 00s internet were very low quality compared to VHS, but I think that's the source of reference for many younger people who don't remember VHS well.

>For me, the quality improvement from 480i/p to 1080p is huge and I wouldn't personally sacrifice that

You'd be amazed how high quality you can stuff into 4.7gb if you use a proper encoding format like H264 or HEVC. Pirates have been doing it for years, it wouldn't be too unreasonable for legit companies to offer it as well.

I legitimately don’t understand how you can care enough about movies and TV to buy physical media, but little enough that standard definition is not a deal breaker. This is not a criticism, it just makes absolutely no sense to me.

Seriously - 480i is pretty awful these days. I don't even watch YouTube videos at that resolution on my phone. I can't imagine watching full movies at that resolution in 2022.

These days if I'm watching youtube on my TV I'll usually preference 4K content because 1080 is just noticeably bad. I wish people would start uploading HDR content because it's another huge leap in quality.

Though for youtube on a TV, bitrate is probably the dominating factor in the difference between 1080 and 4K.

Yeah very likely. I play 1080p switch games and they are generally ok, clearly not as good as 4k but not as bad as youtube 1080p.

Youtube 480p is a world of difference crappier than DVD 480p.

Personally, I started during the days when things went on and off netflix rather often.

It turns out the few shows I really wanted to watch were available on ebay reasonably cheaply, and I didn't have to pay any attention to availability anymore. It snowballed from there, as I kept adding more shows.

As far as the quality goes, I don't really like wearing my glasses when I get home. I literally can't tell the difference from my couch. Unless it's a show that requires subtitles, then I need to put on my glasses, but I'm pretty used to everything being a little blurry anyways.

I care about the story. SD typically is sufficient for not distracting me from the story.

FHD Blu-rays rips really easily and the media are far more durable/reliable. About 5% of my DVD collection fails to rip in the simple manner, 1% doesn't rip at all[1], 100% of my Blu-ray collection rips cleanly on the first try with makemkv.

1: ddrescue on two different DVD drives can rip most DVDs (make sure you authorized the drive first by opening it with a player first), but I have 2 (out of nearly 200) that do not.

I've had Blu-Rays that required multiple tries and even some that I haven't managed to rip yet due to apparent damage (though resurfacing might yet make them readable).

> ddrescue

GNU ddrescue is essential for any kind of data recovery for sure - not to be confused with the older dd_rescue wrapper around dd which is a lot more limited. For archival though it is not always enough though (it might be for DVDs) as some copy protection schemes store data outside the normal data area or in the error correction information.

> I've had Blu-Rays that required multiple tries and even some that I haven't managed to rip yet due to apparent damage (though resurfacing might yet make them readable).

Are you using a slim BD drive? I switched to a "normal" 5.25 sized (a.k.a. 41mm tall half-height bay) and got significantly improved speeds and reliability after trying two different slim drives.

I haven't seen this be a problem on MacOS with MakeMKV and a good external bluray drive (one a slim bluray and another a LG drive in a usb3 enclosure). I've had maybe 1 bad bluray disk that I backed up out of the hundreds of blu-ray disks that I own, and in that case it was the physical material separating on the disk itself.

Edit: I have one of the good LG drives that works well with Libredrive and as far as I've tested it can back up everything I've thrown at it.

What software do you use to play ripped Blu-rays?

I've tried both Macgo Blu-ray Player [1] and Anymp4 Blu-ray Player [2] and both have their playback issues. (Just a note that Anymp4 may look sketchy, but they are a legit company who do provide refunds if necessary.)

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/macgo-blu-ray-player-pro/id140...

[2] https://www.anymp4.com/blu-ray-player/

VLC basically. Or Plex if you have an apple TV.

I usually transcode using Don Melton's other-video-transcoding ruby gem, albeit I think doing it on my PC w/ nvidia card seems to yield more consistent quality vs. the Apple Silicon built-in HEVC encoder.

VLC can play them just fine and anything that supports H.264/H.265 mkvs.

I suggest IINA.

While MakeMKV can rip decrypted Blu-Rays as-is, the default mode of operation is to encapsulate the audio and video streams in a Matroska (.mkv) container for each track (hence the name MakeMKV) which should be playable in any video player worth its salt. Personlly I like mpv for its minimalism.

As someone who use to buy Blu-Ray kids movies and rip them to my own media server long before "netflix" your post makes zero sense and I strongly agree with the other guy.

Get a Blu-Ray drive for your computer and makemkv (works on Windows, Linux, Macos) and be done with it.

I've ripped both Blu-Ray and DVD's via makemkv and the process is pretty much identical so i don't see where the "complicated, errror-prone and expensive" part comes from given makeMKV is free?

It has been in "beta" for decades and so they offer a time-limited license.

Nothing a basic BD-ROM and a AnyDVD HD license (and a PC I guess) can't fix

Or MakeMKV which is cross-platform and currently freeware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com