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Comment by chungy | Hacker News Reader

"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. ;)

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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

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.

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.

> 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.

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