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Comment by jotato | Hacker News Reader

I picked up a new hobby of buying Linux ISOs from thrift stores. I usually get them for $1/each. Up to 300 now - all mine. Jellyfin is great to organize them

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I have some Linux ISOs I ripped myself, but it can be especially hard to find older ISOs from other countries - you usually can't find them on normal websites. It's really nice to have them on my own server and not worry about them disappearing someday.

I’ve been collecting a lot of post-war Italian neorealism Linux ISOs and running a DHT indexer has made it pretty easy to find distros that may be out of print.

It’s so hard to find drivers for those

Vittorio de Sica's Ladri di biciclette is a Linux ISO I can recommend.

First I've heard of this DHT indexer concept. Is this bitmagnet? What kind of resources does it require? Thanks for any info you can provide.

I used to have a substantial collection of very rare Euro/US short and performance art films on DVD that were lost to the sands of time during a period of my life where my work led me to be mostly nomadic. In retrospect, I wish I would have ripped the collection onto a hard drive as most of them are completely irreplaceable now on DVD.

Problem is the resolution. I don't want to experience paid 480p in a world of free 4k.

Blu rays aren't bad either. The glory days were back when Netflix was cheap and there was an oversupply (in that era I built up a library of hundreds), but even today you can get most things in 1080p for $10 or less.

If you don't think 2 hours of professionally produced content is worth $10, well that's why AI isn't the only thing destroying art and culture.

The issue with Blu-rays is they are costly to rip. Basically, the only software that let you do it right now is MakeMKV, and it's proprietary. I believe that the VLC team is working on some open-source solutions, but last time I checked, it was only able to read old Blu-ray (which is understandable, they have to care about potential copyright and drm issue, unlike the people behind makemkv).

So if you want to rip recent Blu-ray, you will need to buy makemkv (they do have a 1-month trial tho). But worse, if you want to rip 4k Blu-ray, you will need a specific br-drive that makemkv support (as I understand, they make custom / modified firmware for some drives, allowing to read the protected data). The issue is that there is barely anyone still making br drives and whenever makemkv support one it goes out of stock and/or become extremely expensive on the second hand market.

This is really annoying me because I know this is the end of the physical market for movie. I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years. Movie will probably only be available through streaming services, which means it will be harder and harder to get a good quality encoding. With recent codecs (av1, h265, will see how av2 does), the quality that streaming services is okay, but we are far from what a full Blu-ray dump allows today.

MakeMKV has an effectively perpetual free trial right now. It's not like old shareware were you have to pay after a month but rahter that you have to feed it a new free activation key every month and maybe wait a couple of days for one to be posted.

That can change (and the official communication is that its only free while in beta) but my guess is that the free beta is the main thing holding back alternatives. MakeMKV does solid work but it's not rocket science and a lot of parts (like all the complementary LibreDrive / UHD firmware work) doesn't even have a paid license check at all.

> I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years.

I don't. It might continue to shrink and thereby get more expensive but the distributor market is still very healthy and has more active competition than movie production itself. The biggest danger is disc production but I don't think its impossible to shift that over to a BD-on-USBFlash or whatever else is convenient if needed.

Maybe, just like Adobe products recently, someone should vibe code an alternative to that blu-ray ripper...maybe even you.

I'm back in to collecting physical media as well. I get my wife to use her Facebook account to find stuff on marketplace. Lightly used bundles can get movies down to like a dollar per.

1080p doesn't really say much when that could be an old DVD-era master with questionable color correction crammed onto a BD25 disc with other features/extras vs a modern archival-quality master professionally encoded to 40+ GB.

It's rare that the latter goes for < $10.

I hate blueray. At least for having physical copies. Too many times I've tried watching something I own only to have it fail due to my player not having current decryption keys. Perhaps it's more of a player issue and less of a disc issue, but it's still a problem with the overall format.

The one time I actually bought a Bluray, I couldn't play it because of fricking Region Coding. Like this is the 2020s and you still have to deal with that BS?!

MakeMKV hasn't failed me yet. As always, only people fully abiding by corporate rules suffer.

$1 won't get you Linux ISOs up to modern display standards. Great if that works for you but the high end is more like $20+ (emphasis on the +, taxes and shipping not included) per Linux ISO so its understanding why many might prefer sharing them digitally. And that's before getting into cases where the Linux ISO vendors don't even want to give you the specific version you want.

Did you see the 'thrift store' part of his comment? I do the same thing as him, and depending on the location around town, an ISO on a DVD can be as little as 50 cents, and a modern Linux ISO on bluray, including 4K (though rare I see those) are rarely over maybe $3.

Yeah, garage sales are another place. you can get multiple for a buck :)

Especially those "one package wonder" ISO vendors, $20 is steep.

In France many public libraries let you rent them for free (or a ridiculously low annual subscription); you take them home, copy them, return them, and it costs nothing.

And it is legal to do so ! We pay the "copie privé" tax for that reason.

Some of ours in the US even have video games. The one I go to even has tools and all sorts of other interesting physical objects. People really need to visit their libraries, they’re already paying for it via taxes.

Same with USA. I was surprised at the variety of platforms supported.

Hmm, public DVDs I know often have read errors.

but you trust a random torrent upload more?

at least with the library DVDs I can be reasonably certain the weird artifact is not embedded malware, just scratches

What? Rent linux iso:s for free? Good deal!

glad to hear I'm not the only one!!!

a few months back I opened up a streaming service that I pay for to watch a old TV show. I was _enraged_ to find out that they put ADS WHERE COMMERCIALS USED TO BE. I thought the whole point of paying was to avoid ads!

so now I visit my used Blu-Ray/DVD store about once a month. they always have buy two/get one free, and the prices are ridiculously low.

is it a better solution? I don't know, but I do know that I don't have to watch those ads anymore.

I started picking them up from the library. Goodwill wants like five bucks a disk now. Library has them for .25 to a dollar each. Or free if you just check them out.

What kind of thrift store sells these? In what country?

I suspect "Linux ISOs" are not actual Linux .iso images but ~pirated~ movies, music, and digital books ;)

Joking aside, a few early commercial Linux distro (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, SuSe, Corel Linux) had really nice packaging and media artworks. I'd love to collect them.

Yes, seriously, my intro to linux as a kid was seeing the slick Red Hat boxed media on the shelves at CompUSA.

Thrift stores will often sell used DVDs for $1. No piracy involved, no copyright issues as it's a physical disk which can be legally sold on.

The "questionable" piece is ripping the DVD to a home media library to play via Jellyfin. Which might be fair use in some countries.

No way!

ding ding ding

ISOs of what, music or video?

movies, tv, and occasional audio books. A good blueray reader costs a bit but it is worth it to have them legally

Thrift stores? Really?

Yes there’s usually a good cache for very cheap though most are scratched up

1000% percent!

I go to a local game exchange place, they have all kinds of DVDs and Blu-Rays for dirt cheap.

absolutely. whole walls of old movies, music, whatever.

the really good stuff eventually goes, but there is often a lot of pretty dang good media there too.

check for scratches, tho

psst, they're talking about movies

is this an internet secret code I am missing ?

It's even in the Urban Dictionary [1]:

> Linux ISO: A codeword for copyrighted material shared without permission, usually over P2P networks.

[1] http://linux-iso.urbanup.com/2782626

Many Linux ISOs are distributed via torrents.

Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.

The two things that torrents are best at are downloading Linux ISOs and pirating content. So using qbittorrent to download Linux ISOs is usually code for piracy, since torrenting Linux ISOs is legal and piracy is not :)

Piracy is legal if you're big enough

I think that's called being a privateer, you just need the right papers from the king!

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