10 ms·

This is why I only buy disks and rip them. My Plex server will never close down or tell me I can't watch a movie anymore.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
While my eBook library is pretty something, the storage costs to rip my movie library onto hard drives would be cost prohibitive. I do keep physical discs of the movies I really enjoy, and generally only buy digital during sales. Most of the "value" in my digital movie collection comes from digital copy redeems. Vudu does $5 sales all the time, and the way I see it, that's less than a movie ticket. So if I see it once, it was like going to see a movie, but with the theoretical hope of long-term persistence. The fact that MA insulates the risk of losing your titles across every major tech company adds to the comfort level now too, and as noted, nobody is losing their UV library when UV shuts down.
- beagle3 8y ago
  DVDs are usually less than 5GB. 1TB drives cost $40 these days, less if amortized over larger disks. Which means $100 buys you enough disk space for two redundant copies of 200 movies assuming you vobcopy them; about twice or thrice if you convert to h264 or h265 or av1; and half again if you have BD quality rips. That’s about 50cents/movie for two copies, half if you only keep one. Is this really prohibitive?
  - olliej 8y ago
    I assume people with blue ray want to rip at original quality - isn’t that 10s of gig per disk? (I have never bought blue ray so have no idea). For me the problem was ripping my dvds just took so long, and wasn’t automatable (weirdly my bottom of the line Mac mini struggles with re-encoding ;) )
    - loeg 8y ago
      Yep, Blu-rays can store something like 25GB per layer; industry standard for movies is dual layer (50GB). Rips can achieve comparable quality with lower bitrate than used on the original disk. Blu-ray dates to 2006 and (typically) uses inefficient high bit-rate H.262 ("MPEG 2", which DVDs used), H.264 (AVC), or VC-1. Rips can use high-efficiency H.265 ("HEVC"). Typical for a 1080p H.265 encoding is 9-15 GB. (Lower for animated films.) UHD Blu-rays do use the more efficient H.265 already, but are much higher resolution as well. I'm not sure how prevalent they are.
      - bscphil 8y ago
        The vast majority of newer Blurays use H.264, which is pretty efficient (much more than the other two). In addition, if you're just wanting to back up the film, and not any special features on the disk, at least half of films fit in 25 GB with no reencoding required. One big downside of reencoding in HEVC is that for a moderate gain in compression (0-50% depending on the film), you considerably increase your playback requirements. I use a Raspberry Pi 3 with Kodi as a playback device, and it's not capable of playing 1080p HEVC videos. UHD Blurays are getting more common. They usually come on 66 GiB disks, and it's becoming more common to let the video take up most of that, and bundling a second disk of special features if necessary. So even backing up the main feature of a UHD can easily run you 50+ GiB.
        loeg 8y ago
        > The vast majority of newer Blurays use H.264, which is pretty efficient (much more than the other two). Right; still quite a bit less efficient than H.265, though. > One big downside of reencoding in HEVC is that for a moderate gain in compression (0-50% depending on the film), you considerably increase your playback requirements. Yes, although this is becoming less true as more hardware offload support becomes available. For example, Nvidia 750, 950-960, and 1030 are all capable of HEVC offload[1]. The latter can be had new for ~$85; the others are probably a bit harder to find but given they're older midrange cards at this point maybe they're a little cheaper. > So even backing up the main feature of a UHD can easily run you 50+ GiB. Sure, I don't think there's any economical way to reduce storage requirements of UHD significantly without defeating the point. On the other hand, I don't think the extra pixels really matter as much as higher color depth (10 or 12 bit) and fewer artifacts at lower resolution, unless you've got a home IMAX or something. [1]: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support...
    - 013a 8y ago
      Depends on the movie and if its 1080p or 4K, but generally I anticipate a ripped Bluray to be around 60gb. Re-encoding them is a PITA as well. Even on a HEDT gaming desktop with a brand new CPU, the process only proceeds at 8-10fps, if that, so at least 2x movie runtime. Maybe there are some ways to involve the video card which can speed it up, but I haven't tried it. And even if you want to and can keep the originals, you'll want to re-encode it and keep both; most Plex clients (think: Apple TV, shitty laptop, etc) simply can't handle raw 4K bluray playback.
      - Rebelgecko 8y ago
        ffmpeg supports a variety of hardware encoders but supposedly the quality will be worse than a CPU-encoded video at the same bitrate
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      Pirated 4k videos are often 7-15GB. I presume this is optimized for size over maximum quality.
      - jumelles 8y ago
        That seems too small IMO. Encoded BD rips average about 20-30 GB; remuxes (no compression/encoding) begin around 50 GB.
- cortesoft 8y ago
  How big is your movie library and what would you consider cost prohibitive? Hard drives are pretty cheap these days.
- opencl 8y ago
  How many movies do you have? A 5TB hard drive is slightly over $100 and will hold a minimum of 100 Blu-ray rips, assuming they use the entire disk capacity and you don't reencode them to something smaller.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Well, for one, hard drives also fail. So I need backups, unless I want to have to sit and re-rip everything when it happens. I'm a big fan of RAID 1 since I don't have horrific rebuilds, and I offsite my data as well. (Most of my data is stored on five hard drives currently.) So take your estimate drive costs and start multiplying. Second, my Vudu library contains over 600 movies and significantly more television shows than that. And before you calculate the cost of the storage, bear in mind there's another, secondary cost: The much higher cost I'd have spent to have built that library solely on ripped discs. I never paid full price for a digital purchase. (And specifically, never more than it would've cost to acquire it via disc.) Third, time. I'm also significantly backlogged in organizing my ebooks, which I do store on drives. Blu-ray ripping time just isn't something I want to dedicate a big chunk of my life to.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Backblaze is $5 a month for unlimited storage. If your hard drive fails, you can order a hard drive with your data.
      - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        You better store encrypted if you're pirating movies/music. It's rather easy to get TOS'ed even if you match filenames of common pirate name signatures.
        tomatotomato37 8y ago
        Luckily passive commercial scanners don't require much; tossing it into an encrypted zip with everything set to fastest still runs over everything passive that's not nationstate
- mark-r 8y ago
  When my kids were little and basically destroyed anything they touched, I started ripping their DVDs. Now there's over 200 of them on my media center PC. I had to upgrade from a 1GB to a 3GB disk at one point, but there's still plenty of room for more.
- eponeponepon 8y ago
  I thought cost was a blocker too till I actually sat down and worked it out. A cheap microserver with about 15TB of disk space came in well under the thousand pound mark - the real blocker is sitting down and actually ripping the things. There's a trade-off between space and encoding quality to be made, but I'm entirely happy with libx265's results at 1080p. Obviously your mileage may vary as to what's a reasonable cost.
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  > The storage costs to rip my movie library onto hard drives would be cost prohibitive The storage costs as well as streaming transmission costs are not only borne by but also provide profit to the provider. If they can profit off them, you can hopefully at least break even!
- ecpottinger 8y ago
  You must be kidding. I bought two external 4TB for less than $130 CDN each.
acomjean 8y ago
I used to buy apple videos and remove the DRM. But the tools that did that seem to have lost in there arms-race with apple. I'm in the same boat. Disks it is, though they are such a pain. Why can I buy music without DRM but video hasn't followed that path?
- cwyers 8y ago
  File sizes, basically. The marginal benefits of streaming music over downloading it are small. Consumers are willing to pay for streamed video over downloads.
- gdulli 8y ago
  Because of their relative file sizes, downloading audio became fast and easy to do much sooner than video. It created a problem for the music industry pretty abruptly. They didn't have streaming technology (and business structure) ready to go at the time to counter Napster et al. So they went with downloads. By the time it became easier to pirate video, streaming was further along and the video industry went straight there because it's more friendly to them than the download option.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  I think the tools still exist. Probably not for 4K, but up to 1080p should be doable. However, unless you find something really rare on itunes that you can't get elsewhere, it's quite pointless.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > Why can I buy music without DRM but video hasn't followed that path? The movie industry has always been more paranoid about piracy, compared to the music folks. And that's actually quite reasonable for newly-released content - the stuff that gets shown in theaters or on premium streaming services, and that pirates compete to "rip" ASAP. But there's no sensible reason why their long tail content couldn't be made available in DRM-free form, long after it has stopped being "current" and heavily sought-after. It's only market concentration and lack of competition that keeps this from happening-- and this is why DRM is evil and must be shut down. It's the opposite of a free market.
ezoe 8y ago
I will never buy a DRMed product. They don't deserve my money. Yes, that means I can't watch these movies but I assume it's just as bad as DRM anyway.
bubblethink 8y ago
>My Plex server will never close Plex is proprietary and can shut down any time. Although it runs locally, it contacts the plex servers for quite a lot of stuff. Granted, you won't lose your media and can replace plex easily.
- svnpenn 8y ago
  any good alternative? Kodi? Universal Media Server?
  - kakarot 8y ago
    Depends on which features matter to you. If you want an immersive content library like Plex, it's harder to find substitutes. If you just want a way to stream music and movies from your own server or home computer, with on-the-fly re-encoding to adjust to available bandwidth, I would recommend airsonic. https://github.com/airsonic/airsonic https://github.com/airsonic/airsonic
    - svnpenn 8y ago
      sounds good, but i dont do anything java on principle.
      - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
        Huh? What's wrong with Java?
      - _underfl0w_ 8y ago
        You must have either: 1) insufficient knowledge of the source code behind the tools you use, or 2) a really dull and limited computing experience
        kazinator 8y ago
        I've never touched Java; do I have a dull and limited computing experience? I maintain my own Lisp implementation that has a decent object system, exceptions, delimited continuations, compiler and virtual machine, and a whole-document pattern matching language for easy text transformation. I've worked on early versions of the POSIX threading library for Glibc, Linux device drivers, all sorts of middleware stacks in wireless, VoIP and such. Code of mine is in e2fsprogs: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git/tree/lib/support/dict.c https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git/tree/li... In Wireshark: https://code.wireshark.org/review/gitweb?p=wireshark.git;a=blob;f=epan/except.c https://code.wireshark.org/review/gitweb?p=wireshark.git;a=b... I started working with 8 bit microcomputers in the early 1980's, writing games and utilities, and dial-up BBS's, using assembly language and BASIC. I had dabbled in 3D graphics and the "demo" scene. I used to code in Pascal and Modula-2 before C. I've worked as a C++ dev for many years. Java simply isn't something that would interest me. Java programs look verbose and blubby. To be fair, a lot of what I use and have used is blubby, like the C language, Unix shell and whatnot. But I don't need more blubby. I have my fill of blub calories already. The Java platform bloated, and the ecosystem is self-absorbed. To its credit, it has a reputation for supposedly having good garbage collection and concurrency in its VM, that's about it.
bluedino 8y ago
It appears you can still watch your Ultraviolet movies ,just not through Vudu. You have to link your account to another service.
- sib 8y ago
  You can definitely still watch them through Vudu. Even if you've purchased them elsewhere (at a different UV retailer), connect your UV account to Vudu and the titles will "import" to your Vudu account.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

While my eBook library is pretty something, the storage costs to rip my movie library onto hard drives would be cost prohibitive. I do keep physical discs of the movies I really enjoy, and generally only buy digital during sales. Most of the "value" in my digital movie collection comes from digital copy redeems. Vudu does $5 sales all the time, and the way I see it, that's less than a movie ticket. So if I see it once, it was like going to see a movie, but with the theoretical hope of long-term persistence. The fact that MA insulates the risk of losing your titles across every major tech company adds to the comfort level now too, and as noted, nobody is losing their UV library when UV shuts down.

beagle3 8y ago
DVDs are usually less than 5GB. 1TB drives cost $40 these days, less if amortized over larger disks. Which means $100 buys you enough disk space for two redundant copies of 200 movies assuming you vobcopy them; about twice or thrice if you convert to h264 or h265 or av1; and half again if you have BD quality rips. That’s about 50cents/movie for two copies, half if you only keep one. Is this really prohibitive?
- olliej 8y ago
  I assume people with blue ray want to rip at original quality - isn’t that 10s of gig per disk? (I have never bought blue ray so have no idea). For me the problem was ripping my dvds just took so long, and wasn’t automatable (weirdly my bottom of the line Mac mini struggles with re-encoding ;) )
  - loeg 8y ago
    Yep, Blu-rays can store something like 25GB per layer; industry standard for movies is dual layer (50GB). Rips can achieve comparable quality with lower bitrate than used on the original disk. Blu-ray dates to 2006 and (typically) uses inefficient high bit-rate H.262 ("MPEG 2", which DVDs used), H.264 (AVC), or VC-1. Rips can use high-efficiency H.265 ("HEVC"). Typical for a 1080p H.265 encoding is 9-15 GB. (Lower for animated films.) UHD Blu-rays do use the more efficient H.265 already, but are much higher resolution as well. I'm not sure how prevalent they are.
    - bscphil 8y ago
      The vast majority of newer Blurays use H.264, which is pretty efficient (much more than the other two). In addition, if you're just wanting to back up the film, and not any special features on the disk, at least half of films fit in 25 GB with no reencoding required. One big downside of reencoding in HEVC is that for a moderate gain in compression (0-50% depending on the film), you considerably increase your playback requirements. I use a Raspberry Pi 3 with Kodi as a playback device, and it's not capable of playing 1080p HEVC videos. UHD Blurays are getting more common. They usually come on 66 GiB disks, and it's becoming more common to let the video take up most of that, and bundling a second disk of special features if necessary. So even backing up the main feature of a UHD can easily run you 50+ GiB.
      - loeg 8y ago
        > The vast majority of newer Blurays use H.264, which is pretty efficient (much more than the other two). Right; still quite a bit less efficient than H.265, though. > One big downside of reencoding in HEVC is that for a moderate gain in compression (0-50% depending on the film), you considerably increase your playback requirements. Yes, although this is becoming less true as more hardware offload support becomes available. For example, Nvidia 750, 950-960, and 1030 are all capable of HEVC offload[1]. The latter can be had new for ~$85; the others are probably a bit harder to find but given they're older midrange cards at this point maybe they're a little cheaper. > So even backing up the main feature of a UHD can easily run you 50+ GiB. Sure, I don't think there's any economical way to reduce storage requirements of UHD significantly without defeating the point. On the other hand, I don't think the extra pixels really matter as much as higher color depth (10 or 12 bit) and fewer artifacts at lower resolution, unless you've got a home IMAX or something. [1]: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support...
  - 013a 8y ago
    Depends on the movie and if its 1080p or 4K, but generally I anticipate a ripped Bluray to be around 60gb. Re-encoding them is a PITA as well. Even on a HEDT gaming desktop with a brand new CPU, the process only proceeds at 8-10fps, if that, so at least 2x movie runtime. Maybe there are some ways to involve the video card which can speed it up, but I haven't tried it. And even if you want to and can keep the originals, you'll want to re-encode it and keep both; most Plex clients (think: Apple TV, shitty laptop, etc) simply can't handle raw 4K bluray playback.
    - Rebelgecko 8y ago
      ffmpeg supports a variety of hardware encoders but supposedly the quality will be worse than a CPU-encoded video at the same bitrate
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Pirated 4k videos are often 7-15GB. I presume this is optimized for size over maximum quality.
    - jumelles 8y ago
      That seems too small IMO. Encoded BD rips average about 20-30 GB; remuxes (no compression/encoding) begin around 50 GB.
cortesoft 8y ago
How big is your movie library and what would you consider cost prohibitive? Hard drives are pretty cheap these days.
opencl 8y ago
How many movies do you have? A 5TB hard drive is slightly over $100 and will hold a minimum of 100 Blu-ray rips, assuming they use the entire disk capacity and you don't reencode them to something smaller.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Well, for one, hard drives also fail. So I need backups, unless I want to have to sit and re-rip everything when it happens. I'm a big fan of RAID 1 since I don't have horrific rebuilds, and I offsite my data as well. (Most of my data is stored on five hard drives currently.) So take your estimate drive costs and start multiplying. Second, my Vudu library contains over 600 movies and significantly more television shows than that. And before you calculate the cost of the storage, bear in mind there's another, secondary cost: The much higher cost I'd have spent to have built that library solely on ripped discs. I never paid full price for a digital purchase. (And specifically, never more than it would've cost to acquire it via disc.) Third, time. I'm also significantly backlogged in organizing my ebooks, which I do store on drives. Blu-ray ripping time just isn't something I want to dedicate a big chunk of my life to.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Backblaze is $5 a month for unlimited storage. If your hard drive fails, you can order a hard drive with your data.
    - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      You better store encrypted if you're pirating movies/music. It's rather easy to get TOS'ed even if you match filenames of common pirate name signatures.
      - tomatotomato37 8y ago
        Luckily passive commercial scanners don't require much; tossing it into an encrypted zip with everything set to fastest still runs over everything passive that's not nationstate
mark-r 8y ago
When my kids were little and basically destroyed anything they touched, I started ripping their DVDs. Now there's over 200 of them on my media center PC. I had to upgrade from a 1GB to a 3GB disk at one point, but there's still plenty of room for more.
eponeponepon 8y ago
I thought cost was a blocker too till I actually sat down and worked it out. A cheap microserver with about 15TB of disk space came in well under the thousand pound mark - the real blocker is sitting down and actually ripping the things. There's a trade-off between space and encoding quality to be made, but I'm entirely happy with libx265's results at 1080p. Obviously your mileage may vary as to what's a reasonable cost.
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
> The storage costs to rip my movie library onto hard drives would be cost prohibitive The storage costs as well as streaming transmission costs are not only borne by but also provide profit to the provider. If they can profit off them, you can hopefully at least break even!
ecpottinger 8y ago
You must be kidding. I bought two external 4TB for less than $130 CDN each.

acomjean 8y ago

I used to buy apple videos and remove the DRM. But the tools that did that seem to have lost in there arms-race with apple. I'm in the same boat. Disks it is, though they are such a pain. Why can I buy music without DRM but video hasn't followed that path?

cwyers 8y ago
File sizes, basically. The marginal benefits of streaming music over downloading it are small. Consumers are willing to pay for streamed video over downloads.
gdulli 8y ago
Because of their relative file sizes, downloading audio became fast and easy to do much sooner than video. It created a problem for the music industry pretty abruptly. They didn't have streaming technology (and business structure) ready to go at the time to counter Napster et al. So they went with downloads. By the time it became easier to pirate video, streaming was further along and the video industry went straight there because it's more friendly to them than the download option.
bubblethink 8y ago
I think the tools still exist. Probably not for 4K, but up to 1080p should be doable. However, unless you find something really rare on itunes that you can't get elsewhere, it's quite pointless.
zozbot123 8y ago
> Why can I buy music without DRM but video hasn't followed that path? The movie industry has always been more paranoid about piracy, compared to the music folks. And that's actually quite reasonable for newly-released content - the stuff that gets shown in theaters or on premium streaming services, and that pirates compete to "rip" ASAP. But there's no sensible reason why their long tail content couldn't be made available in DRM-free form, long after it has stopped being "current" and heavily sought-after. It's only market concentration and lack of competition that keeps this from happening-- and this is why DRM is evil and must be shut down. It's the opposite of a free market.

ezoe 8y ago

I will never buy a DRMed product. They don't deserve my money. Yes, that means I can't watch these movies but I assume it's just as bad as DRM anyway.

bubblethink 8y ago

>My Plex server will never close Plex is proprietary and can shut down any time. Although it runs locally, it contacts the plex servers for quite a lot of stuff. Granted, you won't lose your media and can replace plex easily.

svnpenn 8y ago
any good alternative? Kodi? Universal Media Server?
- kakarot 8y ago
  Depends on which features matter to you. If you want an immersive content library like Plex, it's harder to find substitutes. If you just want a way to stream music and movies from your own server or home computer, with on-the-fly re-encoding to adjust to available bandwidth, I would recommend airsonic. https://github.com/airsonic/airsonic https://github.com/airsonic/airsonic
  - svnpenn 8y ago
    sounds good, but i dont do anything java on principle.
    - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      Huh? What's wrong with Java?
    - _underfl0w_ 8y ago
      You must have either: 1) insufficient knowledge of the source code behind the tools you use, or 2) a really dull and limited computing experience
      - kazinator 8y ago
        I've never touched Java; do I have a dull and limited computing experience? I maintain my own Lisp implementation that has a decent object system, exceptions, delimited continuations, compiler and virtual machine, and a whole-document pattern matching language for easy text transformation. I've worked on early versions of the POSIX threading library for Glibc, Linux device drivers, all sorts of middleware stacks in wireless, VoIP and such. Code of mine is in e2fsprogs: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git/tree/lib/support/dict.c https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git/tree/li... In Wireshark: https://code.wireshark.org/review/gitweb?p=wireshark.git;a=blob;f=epan/except.c https://code.wireshark.org/review/gitweb?p=wireshark.git;a=b... I started working with 8 bit microcomputers in the early 1980's, writing games and utilities, and dial-up BBS's, using assembly language and BASIC. I had dabbled in 3D graphics and the "demo" scene. I used to code in Pascal and Modula-2 before C. I've worked as a C++ dev for many years. Java simply isn't something that would interest me. Java programs look verbose and blubby. To be fair, a lot of what I use and have used is blubby, like the C language, Unix shell and whatnot. But I don't need more blubby. I have my fill of blub calories already. The Java platform bloated, and the ecosystem is self-absorbed. To its credit, it has a reputation for supposedly having good garbage collection and concurrency in its VM, that's about it.

bluedino 8y ago

It appears you can still watch your Ultraviolet movies ,just not through Vudu. You have to link your account to another service.

sib 8y ago
You can definitely still watch them through Vudu. Even if you've purchased them elsewhere (at a different UV retailer), connect your UV account to Vudu and the titles will "import" to your Vudu account.