6 ms·

I just want to control the viewing experience, not hoard warez. Effortless rewind, skip filler (car chases, sex), play at x1.25 speed, etc. aka the "Blu-Ray e

I just want to control the viewing experience, not hoard warez. Effortless rewind, skip filler (car chases, sex), play at x1.25 speed, etc. aka the "Blu-Ray experience". If that means I gotta bypass the DRM and download, so be it. -- Some shows have my complete rapt attention. I'll keenly watch (and rewatch) every single frame. Like Netflix's Maniac. OMG. So frikkin good. (So many other examples.) Other shows, especially rewatching a series, I just want to focus on the character development, dialog, and plot points.

searine 5y ago
FYI There is a great chrome extension that allows you to control playback speed, and it works on just about every video site.
- mtsr 5y ago
  Similar extensions exist for Firefox as well.
- specialist 5y ago
  I'm interested. Link? I'll mosdef try it. For whatever I reason, I have to use Firefox to watch Disney+. (Mac Safari will always eventually ABEND. Shouldn't Apple regression test Safari on the Top X most popular sites?!) As for spotty rewind, like with Netflix, another comment might have the explanation (root cause); streams are broken into individually encrypted chunks. So of course there's lag (latency) when jumping around the timeline.
  - rishimaharaj 5y ago
    This is the one that I use to control video speed pretty much anywhere (works on any Chromium based browsers): [Video Speed Controller](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...)
- JZL003 5y ago
  On my phone so can't respond fully but if you select the <video> element in chrome and Firefox, you can control the .playbackRate attribute. Extensions can be useful but also abused, this is simple enough to do with a bookmarklet or manually
ramraj07 5y ago
Who the hell skips car chases? What movie had a car chase that you wanted to skip that made that movie more watchable (this sentence applies to the furious films as well, skipping the chase scenes there gives you the dumbest drama of all time).
- tyingq 5y ago
  Imagining "Baby Driver" edited this way.
  - specialist 5y ago
    Exceptions to every rule, right? The car chases in Baby Driver are crucial to the story. So good.
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  I think car chases are really boring, so I would. I also don’t drive, so maybe car chases appeal more to drivers.
- odiroot 5y ago
  As a counter example, I watch Bullitt just for the car chase.
  - mongol 5y ago
    Yes but is not Bullit the original "car chase" movie?
    - odiroot 5y ago
      For a moment I thought The Italian Job (the original one) was first. But you're right, Bullitt is older by a year. Bullitt was definitely unmatched for a long time.
      - cf100clunk 5y ago
        The "Highway Patrol" TV series of the 1950s was a precursor of the car chase genre, as were some notable film noirs that elevated car pursuits as story lines i.e. High Sierra, White Heat. Agreed that Bullitt is exemplary, but don't forget The French Connection, Duel, Easy Rider, Two Lane Blacktop, and Vanishing Point and you have some great car/bike films of Bullitt's era. The hoaxy C'etait un Rendez-vous is likewise great if you don't do the time/distance math.
m-p-3 5y ago
I have the best possible experience by ripping my own Blu-Rays into my own Plex server, including all the languages, subtitles and commentaries. Easy to use, kids-friendly (no dirty fingers on discs), playable from anywhere, including offline with synced copies, and I don't pay a monthly fee to watch the content I already paid for. I wouldn't go back to subscription-based services, even if that means I have to wait for a disc release. At least there's a market for used Blu-Rays so I don't have to pay a fortune.
- dijit 5y ago
  Do you have a guide for doing this? I think I killed my bluray drive but I'd consider buying another one if I can rip decent enough quality movies from them.
  - jackson1442 5y ago
    Use MakeMKV to pull an MKV off the disc, then use Handbrake to compress it to a reasonable size. Relatively easy, just takes a bit.
    - m-p-3 5y ago
      You can skip the MakeMKV part and directly encode through Handbrake if you add the required libraries (libaacs, libbdplus) in your Handbrake install directory and grab decryption key database (which I won't link here). You can do the same with commercial DVDs and the libdvdcss library. Then it's just a matter of opening the disc directly in Handbrake.
      - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
        I've found MakeMKV to be much more reliable than Handbrake for ripping.
        m-p-3 5y ago
        In my case I could never get MakeMKV to recognizey blu-ray drive, even when running the program with admin privileges. And why run MakeMKV then run the MKV in HandBrake if I'm going to transcode it to x265 anyway. At this point I'll do both at once.
dijit 5y ago
> aka the "Blu-Ray experience" Have you actually used blu-ray or are you thinking about DVDs (and Blu-rays are a natural evolution in your mind?) Because, honestly, Blu-rays are atrocious. Every so often I actually buy a BluRay, not only to support the work but also because in the case of losing internet (but not power) I'd like to watch a small selection of carefully curated movies. I was in such a position 2 years ago, I had moved home and the internet had not yet been installed. Did you know that in order to play blurays on the Playstation 4 (a Sony product, where Sony is also the maker of the BluRay spec and it was even a Sony movie!) that the device must be connected to the internet to play bluray's?? I didn't.. that was a shock. So I took to Linux, which... just couldn't play it... Why? The DRM keys could not be installed along with VLC (or something), after googling for half a day on my phones 4G to figure it out I ended up not significantly wiser and realised I'd been hoarding a bunch of useless plastic.
- specialist 5y ago
  Busted. I conflated the two. Apart from the FBI warning and goofy one-off menus, I mostly loved DVDs.
- pm215 5y ago
  Thanks for the heads-up about ps4 bluray playing. Apparently (assuming reddit posts to be correct) the internet requirement is a one-time thing where it downloads codecs, and Sony is supposedly doing it this way so they only pay the codec licensing fee for ps4s whose owners ever actually play a bluray rather than for ever ps4 ever shipped. So I'll make sure to do a test bluray play and then fingers crossed if I want to watch something in future when the internet is out it will work...
  - fishtacos 5y ago
    Memory isn't quite what it used to be, but if I recall, this was also the case with the Sony PSP, Vita, PS3 and XBOX 360. They all required a separate activation step for playback of specific licensed codecs (I believe it was both MPEG2 and h264, varying with system). Unfortunate that a pretty basic piece of functionality is forever lost once the activation servers are taken down.
sergiotapia 5y ago
You might like vidangel, never used them though. https://www.vidangel.com/ https://www.vidangel.com/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thomastjeffery 5y ago
Also performance. I have moderately high-end hardware, and Netflix's windows app stutters drawing subtitles. Using MPC-HC with LAV splitters/decoders is flawless, even with low-end hardware. And Smooth Video Project is an excellent alternative to $1000+ "smart" TV frame interpolation. And even with a gigabit symmetric connection, every streaming service's CDN struggles and gives me a low bitrate every few minutes.

searine 5y ago

FYI There is a great chrome extension that allows you to control playback speed, and it works on just about every video site.

mtsr 5y ago
Similar extensions exist for Firefox as well.
specialist 5y ago
I'm interested. Link? I'll mosdef try it. For whatever I reason, I have to use Firefox to watch Disney+. (Mac Safari will always eventually ABEND. Shouldn't Apple regression test Safari on the Top X most popular sites?!) As for spotty rewind, like with Netflix, another comment might have the explanation (root cause); streams are broken into individually encrypted chunks. So of course there's lag (latency) when jumping around the timeline.
- rishimaharaj 5y ago
  This is the one that I use to control video speed pretty much anywhere (works on any Chromium based browsers): [Video Speed Controller](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...)
JZL003 5y ago
On my phone so can't respond fully but if you select the <video> element in chrome and Firefox, you can control the .playbackRate attribute. Extensions can be useful but also abused, this is simple enough to do with a bookmarklet or manually

ramraj07 5y ago

Who the hell skips car chases? What movie had a car chase that you wanted to skip that made that movie more watchable (this sentence applies to the furious films as well, skipping the chase scenes there gives you the dumbest drama of all time).

tyingq 5y ago
Imagining "Baby Driver" edited this way.
- specialist 5y ago
  Exceptions to every rule, right? The car chases in Baby Driver are crucial to the story. So good.
orhmeh09 5y ago
I think car chases are really boring, so I would. I also don’t drive, so maybe car chases appeal more to drivers.
odiroot 5y ago
As a counter example, I watch Bullitt just for the car chase.
- mongol 5y ago
  Yes but is not Bullit the original "car chase" movie?
  - odiroot 5y ago
    For a moment I thought The Italian Job (the original one) was first. But you're right, Bullitt is older by a year. Bullitt was definitely unmatched for a long time.
    - cf100clunk 5y ago
      The "Highway Patrol" TV series of the 1950s was a precursor of the car chase genre, as were some notable film noirs that elevated car pursuits as story lines i.e. High Sierra, White Heat. Agreed that Bullitt is exemplary, but don't forget The French Connection, Duel, Easy Rider, Two Lane Blacktop, and Vanishing Point and you have some great car/bike films of Bullitt's era. The hoaxy C'etait un Rendez-vous is likewise great if you don't do the time/distance math.

m-p-3 5y ago

I have the best possible experience by ripping my own Blu-Rays into my own Plex server, including all the languages, subtitles and commentaries. Easy to use, kids-friendly (no dirty fingers on discs), playable from anywhere, including offline with synced copies, and I don't pay a monthly fee to watch the content I already paid for. I wouldn't go back to subscription-based services, even if that means I have to wait for a disc release. At least there's a market for used Blu-Rays so I don't have to pay a fortune.

dijit 5y ago
Do you have a guide for doing this? I think I killed my bluray drive but I'd consider buying another one if I can rip decent enough quality movies from them.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  Use MakeMKV to pull an MKV off the disc, then use Handbrake to compress it to a reasonable size. Relatively easy, just takes a bit.
  - m-p-3 5y ago
    You can skip the MakeMKV part and directly encode through Handbrake if you add the required libraries (libaacs, libbdplus) in your Handbrake install directory and grab decryption key database (which I won't link here). You can do the same with commercial DVDs and the libdvdcss library. Then it's just a matter of opening the disc directly in Handbrake.
    - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
      I've found MakeMKV to be much more reliable than Handbrake for ripping.
      - m-p-3 5y ago
        In my case I could never get MakeMKV to recognizey blu-ray drive, even when running the program with admin privileges. And why run MakeMKV then run the MKV in HandBrake if I'm going to transcode it to x265 anyway. At this point I'll do both at once.

dijit 5y ago

> aka the "Blu-Ray experience" Have you actually used blu-ray or are you thinking about DVDs (and Blu-rays are a natural evolution in your mind?) Because, honestly, Blu-rays are atrocious. Every so often I actually buy a BluRay, not only to support the work but also because in the case of losing internet (but not power) I'd like to watch a small selection of carefully curated movies. I was in such a position 2 years ago, I had moved home and the internet had not yet been installed. Did you know that in order to play blurays on the Playstation 4 (a Sony product, where Sony is also the maker of the BluRay spec and it was even a Sony movie!) that the device must be connected to the internet to play bluray's?? I didn't.. that was a shock. So I took to Linux, which... just couldn't play it... Why? The DRM keys could not be installed along with VLC (or something), after googling for half a day on my phones 4G to figure it out I ended up not significantly wiser and realised I'd been hoarding a bunch of useless plastic.

specialist 5y ago
Busted. I conflated the two. Apart from the FBI warning and goofy one-off menus, I mostly loved DVDs.
pm215 5y ago
Thanks for the heads-up about ps4 bluray playing. Apparently (assuming reddit posts to be correct) the internet requirement is a one-time thing where it downloads codecs, and Sony is supposedly doing it this way so they only pay the codec licensing fee for ps4s whose owners ever actually play a bluray rather than for ever ps4 ever shipped. So I'll make sure to do a test bluray play and then fingers crossed if I want to watch something in future when the internet is out it will work...
- fishtacos 5y ago
  Memory isn't quite what it used to be, but if I recall, this was also the case with the Sony PSP, Vita, PS3 and XBOX 360. They all required a separate activation step for playback of specific licensed codecs (I believe it was both MPEG2 and h264, varying with system). Unfortunate that a pretty basic piece of functionality is forever lost once the activation servers are taken down.

sergiotapia 5y ago

You might like vidangel, never used them though. https://www.vidangel.com/ https://www.vidangel.com/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

thomastjeffery 5y ago

Also performance. I have moderately high-end hardware, and Netflix's windows app stutters drawing subtitles. Using MPC-HC with LAV splitters/decoders is flawless, even with low-end hardware. And Smooth Video Project is an excellent alternative to $1000+ "smart" TV frame interpolation. And even with a gigabit symmetric connection, every streaming service's CDN struggles and gives me a low bitrate every few minutes.