4 ms·

Why not buy the movie you want to watch (so that the creators get paid) and then torrent an .mkv you can play anywhere and keep forever?

googlryas 4y ago
Do creators get paid more when you buy DVDs vs digital versions?
- substation13 4y ago
  Good question - it might even be less due to DVD resale market
wolrah 4y ago
> Why not buy the movie you want to watch (so that the creators get paid) and then torrent an .mkv you can play anywhere and keep forever? This is exactly the approach I've taken for the HD era and it works great. Back in the DVD era I had a well optimized ripping setup, I put hours in to tuning everything so I could pop a new disc in and have it ready to play on my Windows Media Center instance as quickly as my drive would read it. At this point though, it's just not worth the trouble. Especially for UHD content, ripping that is just a nightmare. These days when I buy a new disc I just add it to a list on my server and my server goes out, finds whatever quality copy I told it to look for, downloads it, extracts it, names it according to my standards, and tells Plex to update its metadata. More often than not by the time I get home the content is already there on my server waiting for me and I can toss the disc on the rack for display purposes. In my last move I had an entire box of discs that were still sealed in their original plastic. It's the best of all worlds. The content owners get their money, I get a DRM-free copy that I can play on what I want when I want. It's not strictly legal but it's morally clean. The end result is the same as if I had ripped it myself, just with less effort on my part.
- liampulles 4y ago
  Different strokes I guess, I actually find ripping DVD kind of fun - sort of an opportunity to experiment maybe. :)
  - wolrah 4y ago
    I definitely found it fun, and back then I was working with limited disk space so I enjoyed the challenge of optimizing for quality and encoding speed while still getting the file size down to a reasonable target. I lost interest in HD ripping when it required commercial software to do reliably, the cat and mouse games with the DRM, etc. Combine that with my home server getting in to the multiple terabyte range and my internet connection working its way up to gigabit speeds and suddenly "REMUX" type rips that are the exact A/V content from the disc just repackaged in to a more convenient container became practical. Re-encoding just isn't worth the time or CPU cycles when disk and bandwidth are cheap. The challenge and annoyance went through the roof and the benefits dropped off, so I'd rather put my effort in to something else.
yamtaddle 4y ago
That "forever" for the .mkv comes at a pretty high cost in time and money, if you really want a decent chance of it actually lasting a lifetime. You can reduce one by making the other go up, but there's gonna be some cost in both. Then again you have to store physical disks. And pay for them, of course. Pick your poison I guess.

googlryas 4y ago

Do creators get paid more when you buy DVDs vs digital versions?

substation13 4y ago
Good question - it might even be less due to DVD resale market

wolrah 4y ago

> Why not buy the movie you want to watch (so that the creators get paid) and then torrent an .mkv you can play anywhere and keep forever? This is exactly the approach I've taken for the HD era and it works great. Back in the DVD era I had a well optimized ripping setup, I put hours in to tuning everything so I could pop a new disc in and have it ready to play on my Windows Media Center instance as quickly as my drive would read it. At this point though, it's just not worth the trouble. Especially for UHD content, ripping that is just a nightmare. These days when I buy a new disc I just add it to a list on my server and my server goes out, finds whatever quality copy I told it to look for, downloads it, extracts it, names it according to my standards, and tells Plex to update its metadata. More often than not by the time I get home the content is already there on my server waiting for me and I can toss the disc on the rack for display purposes. In my last move I had an entire box of discs that were still sealed in their original plastic. It's the best of all worlds. The content owners get their money, I get a DRM-free copy that I can play on what I want when I want. It's not strictly legal but it's morally clean. The end result is the same as if I had ripped it myself, just with less effort on my part.

liampulles 4y ago
Different strokes I guess, I actually find ripping DVD kind of fun - sort of an opportunity to experiment maybe. :)
- wolrah 4y ago
  I definitely found it fun, and back then I was working with limited disk space so I enjoyed the challenge of optimizing for quality and encoding speed while still getting the file size down to a reasonable target. I lost interest in HD ripping when it required commercial software to do reliably, the cat and mouse games with the DRM, etc. Combine that with my home server getting in to the multiple terabyte range and my internet connection working its way up to gigabit speeds and suddenly "REMUX" type rips that are the exact A/V content from the disc just repackaged in to a more convenient container became practical. Re-encoding just isn't worth the time or CPU cycles when disk and bandwidth are cheap. The challenge and annoyance went through the roof and the benefits dropped off, so I'd rather put my effort in to something else.

yamtaddle 4y ago

That "forever" for the .mkv comes at a pretty high cost in time and money, if you really want a decent chance of it actually lasting a lifetime. You can reduce one by making the other go up, but there's gonna be some cost in both. Then again you have to store physical disks. And pay for them, of course. Pick your poison I guess.