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This is a fun rabbit hole to walk down. You might have noticed that streaming is getting worse (more expensive, less selection, more ads, more fragmentation).
by hedora 7mo ago
This is a fun rabbit hole to walk down.
You might have noticed that streaming is getting worse (more expensive, less selection, more ads, more fragmentation). For me, they crossed a breaking point, where I decided I'd just find something more convenient.
So, I went down to the local record store, where they have 10,000s of DVDs and Blu Rays in stock; many for $1 (DVD), $2 (BluRay), most under $5-10, and a few gems for $20-30. The prices are for a mix of new and used DVDs; some new DVDs are over-printed, and cost $1.
Problem half-solved. I looked around to figure out how to play these anachronistic shiny disks on my TV, and eventually settled on a USB BluRay RW drive (I guess you can get rewritable BluRays!)
I never figured out how you're supposed to actually use that drive to play movies. Instead, there's DeCSS from the article, then something comparable for BluRay. For the "easy" decryption, you end up downloading per-disk decryption keys for every disk ever printed.
For the more advanced stuff, they have this giant Java Rube Goldberg machine that xors glitches into the video stream. This gets applied at the factory, and then (on some hardware I guess you can purchase?) again via some complicated JVM stack that was originally meant to just render the scene selection menu.
[spoiler alert]
The easiest way to play those BluRays back is to just download the output of the Rube Goldberg machine. At some point the industry realized that scheme was dumb, so there's a finite set of glitch masks. The whole dataset for all BluRays that will ever be produced with this scheme is a few GB.
You might think that when I say "play", I mean "transcode + pirate", but it turns out that's not particularly practical. BluRays are multiple GB, and already compressed with codecs that are competitive with modern ones, so they don't shrink down like DVDs unless you're willing to lose a lot of quality.
So, yes, we have a growing collection of physical media. I target 20-30 movies / $100 when I go to the store. It's grand.
- MathMonkeyMan 7mo agoHow many GB? I see "bluray rip" mp4 files on torrent index sites, which I assume have been aggressively recompressed, but there are three size tiers in the "1080p" category: 2-3GB, 7-10GB, and 15+GB.
- dddgghhbbfblk 7mo agoYou want to search for BDMV for full disc images, or for remuxes which are uncompressed video and audio streams, if you want to get a sense for the size on disc. Typical Blu-ray images will be from 20-40ish GB.
- miki123211 7mo agoHow are today's scene rippers about keeping extra audio tracks and such in these, E.G. audio description? It used to be quite hard to get an actually actually unmodified disc image.
- progbits 7mo agoOn private trackers where people care about that stuff it's easier. The NFO usually has a pretty comprehensive description of the contents and all the tracks etc so you can decide which version you want before downloading.
- dddgghhbbfblk 7mo agoUnmodified Blu-ray disc images are the BDMV folders I mentioned. Any BDMV will be unmodified almost all the time though I've very occasionally run into modified ones originating from the Chinese piracy scene that had custom subs added. A "good" remux is actually the highest quality movie release available, usually, if you don't care about file size. A good remux will combine all the best parts of every possible release into one super-file. For one movie, you could have the best video quality be on a French UHD Blu-ray, the best audio quality from a different source, subtitles aggregated from various international releases and streaming platforms (and filtered/deduped for quality), chapter titles taken from an old DVD, and all available commentary tracks collected. Rarely you might even see a hybrid release where multiple streams are spliced together to fix some problem or another in one of them. You can look for releases by the CINEPHILES p2p group for gold standard examples, they get distributed fairly widely so you can probably find some. To answer what you asked about extra audio tracks specifically (outside of full disc images)--usually non-English dubs are considered bloat and aren't distributed. Commentary tracks are kept. Audio description is a mixed bag, good groups will keep it.
- recursivecaveat 7mo agoI used to not be a physical media person. I have found that it makes it a lot easier for me to start and to finish things though. The fact I have to actually get up to swap the disk out if I want a distraction helps focus the attention span haha.
- stevekemp 7mo agoSame story here, I can be used films on DVD for €1 at many charity shops. Boxed sets of TV shows are €2-5 depending on size/popularity. The only downside is that I've noticed that the used DVD sections are definitely getting smaller. I guess fewer people are donating their collections these days. I've bought a couple of DVD sets from Amazon, used, but the prices there aren't so competitive. Still it's nice to have physical media, with real/original soundtracks.
- 1317 7mo ago> The easiest way to play those BluRays back buy a bd player? i don't know why you would settle on a usb rw drive when you could just have a box that plugs in via HDMI and works
- adrian_b 7mo agoA bd player is a temporary solution. At some point nobody will make bd players any more. Several big companies have already stopped production. Then you would have a useless BluRay collection after your own player stops working. The solution is of course to rip off the BluRay discs as soon as you buy them. Then you can have a higher-quality playback on a PC (due to much faster random access and sequential access on an SSD) and you can recopy them forever when the available storage media will change in the future, so you will not lose what you have paid for.
- 1317 7mo agoand all existing players will disappear off the face of the earth never to grace the listings of ebay again come on man people can complain about the dvd/bd scrambling restricting your freedoms and stopping you from making backups etc, and sure that's true but if you just want to sit in front of the tv and watch a film you bought, idk what more you could ask for
- orsorna 7mo agoI think the more pressing issue is the medium degrading before the playback hardware. Disks have an average lifespan of 25 years. I surmise basic bluray hardware will last much longer.
- bob1029 7mo agoThe laser diode would probably be the first thing to fail in the player, and it likely wouldn't take 25 years if it was being used regularly.
- hedora 7mo agoI'm out of HDMI ports on the TV. Anyway, I bought a bluray player, plugged it in via USB, and it works. Also, do modern bd players let you skip DVD trailers and fbi warning videos? My USB setup does...
- ThrowawayTestr 7mo agoI just torrent everything. It's equally as illegal.