4 ms·

Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

30 points by akkartik 4mo ago

triyambakam 4mo ago
> The kind of thing every kid with a Dell tower in 2003 spent an entire weekend trying to figure out. OK Claude.
- lloydatkinson 4mo ago
  At this point I don't even read Medium, Substack, or any of the other slop monger sites.
akkartik 4mo ago
[dead]
bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
Nobody got a letter for copying a DVD at their home… I suppose if you sold them on the street corner you could maybe get in trouble maybe he’s confusing this with downloading movies which seems odd because he’s writing this as if he existed then
- isoprophlex 4mo ago
  It's AI slop. Don't worry too much about the contents, it's only meant to evoke a passing resemblance to a coherently written piece
kyrra 4mo ago
It's also nice that this has been solved for Blu-ray as well. You just have to buy the correct kind of Blu-ray drive, and there's custom firmware out there to flash on the drive and let you rip any Blu-ray.
- peterspath 4mo ago
  What drive would that be? Asking for a friend…
  - QGQBGdeZREunxLe 4mo ago
    https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634 https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634
- jeroenhd 4mo ago
  I've looked into that, but it looks like the drives are ten or twenty times as expensive as a normal DVD reader capable of reading discs. Any time anyone publishes firmware for a new, affordable drive that can rip movie discs, the drives quickly go out of stock.
  - Telaneo 4mo ago
    Thankfully, the people who buy those drives for unreasonable prices are usually willing to share their spoils. Only one needs to actually have the hardware for the rest of the world to share the joy. It's annoying if you have some more obscure blu-ray release that nobody else has ripped, and even more so if you don't know a guy who can do you a favour.
    - jeroenhd 4mo ago
      There's a piece of merch that I want to buy that will take weeks to ship to where I live. I currently have nothing that's capable of playing optical disks, so I was looking into buying a drive that can help me out (I'd rather rip the thing and stuff it into my Jellyfin than deal with a dedicated machine hooked up to my TV). I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.
      - 4mo ago
isatty 4mo ago
I’m pretty sure I did it for much cheaper back in the day.
tehwebguy 4mo ago
What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake
- LocalH 4mo ago
  It's been mostly solved since DeCSS
- adithyassekhar 4mo ago
  How are you planning on getting the dvd to show up in handbrake? Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.
  - whycombinetor 4mo ago
    libdvdcss
- jeroenhd 4mo ago
  Yes, as the article states, the $22 is for buying a USB DVD drive. I don't think many PCs come with optical media readers these days.
- rolph 4mo ago
  " -That meant I needed a separate consumer drive. So I bought one off of Amazon. Two day shipping, twenty two dollars, no-name brand, USB 3.0, plug and play,- "
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
throwvava 4mo ago
Is this GPT 5? In particular, > The drive in your laptop does not do this. The cheap drive I had ordered off Amazon does not do this. A consumer drive’s firmware is, in the technical sense, dumb. It sees a disc, it reports the contents, it lets the OS handle whatever happens next. The server drive is the unusual one. > This is worth pausing on. The "short punchy sentences, new paragraph, 'This matters' type sentence" style is very reminiscent of GPT-5.x.
Dfiesl 4mo ago
I'm a bit confused by the title. It seems to suggest that ripping a DVD in 2026 is no longer a federal crime, which I'm pretty sure it is. And that ripping a DVD in 1999 didn't require $22 worth of hardware and some free software -> both of which I'm pretty sure it did.
- parineum 4mo ago
  Ripping a DVD is and was not a federal crime. The DMCA had carve outs for personal use and DeCSS was free speech (as argued and won by the EFF). Using DeCSS to rip your own dvd was never illegal.
  - Dfiesl 4mo ago
    I'm not seeing personal use as one of the DCMA exemptions to prohibition against copyright protection circumvention: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-201/section-201.40 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-... The exemptions seem to be for pretty specific cases. Have you got a link to the EFF case?
- dlcarrier 4mo ago
  The DMCA includes a provision for the Library of Congress to grant exemptions, and they exempted DVDs, but if I remember correctly the exemption does not include Blu-Ray disks.
madmod 4mo ago
What is the point of taking an actually interesting subject and injecting gpt botox into it making it 50x more words than it needs to be. I liked some details in the article and I'm not against AI prose in general but this blog post novel could've been an email. The part about server drives refusing to read dvds with css is crazy.
ralferoo 4mo ago
Not the point the article is making but "Hardware Is $22" and "The cheap hardware costs less than a sandwich" makes me very glad I don't live in the US and want to buy a sandwich!
- mplanchard 4mo ago
  $22 is an expensive sandwich, to be fair! Certainly not unheard of, but probably more expensive than your average sandwich even in a big city.
  - rolph 4mo ago
    if you have expensive, "high quality" organic sandwich ingredients, such as prosciuto, smoked salmon, small batch cheese, that goes down well with an all out starbucks. a good bento box sounds better to me for the usual price points if your into a 50$ lunch.
- isoprophlex 4mo ago
  It's mentally carcinogenic clanker slop. Don't think about it too hard
witx 4mo ago
Also don't forget that in many countries it is illegal for you to torrent books and remove DRM from ebooks, notheless Meta was caught torrenting hundreds of GB of books without consequence
trumpdong 4mo ago
What changed is time. A clone of the NES lockout chip has been made now, 40 years after the NES. Nobody will enforce that because it didn't exist 40 years ago and Nintendo doesn't make money on NES games now, so they don't lose money on NES game piracy. The lockout chip worked, and its job was finished long ago.
- mingus88 4mo ago
  Everything in this article was actively being done 20 years ago. Nothing has changed on the tech side. A lot more activity, actually, because DVDs were state of the art then and today a 480p rip looks terrible on modern TVs even with upscaling. Ripping commercial DVDs in 2026 is weird, unless it’s some out of print media that can’t be streamed in 4k from countless sites. The Mist DVD for example has a special B&W version I’ve been dying to find in a second hand store. The DVD extras are pretty much the only reason I would bother, personally.

30 points by akkartik 4mo ago

triyambakam 4mo ago

> The kind of thing every kid with a Dell tower in 2003 spent an entire weekend trying to figure out. OK Claude.

lloydatkinson 4mo ago
At this point I don't even read Medium, Substack, or any of the other slop monger sites.

akkartik 4mo ago

[dead]

bethekidyouwant 4mo ago

Nobody got a letter for copying a DVD at their home… I suppose if you sold them on the street corner you could maybe get in trouble maybe he’s confusing this with downloading movies which seems odd because he’s writing this as if he existed then

isoprophlex 4mo ago
It's AI slop. Don't worry too much about the contents, it's only meant to evoke a passing resemblance to a coherently written piece

kyrra 4mo ago

It's also nice that this has been solved for Blu-ray as well. You just have to buy the correct kind of Blu-ray drive, and there's custom firmware out there to flash on the drive and let you rip any Blu-ray.

peterspath 4mo ago
What drive would that be? Asking for a friend…
- QGQBGdeZREunxLe 4mo ago
  https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634 https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634
jeroenhd 4mo ago
I've looked into that, but it looks like the drives are ten or twenty times as expensive as a normal DVD reader capable of reading discs. Any time anyone publishes firmware for a new, affordable drive that can rip movie discs, the drives quickly go out of stock.
- Telaneo 4mo ago
  Thankfully, the people who buy those drives for unreasonable prices are usually willing to share their spoils. Only one needs to actually have the hardware for the rest of the world to share the joy. It's annoying if you have some more obscure blu-ray release that nobody else has ripped, and even more so if you don't know a guy who can do you a favour.
  - jeroenhd 4mo ago
    There's a piece of merch that I want to buy that will take weeks to ship to where I live. I currently have nothing that's capable of playing optical disks, so I was looking into buying a drive that can help me out (I'd rather rip the thing and stuff it into my Jellyfin than deal with a dedicated machine hooked up to my TV). I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.
    - 4mo ago

isatty 4mo ago

I’m pretty sure I did it for much cheaper back in the day.

tehwebguy 4mo ago

What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake

LocalH 4mo ago
It's been mostly solved since DeCSS
adithyassekhar 4mo ago
How are you planning on getting the dvd to show up in handbrake? Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.
- whycombinetor 4mo ago
  libdvdcss
jeroenhd 4mo ago
Yes, as the article states, the $22 is for buying a USB DVD drive. I don't think many PCs come with optical media readers these days.
rolph 4mo ago
" -That meant I needed a separate consumer drive. So I bought one off of Amazon. Two day shipping, twenty two dollars, no-name brand, USB 3.0, plug and play,- "
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

throwvava 4mo ago

Is this GPT 5? In particular, > The drive in your laptop does not do this. The cheap drive I had ordered off Amazon does not do this. A consumer drive’s firmware is, in the technical sense, dumb. It sees a disc, it reports the contents, it lets the OS handle whatever happens next. The server drive is the unusual one. > This is worth pausing on. The "short punchy sentences, new paragraph, 'This matters' type sentence" style is very reminiscent of GPT-5.x.

Dfiesl 4mo ago

I'm a bit confused by the title. It seems to suggest that ripping a DVD in 2026 is no longer a federal crime, which I'm pretty sure it is. And that ripping a DVD in 1999 didn't require $22 worth of hardware and some free software -> both of which I'm pretty sure it did.

parineum 4mo ago
Ripping a DVD is and was not a federal crime. The DMCA had carve outs for personal use and DeCSS was free speech (as argued and won by the EFF). Using DeCSS to rip your own dvd was never illegal.
- Dfiesl 4mo ago
  I'm not seeing personal use as one of the DCMA exemptions to prohibition against copyright protection circumvention: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-201/section-201.40 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-... The exemptions seem to be for pretty specific cases. Have you got a link to the EFF case?
dlcarrier 4mo ago
The DMCA includes a provision for the Library of Congress to grant exemptions, and they exempted DVDs, but if I remember correctly the exemption does not include Blu-Ray disks.

madmod 4mo ago

What is the point of taking an actually interesting subject and injecting gpt botox into it making it 50x more words than it needs to be. I liked some details in the article and I'm not against AI prose in general but this blog post novel could've been an email. The part about server drives refusing to read dvds with css is crazy.

ralferoo 4mo ago

Not the point the article is making but "Hardware Is $22" and "The cheap hardware costs less than a sandwich" makes me very glad I don't live in the US and want to buy a sandwich!

mplanchard 4mo ago
$22 is an expensive sandwich, to be fair! Certainly not unheard of, but probably more expensive than your average sandwich even in a big city.
- rolph 4mo ago
  if you have expensive, "high quality" organic sandwich ingredients, such as prosciuto, smoked salmon, small batch cheese, that goes down well with an all out starbucks. a good bento box sounds better to me for the usual price points if your into a 50$ lunch.
isoprophlex 4mo ago
It's mentally carcinogenic clanker slop. Don't think about it too hard

witx 4mo ago

Also don't forget that in many countries it is illegal for you to torrent books and remove DRM from ebooks, notheless Meta was caught torrenting hundreds of GB of books without consequence

trumpdong 4mo ago

What changed is time. A clone of the NES lockout chip has been made now, 40 years after the NES. Nobody will enforce that because it didn't exist 40 years ago and Nintendo doesn't make money on NES games now, so they don't lose money on NES game piracy. The lockout chip worked, and its job was finished long ago.

mingus88 4mo ago
Everything in this article was actively being done 20 years ago. Nothing has changed on the tech side. A lot more activity, actually, because DVDs were state of the art then and today a 480p rip looks terrible on modern TVs even with upscaling. Ripping commercial DVDs in 2026 is weird, unless it’s some out of print media that can’t be streamed in 4k from countless sites. The Mist DVD for example has a special B&W version I’ve been dying to find in a second hand store. The DVD extras are pretty much the only reason I would bother, personally.