I didn’t think I’d spend hours reading about this today, but some things surprised me:
- Just using a Playstation sounds like it won’t work or will be a huge time sink.
- Blu ray optical drives are way more expensive than I thought
- The copy protections on Blu rays are exceptionally annoying, to the extent where there is really only one closed source software – MakeMKV – that can work around them. This post goes into some interesting details.
- Finding a drive that is known to work with MakeMKV is a pain. There’s a brand called Pioneer that seems promising but they have stopped producing bluray drives
went out of business last year. I have no idea which model works, and it’s common that secondhand sellers will swap enclosures and pass it off as a different model. - Sometimes you need to flash the firmware on the drive to make it work with 4K UHD discs.
Anyway I was going to try ripping a Blu-ray that I bought recently, since I couldn’t find a quality rip anywhere, but I’m pretty turned off from the whole prospect at this point.
Anyway I’m not really asking for a specific reply, I just thought this topic was interesting and I’m curious what people think about Blu rays and optical media in general. Does the future seem bleak? Are we going to be stuck with shitty WebDLs for most new content? Or is physical media here to stay?
Not quite, RedFox formerly SlySoft (RIP) used to market their own Blu-ray ripper and it worked quite well. What it used to do is on-the-fly decryption so you’d run it in the background and could use any other software to read the decrypted Blu-ray (e.g. using Handbrake or whatever). It did also have an option to just rip to a file IIRC. Unfortunately they randomly disappeared so their software is pretty much done. (some background on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedFox)
That aside they always a competitor, DVDFab, that still exists today. Their Passkey software is the rough equivalent of what the old RedFox/SlySoft software used to do but they also sell a standalone Blu-ray ripper if that’s more your thing (see https://www.dvdfab.cn/).
But yeah, in some ways you’re stuck with MakeMKV, DVDFab, and maybe some others (?).
I’d have to dig it out but I actually bought a Blu-ray drive a while back that was on the list of drives compatible with these rippers but honestly it’s been a few years since I’ve tried using it. Most times someone else already ripped a Blu-ray I’d be interested in.
Speaking of - If anyone knows offhand, how do people do this stuff on Linux? Does the Linux version of MakeMKV work well for this and/or are there other tools (?)
MakeMKV works great on Linux. I used it to backup all of my blurays and DVDs without any issues.
I don’t have first-hand experience, but I’ve heard that the linux version of MakeMKV does work; though I’ve seen some issues reported in the forum. MakeMKV is even available on nixpkgs.