I didn’t think I’d spend hours reading about this today, but some things surprised me:

  1. Just using a Playstation sounds like it won’t work or will be a huge time sink.
  2. Blu ray optical drives are way more expensive than I thought
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?

    • ramble81@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      6 hours ago

      Sadly no. He packed it up about 6 months ago. However if you can get your hands on an ASUS BW-16D1HT, you can flash the firmware yourself. I could have done that but he was offering it for a negligible difference and it was just quicker to do that method.

      • Cooper8@feddit.onlineEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        Does the BW-16D1HT offer good performance for 4kbluray playback as well as ripping? Looking at it it seems price competitive with the stand-alone players, and if it is good it would make financial sense to buy a dedicated pc and enclosure as an alternative to stand-alone player assuming it can drive HDR and Atmos

        • ramble81@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          I’ve honestly never used it for playback but since it can rip 4K at 2x-4x playback speed I would assume it’d be just fine. The issue is the system you build would have to have a card that can output Atmos bitstreams as well as HDR.

          As for ripping performance I’m over 500 DVD, BD, 4K and it’s doing great. You do have to give it 30 minutes between 4K discs to cool down.