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.
I 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.
How 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.
You 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.
Unmodified 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.
On 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.
It really depends on your hard drive space and your tolerance for compression. Two hours of decently compressed video is a few gigs, but if you want 10-bit HDR with 5.1 audio, then choose the 15 gig torrent.
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.
I 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.
Same 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.
Worth noting the industry knew that CSS was a lousy scheme. Originally, Disney and others were boycotting DVD because of it. That lead to DIVX (the disk not the codec).
Some people were opposed to DIVX's 'phone home' PPV option, but the bigger issue was it seemed like a nasty format war was brewing. Then DIVX flopped quickly. Instead, the MPAA got the US Congress to "patch" CSS by passing a law.
Apple had an advertising campaign that you could "Rip. Mix. Burn." your CDs with a Mac. Obviously nerds could rip DVDs, but nobody ever could productize it like that.
It was good that CSS was a lousy scheme, for everybody, including for the DVD producers.
As long as CSS was not broken, I bought neither discs nor drives, because I believe that only naive customers (to not say losers) are willing to buy any kind of information that cannot be protected from the certain eventual destruction due to the decay of its storage medium, by making copies of it on any other kind of storage medium.
After CSS was broken and the tools to read DVDs became available publicly, I have bought several DVD drives during the following years and many hundreds of DVDs.
So the breaking of the CSS was how the DVD industry got my money, and presumably the money of many others. They should have been grateful to the one who did this.
When you "buy" copy-protected information you are not really buying it. You are just renting it until the time when its storage medium will become corrupt, which is certain to happen, sooner or later. (Or until your reader becomes defective and you can no longer buy a replacement, due to obsolescence.)
The copyright laws are stupidly named and frequently stupidly formulated. Making copies not only is not a crime, but it is a fundamental right of the owner of any kind of information, being the only way in which information can be preserved.
Only the distribution of copies to third parties may be criminalized. While most stupid copyright laws claim that even making copies by the owner is a crime, that is not only unjust but it also not enforceable against any careful owner, so the laws are doubly stupid.
The average consumer won’t pirate it unless it’s easier to obtain the pirated copy than a legit version. They’ll suffer through ads, poor quality, high prices. A good example is music - I’d bet audio piracy is bordering on a rounding error of 0 because of Spotify, Apple Music and YT music. Meanwhile, for video content you need to subscribe to Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV, and even then you won’t get access to all of the “big” shows. Sky sports and co show that the vast majority of people are willing to pay for the content but when the service and availability suffers they’ll go elsewhere
You massively underestimate how price sensitive the average person is. Stuff like Spotify ended music piracy by driving the cost of music to nearly zero.
Good for you. Good for the guy who sold disks at the flea market too.
DVDs/BRs/etc were always a scam imo, unless it your favorite movie that you will watch repeatedly forever. For most people buying DVDs was just expensive PPV.
Internet says nothing about that; and using VB for DeCSS it's as 'serious' as quickly hacking Perl or TCL (for its day) in order to complete a simple prototype.
If any I can just see C++ code which is pretty much portable because you can decouple I/O with ease, altough
under Unix you would need to use ioctl's to command the DVD drive in a low level way.
VB could bang on any Win32 C API, so there's no reason to disbelieve this. In the modern sense it's like saying you couldn't write this in Go. Direct question: do you know what you are talking about, or are you just spewing keywords and reddit mime dancing?
So did Perl with bindings and TCL interoperating in two ways. Reddit? I used to compile mplayer and libdvdcss long ago, and even if the prior version was VB/C++ bound, it was the open code (FLOSS) the one who survived every takedown attempt.
The same with Nagra encoding and XawTV for some propietary channels in TV. You can decode any stream (and even extract subtitles) thanks to free software.
Even BTTV cards will still work. Go try that with Windows 7 and up. If you can find drivers, that's it. And working decoding software not messing up with DDraw based codecs and rendering.
I was there, and it was the free software the one who broke most of the chains. Propietary software today it's useless.
It was apparently hidden in the lead-in area, but I can't find any information on how it was encoded. Some sources say "a hidden sector in the lead in" but that doesn't seem right, as there is nothing physically stopping a DVD burner with custom firmware from writing a hidden sector.
The disk key is small (40 bits) and I'm suspicious it's actually encoded as wobble frequency [0], like the PS1's copy protection scheme.
Because CD/DVD burners can't write wobble. Blank CDs/DVDs ship with a pre-made wobble in the pre-groove, which the burners use to determine the absolute position of the write laser.
But you couldn't rip the copy protection signal (not that you needed to, it was a fixed 4 letter string, "SCEA", "SCEI", or "SCEE" depending on region)
Nor could you burn it onto a CD-R. It was there to prevent people from burning copies of games, not to prevent you from ripping the disc.
Of course, it was stupidly easy to bypass with a mod chip. They literally just sit there injecting the copy protection signal into the cd rom electronics, tricking it into thinking every single disc was blessed by Sony, burned or not.
Not needed for emulation. I never owned a PSX so I used EPSXE and whatever I got for the N64 in early 2000s. I jumped from a GB/NES in late 90's to a PC. It was like crossing a wormhole to another dimension.
In this era, console designers were't concerned about emulators or ripping games. They were entirely focused on preventing game duplication (especially with CDs being so easy to copy) and unlicensed games. And the PS1's copy protection makes an ok effort at being a roadblock to running non-sony discs.
In fact, the question of emulators wouldn't have been on the Sony engineers minds at all.
Because in 1994 (when the ps1 launched) there were no viable console emulators.
There were a few early prototypes, but they didn't produce 'playable results'. The first viable emulator (for any console) was arguably NESticle, released in April 1997. Things then moved rapidly, we see the first viable 16bit emulators in 1998.
It's notable that the PS2 doesn't have any protection against ripping games either. The Sony engineers would have been aware of emulators by this point, but they might have assumed that emulation would be stuck in the 8/16bit era for the foreseeable future.
So it must have been a huge shock for the first viable 32bit era emulators to come out in 1999. Connectix Virtual Game station (Jan 1999), UltraHLE (Also Jan 1999) and Bleem! (March 1999)
Yes.. that's right. We went from the first viable NES emulator to viable PS1/N64 emulators in under 2 years.
I'm guessing the PS2 was a little too close to it's March 2000 release date at this point to slap on rip protection, but the Gamecube and Xbox were released 18 months later, and both had time to implement disc encryption schemes.
>He hadn't pirated anything, only made a program to view his DVDs in Linux.
He released a tool for circumventing a protection measure. While already illegal to do in America, it wasn't made illegal in Norway until less than 2 years later.
See also farmers repairing their tractors. Arguably you can just write DO NOT COPY on a sticker on the disc and then it's illegal to circumvent the sticker.
In the US the law makes it illegal to 'circumvent a technological measure', defined as:
> descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner
where
> a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
A sticker doesn't count as a "technological measure".
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.
It used to be quite hard to get an actually actually unmodified disc image.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
Some people were opposed to DIVX's 'phone home' PPV option, but the bigger issue was it seemed like a nasty format war was brewing. Then DIVX flopped quickly. Instead, the MPAA got the US Congress to "patch" CSS by passing a law.
Apple had an advertising campaign that you could "Rip. Mix. Burn." your CDs with a Mac. Obviously nerds could rip DVDs, but nobody ever could productize it like that.
As long as CSS was not broken, I bought neither discs nor drives, because I believe that only naive customers (to not say losers) are willing to buy any kind of information that cannot be protected from the certain eventual destruction due to the decay of its storage medium, by making copies of it on any other kind of storage medium.
After CSS was broken and the tools to read DVDs became available publicly, I have bought several DVD drives during the following years and many hundreds of DVDs.
So the breaking of the CSS was how the DVD industry got my money, and presumably the money of many others. They should have been grateful to the one who did this.
When you "buy" copy-protected information you are not really buying it. You are just renting it until the time when its storage medium will become corrupt, which is certain to happen, sooner or later. (Or until your reader becomes defective and you can no longer buy a replacement, due to obsolescence.)
The copyright laws are stupidly named and frequently stupidly formulated. Making copies not only is not a crime, but it is a fundamental right of the owner of any kind of information, being the only way in which information can be preserved.
Only the distribution of copies to third parties may be criminalized. While most stupid copyright laws claim that even making copies by the owner is a crime, that is not only unjust but it also not enforceable against any careful owner, so the laws are doubly stupid.
DVDs/BRs/etc were always a scam imo, unless it your favorite movie that you will watch repeatedly forever. For most people buying DVDs was just expensive PPV.
As they say, piracy is a service issue.
Also, this is a false history, and more of an ex-post-facto justification.
The original DeCSS was a VisualBasic program written by some W1nd0z h8X0r teenager. Not for any greater cause, just because they could.
If any I can just see C++ code which is pretty much portable because you can decouple I/O with ease, altough under Unix you would need to use ioctl's to command the DVD drive in a low level way.
https://github.com/cthpw103/decss
But for just decoding a dumped ISO Perl would be more than enough, from parsing UDF headers to unscramble the media.
It would last hours instead of 15 minutes under my Athlon 2000 but if would work the same.
The same with Nagra encoding and XawTV for some propietary channels in TV. You can decode any stream (and even extract subtitles) thanks to free software.
Even BTTV cards will still work. Go try that with Windows 7 and up. If you can find drivers, that's it. And working decoding software not messing up with DDraw based codecs and rendering.
I was there, and it was the free software the one who broke most of the chains. Propietary software today it's useless.
The disk key is small (40 bits) and I'm suspicious it's actually encoded as wobble frequency [0], like the PS1's copy protection scheme.
Because CD/DVD burners can't write wobble. Blank CDs/DVDs ship with a pre-made wobble in the pre-groove, which the burners use to determine the absolute position of the write laser.
[0] *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wobble_frequency
Nor could you burn it onto a CD-R. It was there to prevent people from burning copies of games, not to prevent you from ripping the disc.
Of course, it was stupidly easy to bypass with a mod chip. They literally just sit there injecting the copy protection signal into the cd rom electronics, tricking it into thinking every single disc was blessed by Sony, burned or not.
In fact, the question of emulators wouldn't have been on the Sony engineers minds at all.
Because in 1994 (when the ps1 launched) there were no viable console emulators.
There were a few early prototypes, but they didn't produce 'playable results'. The first viable emulator (for any console) was arguably NESticle, released in April 1997. Things then moved rapidly, we see the first viable 16bit emulators in 1998.
It's notable that the PS2 doesn't have any protection against ripping games either. The Sony engineers would have been aware of emulators by this point, but they might have assumed that emulation would be stuck in the 8/16bit era for the foreseeable future.
So it must have been a huge shock for the first viable 32bit era emulators to come out in 1999. Connectix Virtual Game station (Jan 1999), UltraHLE (Also Jan 1999) and Bleem! (March 1999)
Yes.. that's right. We went from the first viable NES emulator to viable PS1/N64 emulators in under 2 years.
I'm guessing the PS2 was a little too close to it's March 2000 release date at this point to slap on rip protection, but the Gamecube and Xbox were released 18 months later, and both had time to implement disc encryption schemes.
Newer drives I bought will refuse reading what they won’t decide themselves (e.g. wrong region).
He released a tool for circumventing a protection measure. While already illegal to do in America, it wasn't made illegal in Norway until less than 2 years later.
> descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner
where
> a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
A sticker doesn't count as a "technological measure".