I wonder, with some amusement, how much the current state of multimedia ripping, editing, encoding, MUXing, etc. owes to the underground community of internet nerds that just wanted to watch their anime.
I'm a little puzzled as to why he's so set on having a physical disc as output. If this is for personal use, wouldn't it be easier to just rip the episodes to mp4 using Handbrake, which can also add subtitles? And once you've got eps as separate files, no need for menus.
I buy a fair few Blu-Rays, but I've never watched one directly. It's just a distribution format for me.
Yeah. I take the UNIX approach to media storage, everything is a file.
If it's not a file, that's probably due to some anti-user nonsense (a dvd, bluray, whatever could just be an FS with an mp4/mkv/whatever file on it, but it's not, 'cos DRM.). A challenge, then.
Given the mention of menus, I could readily imagine someone who uses a Blu-Ray player as their viewing device of choice, and prefers the approach of keeping a library of discs.
I personally own a lot of dvd's and blurays, but it's been a while since I actually watch them in that format.
I just rip the disc to my harddrive, demux/convert what i want (usually just the main audio to flac), then remux to mkv and store the result (video + audio + eng subs + commentary tracks). Then just watch in kodi/plex.
Dealing with the actual discs etc seems just weird, neither dvd nor bluray as a media was never any fun to use. Using a remuxed copy of a tv series i'd be half way through an episode by the time the trailers and fbi warnings stopped playing on the disc version.
I had probably 400 DVDs and i never started with BluRay.
Not because of the cost, i can afford what i like to watch, but having to buy the physical copy, which i would rip and put on my storage system and than would probably need to store or throw away, sucks.
Why can't i just buy a digital BluRay? Like yes i can do whatever i want with it :|
Yes i know people would copy those asap but still AARGH...
My family definitely rewatches videos all the time. As they grow, my kids become new people every year or so; I like the chance to at least briefly visit every one of the people they have been.
The publisher needs to be able to edit the disc the first time. If that part is expensive in time and money, small publishers aren't going to pick up the format.
He said that the cart page of the software website was blank, the last version of the software was from 2012 and the web page was last updated in 2014, so he had no other option.
Legally dubious? Not sure of the "website is old so pop along to a .ru site" exemption to copyright law. Did the author attempt to contact the copyright owners or discover an alternative?
The Blu-Ray video format is pretty cancerous in terms of DRM; there's not really any salvaging it.
One of the most nauseating restrictions of all is that replication plants aren't even allowed to fabricate Blu-Ray video discs which don't have AACS. This means that if you want to get some Blu-Ray video disc fabricated which contains Creative Commons content and you disagree with DRM, for example, you're out of luck: AACS is mandatory. Archive Team had issues with this - as I recall, the best compromise they were able to find was to just put video files on a normal Blu-Ray data disc and get that fabbed. I suspect this is enforced using conditions in the patent licences Sony hands out to fabs or DRM in the software used by fabrication plants, or both.
You start to realise why this is the case when you research how the production process works. When you send a Blu-Ray video disc to a fab for mass production, you don't apply the encryption; the fab does, and you have no control over the process. Moreover, this process involves sending a request for encryption keys to AACS LA, who then issue newly-minted encryption keys for the disc. Yes, this means that all Blu-Ray video discs must be centrally approved by a single organisation in realtime, as an integral part of the AACS application process. Which explains why AACS is mandatory; it lets them catch attempts by commercial pirates to get discs replicated in mass.
So I don't think Blu-Ray can ever become a non-helldamned format. The fact that the specifications are all secret is just the icing on the cake (this is actually the case for DVD too, open source implementations all had to reverse engineer it). I always found it deeply ironic that by comparison, the AACS specification, which specifies a DRM scheme, a type of thing fundamentally dependent on security by obscurity, is freely available.
I find this deeply amusing. I see how this could have worked in the DVD era, but these days with all of the options we have it's no surprise why most people don't have bluray players. It is kinda sad though because as much as streaming gives us options, the quality is always terrible.
A 4k stream on Netflix isn't even close in quality to a 1080p BluRay - the bitrate is lower. IIRC they stream 4k HDR at just 25mbit/s. Even the superior codec can't compensate.
Theoretically, UHD (4k) blu-rays can go from 80 mb/s to 120 mb/s depending on the authoring of the disc, compared to Netflix's maximum of 25 mb/s that's a massive difference.
However... unless you have a UHD projector, or VERY large TV (60"+) then you are unlikely to see the difference under normal viewing.
Where I feel streaming typically fails, is in the audio. They may 'say' it's a 5.1 surround sound mix, but if so, why does it sound _so_ flat compared to the same film on blu-ray ? All I can think is that the audio is compression is also 4x as compressed which to our ears is quite significant.
Actually even at 1080p, Netflix streams are visibly worse quality than blu-ray. Particularly in the compression of dark colors. I'll occasionally see color-banding, which you never see in Blu-ray.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in the Blu-ray camp; Netflix is for casual viewing, but proper viewing such as big hitter movies are on blu-ray always (I'm yet to get a 4k projector).
It's not the size of the TV, but the quality of the TV. I run a 65" OLED so it's top of the line, but I can clearly see color banding from Netflix on pretty much any TV and it looks terrible. Overall it's just a lower bitrate and compression artifacts on both audio and video make the experience suffer.
Comcast’s gigabyte internet still has a 1TB data cap. So while the bandwidth might be available, you’ll quickly cap out and the overage charges can get as high as $200 a month. the ‘unlimited’ data plan is very expensive as well
A compromise might be to author with AACS but silk-screen the disc key onto it? The DRM is how the disc key is protected, once you have the key it's simple decryption.
I actually thought of this. You could put the key on the disc, or publish it, or include it as a file on the disc in a standard location. But no dice: it turns out the encryption is managed entirely by the replication plant. The plant makes the encrypted golden image from the unencrypted image you give them and even you, the disc author, never get to see the keys.
This shows how sick ideas like DRM slow down progress. Amusingly, they keep obsolete technology undead for years too, because of this mandatory requirement.
I haven't done much Blu-ray ripping, but I try to keep an eye on it to make sure it's still "working" as a thing. I want a movie collection, but I don't want to invest heavily in maintaining a RAID array of live drives to store giant 25 GB archives of each movie. I'd much rather just hang onto the Blu-ray discs, and know that inevitably they all get cracked, so I'll always have ripping options if I need it.
As a physical disc you can keep in your possession, it's still really the only way to "own" a movie these days. Vudu is nice, and I'll do a lot of casual watching via my digital copy codes, but the discs are my "collection".
Blu-Ray rips from Handbrake etc aren't the raw on-disc encoding, and aren't actually that big. ~2-3GB is typical with decent quality. Often the filesize is surprisingly close to that from a DVD, presumably because the DVD one is encoding a bunch of unwanted compression artifacts.
I'm not saying the BD rips aren't bigger, just that they're nowhere near as much bigger as the resolution and quality improvements might suggest. So BD averages maybe 2.5 GB, and DVD averages maybe 1.5 GB, while a BD frame has nearly 7 times as many pixels.
I do set CQ a couple of stops higher for DVD, as per Handbrake recommendations, just because DVD has to get enlarged so much when watching fullscreen.
A WD 4TB external drive can store 160 25TB blurays for $100. That adds a "tax" of $1.60 per disc if you rip the raw disc.
I tend to re-encode as libx265 (preset veryslow CRF=18) which is a fairly transparent reencode at 20-40% the size, which lowers the storage cost to under $1 per disc. If you also have backups, that will double the cost, or you can accept the risk and re-rip them if you lose the drive.
[edit] They have 6TB and 8TB options now that are cheaper per-disc if you have more than 160 bluray movies.
Or I could just get the disc off the shelf and pop it in the drive on the rare occasion I want to watch it. What's the benefit to spend the time ripping it?
Like, I manage an ebook library, and I easily spend more time and effort managing said ebook library than I actually spend reading the ebooks. So I'm hesitant to bring myself into movie library management when I have a fairly robust physical storage medium already handy.
Kodi has a great interface for browsing movies, and automatically tags things like director, year, nationality, and summary. My fiancée likes to flip through that to pick things to watch; it's a lot easier and faster than trying to figure out all those details from the backs of BDs, which often make it very difficult to even see the duration of a film.
And it allows me to mix together video files from BDs and DVDs with files from other sources (a lot of which are commercially unavailable, such as an Ethiopian film which has never been released except on VHS and a version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg which has been modified to fix a color error) into one seamless interface.
Obviously, though, this is just what works for me. If physical BDs are easier then by all means go for it.
If you spend more time managing your ebook library than reading your ebooks, then this might not be for you. I have ~100 ebooks and it's "load in calibre then forget about it until I want to read" Movies took me slightly longer as while (Author, Title) is unique for books, (Title) is not.
More recently I discovered (Title, Year) is near enough to unique that I can name my rips that and Kodi is happy.
For comparison between BluRay and DVD: I did something similar, also for an animated series, for DVD. I took DVDs from Japan, ripped the video, and inserted good subtitles (the original subtitles for the series as released in the US were trash), and burned to DVD.
The hardest part was making sure the subtitles were in sync. After that, a simple shell script and dvdauthor were all I needed. With some modifications, this shell script could also take speedsubbed episodes and produce DVDs containing between four and six episodes per disc (this was before streaming simultaneous releases).
To address a question from mrec above about why physical media was chosen - I was making this set of discs for a friend for a lending library for their club. The easiest way to move video around at the time was DVD (this was right as BluRay was taking off). Having the disc images was also helpful in case the (relatively fragile) DVD-R media got damaged while it was lent out.
What a strange end-goal. I'm not sure why you would want to "reauthor" a DVD or a Blu-Ray, as their contents are much more convenient once you've ripped and transcoded them. The difficulty he encountered doesn't sound like a good reason at all to buy DVDs instead.
I have roughly 200 Blu-Rays in my collection, and I've watched maybe one or two of them in an actual Blu-Ray player.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadI buy a fair few Blu-Rays, but I've never watched one directly. It's just a distribution format for me.
If it's not a file, that's probably due to some anti-user nonsense (a dvd, bluray, whatever could just be an FS with an mp4/mkv/whatever file on it, but it's not, 'cos DRM.). A challenge, then.
I just rip the disc to my harddrive, demux/convert what i want (usually just the main audio to flac), then remux to mkv and store the result (video + audio + eng subs + commentary tracks). Then just watch in kodi/plex.
Dealing with the actual discs etc seems just weird, neither dvd nor bluray as a media was never any fun to use. Using a remuxed copy of a tv series i'd be half way through an episode by the time the trailers and fbi warnings stopped playing on the disc version.
Not because of the cost, i can afford what i like to watch, but having to buy the physical copy, which i would rip and put on my storage system and than would probably need to store or throw away, sucks.
Why can't i just buy a digital BluRay? Like yes i can do whatever i want with it :|
Yes i know people would copy those asap but still AARGH...
-_-
I see zero corellation here. Out of people buying blu-rays maybe 0.00001% will want to rip them and edit them.
>You can find a copy of the BDFix Pro installer and a keygen here.
Have fun with that.
One of the most nauseating restrictions of all is that replication plants aren't even allowed to fabricate Blu-Ray video discs which don't have AACS. This means that if you want to get some Blu-Ray video disc fabricated which contains Creative Commons content and you disagree with DRM, for example, you're out of luck: AACS is mandatory. Archive Team had issues with this - as I recall, the best compromise they were able to find was to just put video files on a normal Blu-Ray data disc and get that fabbed. I suspect this is enforced using conditions in the patent licences Sony hands out to fabs or DRM in the software used by fabrication plants, or both.
You start to realise why this is the case when you research how the production process works. When you send a Blu-Ray video disc to a fab for mass production, you don't apply the encryption; the fab does, and you have no control over the process. Moreover, this process involves sending a request for encryption keys to AACS LA, who then issue newly-minted encryption keys for the disc. Yes, this means that all Blu-Ray video discs must be centrally approved by a single organisation in realtime, as an integral part of the AACS application process. Which explains why AACS is mandatory; it lets them catch attempts by commercial pirates to get discs replicated in mass.
So I don't think Blu-Ray can ever become a non-helldamned format. The fact that the specifications are all secret is just the icing on the cake (this is actually the case for DVD too, open source implementations all had to reverse engineer it). I always found it deeply ironic that by comparison, the AACS specification, which specifies a DRM scheme, a type of thing fundamentally dependent on security by obscurity, is freely available.
However... unless you have a UHD projector, or VERY large TV (60"+) then you are unlikely to see the difference under normal viewing.
Where I feel streaming typically fails, is in the audio. They may 'say' it's a 5.1 surround sound mix, but if so, why does it sound _so_ flat compared to the same film on blu-ray ? All I can think is that the audio is compression is also 4x as compressed which to our ears is quite significant.
As a physical disc you can keep in your possession, it's still really the only way to "own" a movie these days. Vudu is nice, and I'll do a lot of casual watching via my digital copy codes, but the discs are my "collection".
Sure audio is always an issue, can't do much there.
I do set CQ a couple of stops higher for DVD, as per Handbrake recommendations, just because DVD has to get enlarged so much when watching fullscreen.
I tend to re-encode as libx265 (preset veryslow CRF=18) which is a fairly transparent reencode at 20-40% the size, which lowers the storage cost to under $1 per disc. If you also have backups, that will double the cost, or you can accept the risk and re-rip them if you lose the drive.
[edit] They have 6TB and 8TB options now that are cheaper per-disc if you have more than 160 bluray movies.
Like, I manage an ebook library, and I easily spend more time and effort managing said ebook library than I actually spend reading the ebooks. So I'm hesitant to bring myself into movie library management when I have a fairly robust physical storage medium already handy.
And it allows me to mix together video files from BDs and DVDs with files from other sources (a lot of which are commercially unavailable, such as an Ethiopian film which has never been released except on VHS and a version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg which has been modified to fix a color error) into one seamless interface.
Obviously, though, this is just what works for me. If physical BDs are easier then by all means go for it.
More recently I discovered (Title, Year) is near enough to unique that I can name my rips that and Kodi is happy.
25gig costs 50 cent / month to store on something easy like google drive.
For keeping a zfs cluster up and running and maintained, its probably way cheaper but still you pay for power, hardware and your labour.
Was the spec written by precocious twelve-year olds?
The hardest part was making sure the subtitles were in sync. After that, a simple shell script and dvdauthor were all I needed. With some modifications, this shell script could also take speedsubbed episodes and produce DVDs containing between four and six episodes per disc (this was before streaming simultaneous releases).
To address a question from mrec above about why physical media was chosen - I was making this set of discs for a friend for a lending library for their club. The easiest way to move video around at the time was DVD (this was right as BluRay was taking off). Having the disc images was also helpful in case the (relatively fragile) DVD-R media got damaged while it was lent out.
I have roughly 200 Blu-Rays in my collection, and I've watched maybe one or two of them in an actual Blu-Ray player.