> The issue impacts Ultra HD Blu-ray discs that use DRM, so if the Blu-ray Disc Association ever decides to lift the strict protections, the playback will return to nominal resolutions (3840 x 2160).
As usual, thank goodness for MakeMKV letting me avoid knowing this was ever an issue: https://makemkv.com/
How could we get this to Intel and partners? This would be amazing. Plundervolt protections make it impossible to remove the EFI variable write protection controlling undervolting. It would only require a BIOS upgrade to unlock it and then we could undervolt our rather power hungry Tiger and Alder Lake CPUs.
> No matter if a movie leaves a streaming service or if the digital rights change in the future, a physical disk makes the content permanently available.
Well, isn't that ironic. Sure, the content is "permanently available" in a technical sense, but it'll hinge on the permanent availability of playback devices deemed suitable by the DRM.
It's permanently available if you're willing to fly the black flag. I know a few people who hoard huge amounts of BD-rip movies on their multi-TB NAS at home. That way it's permanently available.
DRM is a scam on the law abiding consumer and the "Blu-ray Disc Association" is a cartel.
Honest question: do people still use PCs to watch BD movies? Have they ever? AFAIK the rare few people who still have a BD movie collections, use dedicated players or their consoles for that. Using a PC for that always seemed like masochism from a UX perspective so it was never popular.
To play the devil's advocate, I think it was too expensive for Intel to invest in patching the SGX IP block vulnerabilities, porting it to smaller nodes, and wasting valuable silicone die, just so the last 5 remaining people on the planet who still use a PC to watch BD movies can now do it from a brand new PC instead of using their existing ones.
So, ultimately this problem backtracks to the use of DRM and why that's bad, not on Intel who can't financially justify supporting such old & niche DRM IP moving forward.
Most of the free/trial stuff I used had subpar menu support (some would only even play the longest playlist). The other issue was my intent was to rip so it was useful to reference playlist numbering, and not all players made it accessible.
Sometimes I just resort to using a physical player.
I've used both WinDVD and CyberLink PowerDVD. They are AFAIK the only "official" ways to play Blu-rays on Windows. PowerDVD is IMO better. Most Blu-rays don't support using the mouse for menus because they are BD-Js. It's not a great experience and a decent player like a PS3 is a better option.
PowerDVD 12. It came with the Blu-ray drive. It's crappy software but it doesn't really matter once the movie starts playing.
The latest PowerDVD is better but I don't feel like paying when I already have something that works.
There was that time around 2002-2007 or so where the "HTPC" was a thing. You had HTPC PC cases that looked like something that would go beneath a TV, various forums talking about TV tuners like Hauppage, etc., CableCARDs, things like Windows XP Media Center Edition/MythTV, etc.
But who watches TV or cable anymore? Not the young people.
BluRay had the dumb luck to be introduced right as the iPhone came out and redefined the consumer electronics landscape. PCs haven't been the forefront of how people entertain themselves since 2014ish unless you're a gamer with a gamer PC.
Me personally I'd rather just buy a $50 Bluray player from Walmart and be done with it.
It always felt like a missed opportunity. The US transition to digital TV was almost perfectly aligned to slot into the HTPC trend.
You'd be able to make perfect-quality recordings from broadcast (remember when timeshifting was valuable?) and the built-in EPG data would reduce the need for some clumsy external data source.
But it felt like we never transitioned smoothly. I can recall the Media Centre stuff for Windows Vista being pretty clunky.
I suspect part of it was that people were under-appreciating the synergy. I liked TV cards for "I can watch in a 20cm window while doing other stuff" but all the momentum was going into terrible 10-foot interfaces that worked best with a remote control.
There was a golden moment - perhaps 2003 through mid 2004 - when xbmc running on the original Xbox could do everything…
But then HD content arrived with bitrates too high for that hardware and everything splintered and got confusing and which Mac mini was beefy enough to play 1080p @ 30fps and which downloads were “HD” but not so hd that you couldn’t play them …
It never got back to the elegance of a modded Xbox and sd content …
PCs don't even have space for insertable drives anymore, let alone blueray players! It's weird to now be in an age where the idea of encoding data on spinning plastic is archaic, but when you can cram literally hundreds of gigabytes in the head of a USB Type-A port it's kinda hard to justify anything else
Not a big surprise because if you actually tried to watch blu-rays purely on a PC you know how much of a horrible, broken experience it has been for more than a decade. I could only get it to work with a very specific commercial version of PowerDVD on Windows years and years ago. Never been able to make it work since then, it's a real cluster.
It's probably about protecting a commercial-level monopoly.
You could presumably put together a box with a BD-ROM mechanism that runs a kiosk-mode VLC or the like that could play every concievable format. I'm sort of surprised it doesn't exist already on Alibaba. But chucking around the legal weight of DRM keeps that product off the market, ensuring that the "legitimate" manufacturers willing to pay for licenses, keys, and patent pools don't have to fight it.
“BD+ mainly works by adding errors to the video stream, not enough to make it unwatchable but enough to make it unpleasant to watch due to near constant artifacting. These are fixed in official players by using "fixup tables", which are downloaded from the internet and provide a mapping to convert the broken video stream into the correct video stream.
everyone has a responsibility to not do anything reprehensible. Some people just do not have a very good value system. I, for example, would not, no matter the money offered, construct a prison for kidnapped kids, or software to scam elderly people of their life savings. I also would not produce shit like DRM. Some clearly will, and hopefully there is a place for them :)
The trick is to give you just enough information so that you don't know you're building a prison for kidnapped kids. I don't want to go too much in Godwin territory, but this trick worked well in the past.
I would take a step towards it, picking an example from a company that was literally created by the guys who caused Godwin's law to exist: imagine a bunch of software engineers at Volkswagen, all from different teams, being individually asked to create components for a test system, unit tests, simulations, etc. and none of them knowing that these apparently innocent parts, when seen individually, would be put together and allow Dieselgate!
You probably would, given the circumstances. What if, for example, every kid was kidnapped to begin with, but after a long time of your campaigning to your superiors, they'd give the go-ahead for a less horrible prison for them?
I think the focus of this is wrong. DRM is bad, and what's worse is people being set up for disappointment when they discover this badness. They are entitled to know what they're getting themselves into. I gladly pay for DRM-ed entertainment, with the knowledge that it's an experience that will go away. Like going to the movies or watching a sunset, it's to be expected that these go away, and by knowing this, I can, as living-feeling human being, make an informed decision. What's not okay is lying about buying something, only to discover later that the usage is extensively limited. All these stores telling us that we buy, when in fact we rent, or license. And that they validate their thing by spying, while pretending that you're private and comfortable in your own home. Also not okay.
The answer is always that someone's just working for hire. Even repressive regimes are made up of 99% of people just doing their jobs to get their paycheck, looking the other way, or down. A great movie is "Cube".
That's just naive. Morality is not as easy as not making a stupid decision. What if you have a comfortable job and now they are asking you to build such a product? What if losing your job would make your life inconvenient? What if it would make it really hard for some time? What if you would miss your mortgage payments and thereby lose your home? Or you couldn't pay for an ongoing medical treatment?
Yes, ignorance is a huge contributor to overall suffering. But you can't just simply eliminate ignorance. (Or a great many other failings of people)
I agree, but I still think they share some blame. Professionals are humans, and they feel moral about how their craft is applied. Physicians for example take the Hippocratic Oath, which directly addresses this issue. The rest of the professions are contested in this regard, as far as I know, with attitudes ranging total responsibility to "I'm just taking orders".
And the idiot consumers who did not do research and bought such products... Both players and the media. Without them it would not have continues for long. That is really so uncool.
Not everyone heard of DRM, and those that haven't have no reason to "research".
Not everyone from the remaining checks everything they buy for DRM.
Not everyone from the remaining realize the implications this may have on legit users (backups, conservation...)
Not everyone from the remaining is aware of the technicalities enough to know those technologies may be implemented in the CPU hardware and be revoked at a later time.
Not everyone from the remaining consider DRM to be a bad trade-off, no matter what we think about it, and our as well as their reasons for believing so.
Who are you to take all these, which is a huge part of those that have a possibility to pay those technologies, and call them all "idiot consumers"?
There are probably other areas you don't even realize exist, where to some guy, you are the idiot consumer that is the reason of a huge industry-wide issue still existing.
Outside of technical forums and tech-savvy friends, the only times I hear about DRMs is about video games. And it created reactions. Steam DRMs are easy to bypass, only a minority of games are using Denuvo, nearly no protections ask for kernel-level modules. Online does often rely on central server which is a shame, but most are still unaware the editor will close them one day, and we can hope for an outcry.
Is the real problem (putting aside the ones creating those devices or designing them) really the "stupid consumer" whose lack of knowledge of a subject is being abused to lock him, when no one is there in the circles they are in to educate them?
People can't be expected to know about everything. There's simply too much going on all the time. I'm sure you encountered many teachers, experts or professionals who think that their specialty is somehow The Thing that's overlooked by most and that's worthy of everyone's deeper consideration. I don't these people could agree which of theirs is the most important. And some people may not even have a single field where they're expert at, and I don't think they are any less for that.
So, what remains? What can we do if people are known to not bother with the things, yet we still want a better world for them, even if they don't know about it? Regulation is the answer, I think, and consistent improvement, and application of it. Education also comes into picture. I'm not even about the part as to what we should actually learn, but critical thinking should be taught somehow. And try to eliminate the Dunning-Kruger effect as much as we can.
I think this is not unlike how cable TV used to be protected. Without subscription, you could still see the channel, kind of, but the image was horrible and the sound muted or garbled. And they installed a box, which basically fixed the stuff (if you had a subscription or bribed the man who installed it).
Luckily, there are people doing Blu-ray digital backups for the disks we own, in open formats unnecumbered by DRM, then store them in large file distribution systems.
no, you don't. I ripped many a blu-ray with an unsupported blu-ray drive (I was even the one to mail in the copy of the firmware as requested by makemkv when it doesn't recognize a drive). ripped great up until the poor drive started having read errors (much later).
new drive supports libredrive though, but I've noticed no real difference in functionality/behavior.
LibreDrive is a mode of operation. If you can rip with it, it’s LibreDrive compatible. That’s all I meant. For anyone getting into this now and that wants to rip UHD disks, they are going to need a compatible drive.
yes, it's a mode of operation, made possible by adding custom firmware by updating the device's microcode.
even your link notes:
> Change the optical drive embedded software in a way that the drive becomes a “primitive” device - one that just positions a laser, reads and decodes the data. Make a drive free from “policing” functionality, a drive that just passes all data from the disc to the user. We call this drive a LibreDrive.
but, libredrive support is not necessary for all drives.
You will likely need custom firmware to read 4K Blu-Ray discs with MakeMKV unless you have a BDXL drive that was purchased before 4K discs came out. These firmwares are provided by the developer of MakeMKV on his forum.
For standard Blu-Ray discs, nothing special is needed. Any Blu-Ray drive will work out of the box.
Actually pioneer drives work out of the box without custom firmware I’ve brought two of them before a standard blu-ray and a 4k one. Both worked out of the box.
I have a collection of about a hundred physical 4K BluRays that I would like to rip and upload to my Plex server.
I just hate using my physical BluRay player. The reproduction is good, super stable, but it's noisy and clunky. I've thought about buying a new player but good players are expensive and I'm not sure I want to keep investing money on physical media.
I live in Mexico and for some reason Amazon US has stopped shipping most BluRay discs here. The selection of titles available in Mexico is much more limited and the prices are so much higher.
4K HDR streaming is really good these days. I rarely feel like the compression is noticeably worse than when watching a BluRay.
MakeMKV will also read 4K Blu-Ray discs. You may not even need a proper 4K Blu-Ray drive, most BDXL capable drives can be made to work using some custom firmware provided by Mike (the developer of MakeMKV).
MakeMKV is "free while in beta". Mike posts a new beta key every few months on their forum. However I implore anyone who can to buy a license. It is a one-time $50 purchase, way cheaper than AnyDVD. This man has spent more than a decade doing God's work.
Wait, this is still in free beta? I used it only twice so far and "only" for DVDs that had this weird "a thousand bogus chapters" copy protection scheme, which I didn't find a FOSS solution for. Last time must have been about three years ago, and even then I was surprised it's still doing the free beta thing, because the time before that felt like a decade ago.
Reading the comments here it seems MakeMKV is quite reliable and feature-rich. That guy should just pull the trigger and call it 1.0 already.
We know a lot of past humans, in part because we can still read old books.
Image a future when all one can find are digital artifacts and all license servers have been disabled.
No e-books, movies, etc, will aid our future selves to decipher what was going on.
It's not entirely like that, I know that essentially all media produced In Sweden is transfered to the Swedish libraries for archiving. There's always going to be someone to manage the originals.
EDIT: With a Swedish library card you can rent most if not all newspapers and such too. Even the older ones.
Blue-Rays and DVDs aren't replaceable by streaming services. The key distinction is that specific videos disappear from streaming services at any time - there are no guarantees. I pay for a number of streaming services, and yet every month things I used to be able to see have disappeared from those services.
If you just "want to watch something" but don't care exactly what it is, a streaming service is great.
However, if you want to watch a particular movie/show repeatedly, then you want a Blue-Ray or DVD, not a streaming service. No streaming service will guarantee you endless future access to a particular video, and that makes them distinctly different. Buying and downloading a file would also work in theory, but in most cases you can't legally buy a video file, you can only lease video files for a specific device for a finite indefinite time. So while that's an option that should exist, in practice it usually doesn't, so disks are the only thing legally available for those who want continuous access.
When I want to watch the a particular show, I want to watch that. Not a random show that may or may not be on a streaming service I'm paying for. The show may not be on any streaming service available to me at a particular point in time. Of course, I could always go to a pirate site and get access to practically everything, but while that's probably more convenient, I'm trying to do things legally.
I think it's fraudulent for vendors to say that you "buy" a video when you don't get to keep it permanently, but it does happen. What's worse, that fraudulent misuse of the word "buy" confuses some people into mistakenly thinking that disks (like Blue-Rays and DVDs) can be replaced by streaming services. Yes, they have similar purposes, but they are not interchangeable.
> I think it's fraudulent for vendors to say that you "buy" a video when you don't get to keep it permanently, but it does happen.
At least one other person thinks that way and agrees with you, and has subsequently filed a lawsuit against Apple for the use of the "Buy" button which contradicts the fine print on their terms. Check out Andino v. Apple
> No streaming service will guarantee you endless future access to a particular video
Apparently neither do Blue-Rays, since about 10 years from now hardware that will read them will become scarce.
In maybe another 5 years it will become an ordeal to get software that can bypass the DRM working on a recent system with whatever Blue-Ray drive you could scrounge up. This may be accelerated by such software becoming even more illegal to create and use.
Additionally these kinds of discs physically degrade within about fifty years tops. Some can become unreadable after a much shorter time. The time range "20-50 years" is often thrown around.
If you want to preserve something long term, the very first thing you should do is strip any DRM, then save it as a "dumb" format on long-term storage. Preferably decentralized with multiple backups (Torrent?).
This stuff can go incredibly quickly and it will become harder every year to salvage anything. I learned this the hard way with my library of .swf files, of which I only managed to convert a subset to video files (where applicable) so far. For now next to them I store a disk image of an OS (old debian+Firefox+Adobe Flash) that can play them - who knows how long that will keep working on future hardware?
Sometimes I wonder if this urge to preserve is patently ridiculous and we should learn to just... let things go.
In any case, the Blue-Rays sitting on your shelf aren't much better than some streaming service.
20-50 years of access is WAY better than the streaming services who all guarantee.. nothing. I'm not likely to be around in 50 years myself.
That said, saving it in another format is a good idea. Harder to do thanks to DRM, but at least plausible.
As far as letting it all just go, that's terrible. At that rate, future generations will know more about ancient Sumeria than the 2020s. I think we can do better.
> In any case, the Blue-Rays sitting on your shelf aren't much better than some streaming service.
My oldest CDs are now 38 years old and still play fine. Of course some discs are better made than other, of course storage condition counts, of course -compared to CDs and DVDs- Blurays add another layer of copy protection, but overall I find this idea of streaming services not being better than a disc on a shelf for preservation pretty "funny". With streaming services you own nothing.
I disagree about it being “not much better”; with Blu-ray, even without SGX, you can still rely on software like AnyDVD, MakeMKV, DVDFab, etc., to clone and decrypt the media. It’s “easy” for general consumers with $50 to burn on an LG WH14NS40, or similar, to backup decrypted copies of even UHD Blu-rays and then stream them locally with something like Plex, Jellyfin or Kodi. Pair that with backups and something capable of correcting corruption, like ZFS, and you’ve got incredibly long-term access to the media that you own.
Whereas when something streaming-exclusive is removed from whatever platform, you typically have no choice but to accept that it is gone or rely on piracy. Services like Netflix often make use of Widevine and restrict playback of full HD and UHD content to devices with Widevine L1 support.
While it is possible to decrypt L3 content using relatively accessible keys, such as the ones from browsers like Chrome, not only has this historically had a much higher barrier to entry, you won’t be getting the decent-quality versions. In order to do that, you’d need either some sort of exploit or insider-access at a manufacturer to get L1 decryption. They will invalidate known abused keys, so piracy groups tend to be very quiet about where and how they’ve managed to decrypt certain content.
All of that is also assuming that you’re willing to make illegal copies of content from streaming services and that you’ve thought enough about it ahead of time to do so prior to removal. And, of course, not to mention that the content available to L1 devices is often still significantly worse quality than what is available on Blu-ray (e.g., typical Netflix 4K streams are 15Mbps while 4K Blu-rays are usually around 80Mbps).
Anyway, I hope all of that didn’t come off too fanatical or ranty; I am just a bit passionate about the subject! I get where you’re coming from, and I do think it is disappointing that even physical media has so many restrictions in place.
That said, while I don’t like the DRM on Blu-ray and DVD, I think we shouldn’t be quite so pessimistic about physical media. It is not libre in any sense, and I recognize the cost of buying each and every single thing you enjoy is too cost prohibitive for the average person, I would be really sad to see this sort of thing eventually die off entirely. I think despite the annoyances, these discs are still really important for enthusiast viewers, people in remote/rural areas, and longer-term preservation.
BDs are also the absolute best for high bitrate content. For 4k UHD BDs, that's the absolute highest quality copy of a show you're going to get, including on streaming sites that offer 4K streaming.
Even if you lease the video file you're usually getting downsampled content.
Definitely. It’s really frustrating since I’d be willing to pay for quality — so many new shows on platforms from Netflix to Amazon have terrible bitrate and amazing production quality. The creators must be frustrated as well. For example, it’s impossible to watch something like The Wheel of Time or Peaky Blinders without bad compression artifacts in noisy and dark scenes.
I’d pay decent money for a service that has close-to-original quality in 4K HDR and a large selection. But it doesn’t exist! I wonder how the market will respond as services continue to lose content and downgrade quality with “better compression.” (Thanks for nothing, Netflix!) I can’t imagine it will ultimately go well for them.
I never understood who this is protecting the data from. I can pirate 4K Blu-Ray MKVs that are quality wise indistinguishable from a blu-ray disc. I'd often rather buy the discs to get movies and tv shows in archival quality without paying for even more storage but it always seems way more complicated to get that to run right.
It’s to prevent the general public from copying everything en masse, like people did in the VHS and audio cassette days. Now it’s only enthusiasts who are willing to jump through the hoops it takes. Of course, the general public also largely doesn’t buy physical media anymore.
tl;dr; DRM significantly reduces the value of a product like a Blu-ray disc.
For a long time I never bought a single Blu-ray. Then MakeMKV made it super easy to rip Blu-rays. Now I've bought dozens of Blu-rays. I haven't 'played' a single disc, but my home server has optimally compressed versions of all of them. The discs are in a box in the attic in case I ever need them in the future.
This is the second "non-advertised" feature reduction I've heard of on Intel's 12th generation processors. The first was losing the AVX-512 instructions [0]. The problem is that these processors are viewed as direct upgrades. But if you need to run AVX heavy or SGX-dependent workloads, these chips are now objectively worse than their prior generation counterparts. It's quite a shame, because most consumers don't realize the impact until it's too late. For example, I had to help a friend troubleshoot low framerates on Star Citizen. It turns out that disabling the AVX instructions absolutely destroyed his framerates in that game. Turning back on AVX using his motherboard's BIOS (because the motherboard manufacturer reversed the microcode and figured out how Intel disabled it) alleviated the problem, but it's a ridiculous step that most people won't do.
If there's anything that makes me think twice about Intel's future, it's moves like this.
These will also work with next-gen enclave tech (mainly in the direction of total VM encryption), but those (AMD SEV, Intel TDX) aren’t as secure as SGX yet, so SGX has continued utility to applications beyond DRM.
If Intel wants people to stop using SGX, they should have intentionally leaked the master attestation key for it. Then the only loser would be the MAFIAA, instead of all of the innocent customers who bought Blu-rays.
These usually relies on TPM. Which is always designed as 'no private key can be extracted physically'.
If your hardware enhanced wallet relies on SGX, It sounds it is defected as it shouldn't be readable after first write at first place.
And why did you think you need signing key for SGX to extract info from it? You only need the decrypt key (Which is already been pwned). Lack of signing key only prevent you from running random program in SGX but not decrypt existing one.
2) it has nothing to do with the technical capabilities of the chip to playback the codecs, but simply to do with AACS's lack of desire to license playback without sgx availability
3) as noted elsewhere with anydvd/makemkv this just hurts regular users as the ability to decrypt and playback UHD blurays is readily available and one can't easily put that genie back in the bottle.
4) As a caveat to #3, AACS hasn't been broken (as opposed to DVD's CSS), its just well understood and people know how to put the effort in to exfiltrate player keys from devices. As each player key can be used to figure out the volume unique key (VUK in terminology), its "easy" enough to make a database of VUKs for each unique disc that one encounters. Of course player keys can be revoked and then not be able to used to generate newer VUKs (happens with newer MKB revisions) so then people have to exfiltrate a new player key.
In fact, AnyDVD basically does this itself, you can make a bit perfect image of a bluray (making an assumption you have an old drive that avoids bus encryption, or use other mechanisms, say libredrive, to prevent it) and assuming AnyDVD has seen the disc before (anywhere thats connected to the internet and their servers), it will be able to decrypt the encrypted image.
This is opposed to DVDs, no special areas of the disc unreadable by normal mechanisms are used on blurays, for DVDs while one can also make an encrypted image and decrypt it, one is then limited to normal DeCSS brute force methods that require a certain amount of data to work so dont work on the smallest of files, in practice, this limitation doesn't matter much and is more noted for technical interest.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadAs usual, thank goodness for MakeMKV letting me avoid knowing this was ever an issue: https://makemkv.com/
It was axed due to the risks to SGX safety.
Well, isn't that ironic. Sure, the content is "permanently available" in a technical sense, but it'll hinge on the permanent availability of playback devices deemed suitable by the DRM.
DRM is a scam on the law abiding consumer and the "Blu-ray Disc Association" is a cartel.
Honest question: do people still use PCs to watch BD movies? Have they ever? AFAIK the rare few people who still have a BD movie collections, use dedicated players or their consoles for that. Using a PC for that always seemed like masochism from a UX perspective so it was never popular.
To play the devil's advocate, I think it was too expensive for Intel to invest in patching the SGX IP block vulnerabilities, porting it to smaller nodes, and wasting valuable silicone die, just so the last 5 remaining people on the planet who still use a PC to watch BD movies can now do it from a brand new PC instead of using their existing ones.
So, ultimately this problem backtracks to the use of DRM and why that's bad, not on Intel who can't financially justify supporting such old & niche DRM IP moving forward.
Most of the free/trial stuff I used had subpar menu support (some would only even play the longest playlist). The other issue was my intent was to rip so it was useful to reference playlist numbering, and not all players made it accessible.
Sometimes I just resort to using a physical player.
It's possible to use VLC. You just have to download two files to decrypt the Blu-rays. -> https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name
But who watches TV or cable anymore? Not the young people.
BluRay had the dumb luck to be introduced right as the iPhone came out and redefined the consumer electronics landscape. PCs haven't been the forefront of how people entertain themselves since 2014ish unless you're a gamer with a gamer PC.
Me personally I'd rather just buy a $50 Bluray player from Walmart and be done with it.
You'd be able to make perfect-quality recordings from broadcast (remember when timeshifting was valuable?) and the built-in EPG data would reduce the need for some clumsy external data source.
But it felt like we never transitioned smoothly. I can recall the Media Centre stuff for Windows Vista being pretty clunky.
I suspect part of it was that people were under-appreciating the synergy. I liked TV cards for "I can watch in a 20cm window while doing other stuff" but all the momentum was going into terrible 10-foot interfaces that worked best with a remote control.
But then HD content arrived with bitrates too high for that hardware and everything splintered and got confusing and which Mac mini was beefy enough to play 1080p @ 30fps and which downloads were “HD” but not so hd that you couldn’t play them …
It never got back to the elegance of a modded Xbox and sd content …
And unfortunately external optical drives are usually of terrible quality :-/
The old school file sharing internet is alive and well if you know where to look for it
I've always wondered why companies punish those that actually purchased their products. Those that got it though other means have no such problems.
You could presumably put together a box with a BD-ROM mechanism that runs a kiosk-mode VLC or the like that could play every concievable format. I'm sort of surprised it doesn't exist already on Alibaba. But chucking around the legal weight of DRM keeps that product off the market, ensuring that the "legitimate" manufacturers willing to pay for licenses, keys, and patent pools don't have to fight it.
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
“BD+ mainly works by adding errors to the video stream, not enough to make it unwatchable but enough to make it unpleasant to watch due to near constant artifacting. These are fixed in official players by using "fixup tables", which are downloaded from the internet and provide a mapping to convert the broken video stream into the correct video stream.
I think the focus of this is wrong. DRM is bad, and what's worse is people being set up for disappointment when they discover this badness. They are entitled to know what they're getting themselves into. I gladly pay for DRM-ed entertainment, with the knowledge that it's an experience that will go away. Like going to the movies or watching a sunset, it's to be expected that these go away, and by knowing this, I can, as living-feeling human being, make an informed decision. What's not okay is lying about buying something, only to discover later that the usage is extensively limited. All these stores telling us that we buy, when in fact we rent, or license. And that they validate their thing by spying, while pretending that you're private and comfortable in your own home. Also not okay.
Correct answer: No, that is dumb.
>No, really, it's cool, I pinky swear it'll always be paired with a doorknob grounder(TM) I paid some other guy to make.
You: It's just a doorknob for shocking people.
This is why we live in the worst timeline. Deep down, you know this to be true.
Yes, ignorance is a huge contributor to overall suffering. But you can't just simply eliminate ignorance. (Or a great many other failings of people)
> Correct answer: No, that is dumb.
"Build me a fence that shocks people"
Not everyone from the remaining checks everything they buy for DRM.
Not everyone from the remaining realize the implications this may have on legit users (backups, conservation...)
Not everyone from the remaining is aware of the technicalities enough to know those technologies may be implemented in the CPU hardware and be revoked at a later time.
Not everyone from the remaining consider DRM to be a bad trade-off, no matter what we think about it, and our as well as their reasons for believing so.
Who are you to take all these, which is a huge part of those that have a possibility to pay those technologies, and call them all "idiot consumers"?
There are probably other areas you don't even realize exist, where to some guy, you are the idiot consumer that is the reason of a huge industry-wide issue still existing.
Outside of technical forums and tech-savvy friends, the only times I hear about DRMs is about video games. And it created reactions. Steam DRMs are easy to bypass, only a minority of games are using Denuvo, nearly no protections ask for kernel-level modules. Online does often rely on central server which is a shame, but most are still unaware the editor will close them one day, and we can hope for an outcry.
Is the real problem (putting aside the ones creating those devices or designing them) really the "stupid consumer" whose lack of knowledge of a subject is being abused to lock him, when no one is there in the circles they are in to educate them?
So, what remains? What can we do if people are known to not bother with the things, yet we still want a better world for them, even if they don't know about it? Regulation is the answer, I think, and consistent improvement, and application of it. Education also comes into picture. I'm not even about the part as to what we should actually learn, but critical thinking should be taught somehow. And try to eliminate the Dunning-Kruger effect as much as we can.
Everywhere else, "deprecated" means "it still works but don't use it".
AnyDVD will allow you to "play" it in the traditional sense by presenting the disc to your player software as unencrypted and unprotected.
With MakeMKV you have to make a copy of the video first, and then play the copy.
Both are paid software. I use MakeMKV on Linux, it works well.
[1]: https://www.redfox.bz/en/anydvdhd.html
[2]: https://www.makemkv.com
new drive supports libredrive though, but I've noticed no real difference in functionality/behavior.
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19113
yes, it's a mode of operation, made possible by adding custom firmware by updating the device's microcode.
even your link notes:
> Change the optical drive embedded software in a way that the drive becomes a “primitive” device - one that just positions a laser, reads and decodes the data. Make a drive free from “policing” functionality, a drive that just passes all data from the disc to the user. We call this drive a LibreDrive.
but, libredrive support is not necessary for all drives.
For standard Blu-Ray discs, nothing special is needed. Any Blu-Ray drive will work out of the box.
I have a collection of about a hundred physical 4K BluRays that I would like to rip and upload to my Plex server.
I just hate using my physical BluRay player. The reproduction is good, super stable, but it's noisy and clunky. I've thought about buying a new player but good players are expensive and I'm not sure I want to keep investing money on physical media.
I live in Mexico and for some reason Amazon US has stopped shipping most BluRay discs here. The selection of titles available in Mexico is much more limited and the prices are so much higher.
4K HDR streaming is really good these days. I rarely feel like the compression is noticeably worse than when watching a BluRay.
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634
MakeMKV is "free while in beta". Mike posts a new beta key every few months on their forum. However I implore anyone who can to buy a license. It is a one-time $50 purchase, way cheaper than AnyDVD. This man has spent more than a decade doing God's work.
Reading the comments here it seems MakeMKV is quite reliable and feature-rich. That guy should just pull the trigger and call it 1.0 already.
Image a future when all one can find are digital artifacts and all license servers have been disabled. No e-books, movies, etc, will aid our future selves to decipher what was going on.
(Well, maybe they'll find some TikTok clips.)
EDIT: With a Swedish library card you can rent most if not all newspapers and such too. Even the older ones.
If your Blu-ray player requires SGX, it sounds defective.
Steve Jobs, 2008
https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-14-steve-jobs-calls-blu-ray...
If you just "want to watch something" but don't care exactly what it is, a streaming service is great.
However, if you want to watch a particular movie/show repeatedly, then you want a Blue-Ray or DVD, not a streaming service. No streaming service will guarantee you endless future access to a particular video, and that makes them distinctly different. Buying and downloading a file would also work in theory, but in most cases you can't legally buy a video file, you can only lease video files for a specific device for a finite indefinite time. So while that's an option that should exist, in practice it usually doesn't, so disks are the only thing legally available for those who want continuous access.
When I want to watch the a particular show, I want to watch that. Not a random show that may or may not be on a streaming service I'm paying for. The show may not be on any streaming service available to me at a particular point in time. Of course, I could always go to a pirate site and get access to practically everything, but while that's probably more convenient, I'm trying to do things legally.
I think it's fraudulent for vendors to say that you "buy" a video when you don't get to keep it permanently, but it does happen. What's worse, that fraudulent misuse of the word "buy" confuses some people into mistakenly thinking that disks (like Blue-Rays and DVDs) can be replaced by streaming services. Yes, they have similar purposes, but they are not interchangeable.
At least one other person thinks that way and agrees with you, and has subsequently filed a lawsuit against Apple for the use of the "Buy" button which contradicts the fine print on their terms. Check out Andino v. Apple
Apparently neither do Blue-Rays, since about 10 years from now hardware that will read them will become scarce.
In maybe another 5 years it will become an ordeal to get software that can bypass the DRM working on a recent system with whatever Blue-Ray drive you could scrounge up. This may be accelerated by such software becoming even more illegal to create and use.
Additionally these kinds of discs physically degrade within about fifty years tops. Some can become unreadable after a much shorter time. The time range "20-50 years" is often thrown around.
If you want to preserve something long term, the very first thing you should do is strip any DRM, then save it as a "dumb" format on long-term storage. Preferably decentralized with multiple backups (Torrent?).
This stuff can go incredibly quickly and it will become harder every year to salvage anything. I learned this the hard way with my library of .swf files, of which I only managed to convert a subset to video files (where applicable) so far. For now next to them I store a disk image of an OS (old debian+Firefox+Adobe Flash) that can play them - who knows how long that will keep working on future hardware?
Sometimes I wonder if this urge to preserve is patently ridiculous and we should learn to just... let things go.
In any case, the Blue-Rays sitting on your shelf aren't much better than some streaming service.
That said, saving it in another format is a good idea. Harder to do thanks to DRM, but at least plausible.
As far as letting it all just go, that's terrible. At that rate, future generations will know more about ancient Sumeria than the 2020s. I think we can do better.
My oldest CDs are now 38 years old and still play fine. Of course some discs are better made than other, of course storage condition counts, of course -compared to CDs and DVDs- Blurays add another layer of copy protection, but overall I find this idea of streaming services not being better than a disc on a shelf for preservation pretty "funny". With streaming services you own nothing.
Whereas when something streaming-exclusive is removed from whatever platform, you typically have no choice but to accept that it is gone or rely on piracy. Services like Netflix often make use of Widevine and restrict playback of full HD and UHD content to devices with Widevine L1 support.
While it is possible to decrypt L3 content using relatively accessible keys, such as the ones from browsers like Chrome, not only has this historically had a much higher barrier to entry, you won’t be getting the decent-quality versions. In order to do that, you’d need either some sort of exploit or insider-access at a manufacturer to get L1 decryption. They will invalidate known abused keys, so piracy groups tend to be very quiet about where and how they’ve managed to decrypt certain content.
All of that is also assuming that you’re willing to make illegal copies of content from streaming services and that you’ve thought enough about it ahead of time to do so prior to removal. And, of course, not to mention that the content available to L1 devices is often still significantly worse quality than what is available on Blu-ray (e.g., typical Netflix 4K streams are 15Mbps while 4K Blu-rays are usually around 80Mbps).
Anyway, I hope all of that didn’t come off too fanatical or ranty; I am just a bit passionate about the subject! I get where you’re coming from, and I do think it is disappointing that even physical media has so many restrictions in place.
That said, while I don’t like the DRM on Blu-ray and DVD, I think we shouldn’t be quite so pessimistic about physical media. It is not libre in any sense, and I recognize the cost of buying each and every single thing you enjoy is too cost prohibitive for the average person, I would be really sad to see this sort of thing eventually die off entirely. I think despite the annoyances, these discs are still really important for enthusiast viewers, people in remote/rural areas, and longer-term preservation.
Even if you lease the video file you're usually getting downsampled content.
But I'll be honest, I'm happy with lower quality content most of the time, and my eyesight is perfect.
FHD with modern compression is quite great.
I’d pay decent money for a service that has close-to-original quality in 4K HDR and a large selection. But it doesn’t exist! I wonder how the market will respond as services continue to lose content and downgrade quality with “better compression.” (Thanks for nothing, Netflix!) I can’t imagine it will ultimately go well for them.
For a long time I never bought a single Blu-ray. Then MakeMKV made it super easy to rip Blu-rays. Now I've bought dozens of Blu-rays. I haven't 'played' a single disc, but my home server has optimally compressed versions of all of them. The discs are in a box in the attic in case I ever need them in the future.
If there's anything that makes me think twice about Intel's future, it's moves like this.
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-is-set-to-disable-avx-512-on-i...
* machine learning in tandem with GPUs https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-confidential-co...
* autonomous key management https://docs.oasis.dev/general/oasis-network/overview#privac...
* signal contact discovery https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
These will also work with next-gen enclave tech (mainly in the direction of total VM encryption), but those (AMD SEV, Intel TDX) aren’t as secure as SGX yet, so SGX has continued utility to applications beyond DRM.
I don't know, for instance, if password wallets use it for protecting their data when they are loaded, but that would lead to pretty bad consequences.
If your hardware enhanced wallet relies on SGX, It sounds it is defected as it shouldn't be readable after first write at first place.
And why did you think you need signing key for SGX to extract info from it? You only need the decrypt key (Which is already been pwned). Lack of signing key only prevent you from running random program in SGX but not decrypt existing one.
1) its not blurays as a whole just UHD blurays
2) it has nothing to do with the technical capabilities of the chip to playback the codecs, but simply to do with AACS's lack of desire to license playback without sgx availability
3) as noted elsewhere with anydvd/makemkv this just hurts regular users as the ability to decrypt and playback UHD blurays is readily available and one can't easily put that genie back in the bottle.
4) As a caveat to #3, AACS hasn't been broken (as opposed to DVD's CSS), its just well understood and people know how to put the effort in to exfiltrate player keys from devices. As each player key can be used to figure out the volume unique key (VUK in terminology), its "easy" enough to make a database of VUKs for each unique disc that one encounters. Of course player keys can be revoked and then not be able to used to generate newer VUKs (happens with newer MKB revisions) so then people have to exfiltrate a new player key.
In fact, AnyDVD basically does this itself, you can make a bit perfect image of a bluray (making an assumption you have an old drive that avoids bus encryption, or use other mechanisms, say libredrive, to prevent it) and assuming AnyDVD has seen the disc before (anywhere thats connected to the internet and their servers), it will be able to decrypt the encrypted image.
This is opposed to DVDs, no special areas of the disc unreadable by normal mechanisms are used on blurays, for DVDs while one can also make an encrypted image and decrypt it, one is then limited to normal DeCSS brute force methods that require a certain amount of data to work so dont work on the smallest of files, in practice, this limitation doesn't matter much and is more noted for technical interest.