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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

I often wonder if archivists are out there somewhere, armed with HandBrake, ripping every DVD they can find into a digital format for preservation beyond the life of the disc.

I've been fascinated with some projects that have tried to recreate the original theater experience of the original Star Wars,[0] or groups trying to capture classics that influenced Chinese cinema but haven't been widely reproduced, like Red Heroine.[1]

If everything moves to streaming though, even that could become impossible. Wonder how long until they'll stop printing DVDs...

[0] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b1Dmiou...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obpyt_tYxCU

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Rest assured that there are archivists ripping their discs losslessly somewhere in the dark corners of the internet. Hidden because the copyright mafia will otherwise ruin their lives.

I once knew of a group like this. eventually, thy disappeared - but it was the most wonderful way to access otherwise unavailable arthouse and experimental cinema. I miss it.

I'm curious: how did they meet? Secure irc?

(I'm not OP)

Experienced the same. I never got into this via IRC. My main thing was music genres, but also on the side quite some non-fiction(documentaries), and a few fiction. I met some awesome people on Soulseek and went from there into DCPP and FTP. This was around 2007-9. DCPP being the frontend for the users. It was a gentlemen's club and from there you just meet different people who see your collection and who invite you into different circles. Back then, there was an auto trader app written in Java, using self signed SSL certificates (w/o pinning). I never understood why they didn't just use rsync over SSH, but it takes more than 1 person to change such habits.

Look up the history of what.cd

And now I'm sad again.

Also read the "how music got free" book, covers allot of that stuff.

sc? i used to knew a few groups like this that concentrated on obscure arthouse films, but i've long since forgotten their names about from sc. there was another one that had something to do with a crow i think. hmm.

I actually can't remember. I was a teenager then and budding cinephile. I stumbled on an invitation to the group through an online acquaintance in a completely unrelated message board.

It was an adventure to be able to pull down obscure work from people I'd never heard of previously. As it goes, a lot of the stuff was above my head - but occasionally I'd stumble on something amazing and go deep on that creator. Later, my university had a very good cinema library. You had to request films my name, necessitating research and sapping some of the adventure of chance.

What's the best software for lossless archival ripping?

I have used DVD Decrypter [0] (unfortunately Windows-only) to make ISOs from DVDs. All the menus are retained, so I can still access special features (image galleries, character profiles, etc.).

I also hear good things about MakeMKV [1], which apparently allows some sort of lossless ripping of video files (I haven't used it, so I cannot confirm this), although the MKV format does not support menus.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter

[1] http://www.makemkv.com/

I'll second DVD Decrypter. I archive DVDs with that, then use handbrake to pull all the useful bits (the film and special features, or programs in the case of TV series) for Kodi.

Works via wine although some disks stopped working in recent years with the software at all that is not with wine

I've generally used MakeMKV to get from protected-source to open-copy, but still as MPEG-2 streams without any loss / transcoding. That's not what you'd use as an archivist - you would want something that does structure-level copying instead, so you get menus and chapters and whatnot. Unless you're talking about archiving just the feature, then it's about perfect and lets you preserve everything you care about in a single file.

MakeMKV preserves chapters.

This is an interesting one, in that most data on DVDs is already stored in lossy formats (such as MPEG-2 for video https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video ). The best form of preservation is to rip the contents as a DVD ISO, which will use the same video and audio formats, as well as preserving extra features like the DVD menus. Any DVD ripper that can rip to a DVD ISO format and perform checksums on the ripped contents will suffice.

h.264 or h.265 is going to yield a much better compression ratio for equivalent quality, even after transcoding formats.

On the order of 2:1 or 3:1 vs MPEG2 format for DVD.

Lossy in top of lossy is never going to be the best approach for archival purposes, which is what the GP was looking for.

If the question was about balancing quality and file size I would've given a different answer.

You can just use bash to make a 1:1 copy:

  sudo cat /dev/sr0 > ~/example.iso

Streaming doesn't stop it, you just record your screen. It's not perfect, but it works.

DRM is dumb.

> Streaming doesn't stop it, you just record you let screen

Not necessarily, see HDCP.

> Not necessarily, see HDCP.

Not necessarily, see HDCP strippers.

Yes, but it stops easy copying. Don't let good be the enemy of perfect.

Really it makes it easier to download the pirated copy, where someone's already done the work of getting around the copy protection, plus removed the menus and unskippable ads and copyright warnings.

Interesting reversal of that saying.

Regardless, my point was the futility of it because screen recording is acceptable, not that we shouldn't strive for better.

Ironically, you're allowed to make a copy for yourself if you rent.

But you have to delete the copy when you give the original back so what's the advantage?

> But you have to delete the copy when you give the original back so what's the advantage?

You do in the USA? Why? AFAIK, not in The Netherlands. The copy was made from a legal source and in a legal way, and is therefore legal regardless if you do or do not possess the original copy.

Yes, in the USA you also have to destroy copies when you sell a movie or CD to someone. This is the whole point of copyright - to limit distribution. Otherwise running a rental service wouldn't be any different from hosting a download site.

yeah they're all here: https://passthepopcorn.me/

How well do these trackers prevent - rather than invite - legal prosecution for their users?

The people that go after these sites are more interested in prosecuting the site operators than the users. I think they want to make running a private torrent site such a risky endeavour that no one wants to take the risk. That said the best sites have operators with some experience at avoiding the law.

they don't really do much of anything to prevent legal prosecution. they're only still around because they're relatively small, invite-only communities. if it ever went public it would get shut down in a day.

Its also pretty pointless when the Mafiaa do manage to get a site taken down new ones crop up almost immediately. What.cd was taken down recently and now has 2 or 3 viable replacements.

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