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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Ripping physical media for personal use is not piracy despite what the MPAA would have you believe.

Yea but who goes through the trouble of ripping blu-rays to put them on plex?

My home setup is entirely digital. Just a Shield Android TV attached to the back of a TV. I don't have any spinning disc players anymore. All discs are ripped, put on my NAS, and served with Plex.

<chimes in> Same here. I still have all my physical CDs from the past 25-odd years but they are in sitting in boxes after being ripped. 99% my "TV watching" is time-shifted using the Shield, with a combination of streaming and downloaded stuff. I have weaned myself off of all physical media except for vinyl records (don't ask - it's a hobby). I wired my house with Cat5e and everything lives on a fat XFS formatted RAID array.

Now that I have a streaming subscription to Tidal (CD quality) I find very little reason to look to alternative music sources. With Amazon Prime the same goes for a lot of TV and movies. But for niche stuff there will always be torrent sites.

Speaking only for myself, blocking commercials is probably the biggest motivator for myself in seeking DVD sets and/or series of TV shows. Once you have stopped watching "live TV" you'd be surprised how sensitive you become commercials blasting every 10 minutes. Kind of like turning off your ad blocker (I honestly don't know how people survive the web without those things). I'm willing to pay for the "privilege" of not being yelled at every 10 minutes...

In the UK, we get three or four per hour on the most popular commercial networks. We record everything we want to watch on a Humax just so we don't have to suffer the ads, and pause for a piss, drink, or surf as and when. Or rewind parts we didn't pay enough attention to. Or skip bad segments. I wouldn't bother otherwise. I'm sure it's provider dependent, but US shows appear to have ads every 5mins, and that looks like torture.

(Well, added to my iTunes library, actually, but - you know.)

I do, because I only have to find the disk once to rip it. From then on I don't have to get off the couch!

Except that is a DMCA violation and just as illegal as downloading from a torrent site. Although, I would say, a morally superior option.

People who get busted for torrents are charged with commercial-scale distribution, because torrents upload as well as download. It's not at all the same thing as ripping your own disc.

Edit: I mean yes, it's technically illegal but I've never heard of anyone being charged for personal use. And if it did happen the penalty would be a lot smaller because the damage done would be the price of a new blu-ray.

Present

Most publicly available pirated content is terrible quality anyway. If there are shows and movies you really love it's worth it to make yourself a high quality rip. Emby/Plex are super convenient, especially playlists. Who wouldn't want their own private streaming service with all the content they love. The discs sit in the basement as disaster recovery.

I don't know where you are looking, but I have no problem getting fully digital rips of current run TV shows in 720p/1080p that are wonderful - excelled only by BluRay rips from the box-sets when they come out.

Most have no problem getting "remux" versions of movies too. Which is the raw digital copy from the Blueray, so of equal quality.

That'd be me. It's almost meditative.

I have been 100% digital media (we're talking movies, music, PS3 games, PS4 games, Nintendo Switch games, iOS app store, Mac app store, and Steam/Origin Client/GOG on PC) for over 10 years now. Maybe even 15.

This is where things are going IMHO.

Sometimes this has forced me to spend more money on drives/other storage (for example, I manually upgraded both my PS3 and PS4 to the largest capacity drives they support). And I have a NAS with a bunch of drives in it. Worth it, IMHO.

I do! And my parents and brothers and sisters families do, too. And once the DRM is gone we can share from each other in ways that we find ethical (these are the same people that I'd happily lend a physical Bluray disc to).

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