The Blu-Ray Reauthoring Project
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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.
I.e. using that bandwidth, you can consume it in 2.22 hours. So you that's how long they expect you to use Internet in a month? Comcast are smoking something very unhealthy.
This is not news, sadly, and is pretty common for telcom oligopolies around the world. Consumer apathy is a real problem: people know Comcast and have 'no reason' to switch, so Comcast can do what they like and people perceive it as normal.
The only solution is for voters to get their act together and demand taxpayer funded network infrastructure and treat it like a utility. It makes no sense for 10 different companies to run fiber to every residence.
When I lived in Silicon Valley, it was barely better, I could chose from Comcast or Sonic Fusion DSL. I tried Sonic for a while, but my distance from the CO limited my speed (and maybe line quality) to around 8mbit/sec.
I prefer Blu-ray for quality reasons, and also I find some comfort in owning a physical disc
Many years ago it was accepted wisdom that the very best blu-ray player you could buy was actually the PS3.
I am mildy interested in a blu-ray player and I wonder if, in 2018, the PS4 is the best option - in the same way that the PS3 was at that earlier time ?
OTOH, you can get a regular old dirt cheap blu-ray player for <$100 now.
This has the benefit that they are now available without having to find the disc, and also this process gets rid of annoying menus and extras and just gets you to the movie. This will also prevent kids from using your BD discs as frisbees.. ;-)
Only downsides I can think of are that last time I checked, VLC/Kodi didn't support Dolby Atmos soundtracks on Xbox and some amount of time that goes into extracting them.
I haven't tried archiving any UHD titles yet, so don't know if this would work for them. I'll hazard it would. Only take more storage.
[0] https://www.makemkv.com/ [1] https://mkvtoolnix.download/
"Blu-ray is a bucket of hurt." - Steve Jobs, on why Apple never supported it.
I think that there should be a law against this.
I 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.
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.
MKV containers with multiple audio tracks and embedded subtitles in actual text format makes so much sense that you wonder who the hell thought the Blu-Ray specs made sense.
It tells a lot when mainstream device manufacturers starts sorting these formats that came from the scene.
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.
Streaming has similar bitrates than what you get when you reduce a BD down to 2-3 Gig.
It still looks good for sure but if I would buy the disk I would not reduce it as strong as 2-3. Perhaps 10gb.
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.
Files don't get scratched or lost.
You can play them on your PC.
You can get right to watching the film.
You can use your favorite player.
You can use smooth video project to interpolate frames. Especially helpful, since the vast majority of content is 24/30fps, yet the vast majority of displays are 60hz or more.
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.
It isn't exactly spec compliant. Hilariously, the spec is patented dispite prior art & simple run length encoding: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090185789/da).
Output is good enough for power dvd when using the admittedly closed source TSMuxer. Always meant to try to port it to ffmpeg, but it just doesn't seem worthwhile, given the context of Netflix.
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.
>You can find a copy of the BDFix Pro installer and a keygen here.
questionable or suspect as to true nature or quality the practice is of dubious legality
I think most would agree that copyright laws fall into the category of "of, by, and for the 1%" as they currently exist. (They would look much different if the only goal was to protect inventors and protect society.)
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Have fun with that.
You just don't want to follow the instructions. ;)
A better way is, simply patent-free unencrypted video files with track numbers and caption streams, perhaps on a HD-DVD disc (without using the HD-DVD video format). We don't need menus and AACS and all of that other junk, please.
Was the spec written by precocious twelve-year olds?