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Comment by steviedotboston | Hacker News Reader

I remember using this to rip every DVD I received in the mail from Netflix, and then copying the file to my iPod Video so I could watch it on the bus ride to school.

Man have times changed...

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Nothing has changed here. I get Blurays in mail from Netflix, rip them via MakeMKV, re-encode with Handbrake and put them on Synology NAS for later convenient viewing via Vero4k. Disk space is cheap, skipping stupid menus and previews is priceless!

Does MakeMKV have some sort of magic fairy dust that allows them to rip blu rays? It seems weird to me that a random closed source tool on the internet does this, and the fact that ffmpeg can’t do it after all these years feels really weird.

No fairy dust, but you do need to re-flash the firmware on your bluray drive to make it work. As far as I know bluray drive manufacturers (and there's a handful at most at this point) have tried to disable ripping.

MakeMKV has been around a long time, works well and it's not what I would call a "random" closed source tool.

OK, so is it basically a community effort coalesced around keeping up with DRM and obfuscation by funneling all the effort into one project which, in order to stay ahead of the industry, can’t reveal how it does what it does? Cuz that, while an unfortunate situation, would be something I could totally understand.

Yes. Specifically, it has the ability to decrypt commercial encrypted Blu-ray content. How they manage to keep up with updates the publishers put out I don't know, but they've typically got an update to MakeMKV within a few days.

I belive they have a legitmatly obtained decryption key. I don't know how they managed to license one, though, one would imagine the powers that be would hate it.

Seems like it in my experience. Basically, I think people "find" decryption keys and then MakeMKV integrates them.

DRM

Same here the value proposition of curating a movie collection has changed a bit over the past 10+ years

Funny you mention that! I started doing it again after a ~10 year hiatus. I decided I wanted to curate a collection for my kids. The issue with streaming services - especially outside of the US - is the recency and popularity bias.

To some point yes, but I ended up buying a boxed DVD set of Buffy when netflix removed the show. Dealing with DVDs are super annoying when you don't have a DVD drive in your computer, so it was back to 2005 for me.

I did the same! Except for my now spouse's iPod Video. And it was for a train, not a bus. But wow has Handbrake delivered for me. A great piece of software.

My Dad did this all the time when he wasn't so busy with work.

I remember using it to rip the first season of LOST and convert it so I could watch it entirely on my iPod while on a summer airplane trip to visit family—good times.

In 2004, I went to China with 1 suitcase and came back with 2. Let's say I found out how to make my players region-free fast.

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