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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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