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Comment by bsedlm | Hacker News Reader

It reminiscent of when I bought a blu-ray and I couldn't watch them because of DRM; as I had already downloaded that show I didn't really care, but those disks are pure waste.

Now that I think about it, the physical disks feel like real-world NFTs.

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People have been treating vinyl records as collectibles ever since music became pirate-able in the cassette era.

I know many people who stream music 95% of the time, but have a big collection of their favorite albums on vinyl, some of them unopened, as a way to support the artist / a piece of art / keepsake / speculative long term investment, etc.

Real-world NFT is a fun analogy.

A vynil os something you can play on a record player, even if you choose not to do so. How do you play am NFT?

I still try to acquire blu-rays not because I actually want to collect them but because it provides an opportunity to get the best quality with minimal loss of my freedoms(no tracking, no BS with DRM restrictions, I can toss their online player where it belongs: in the trash).

Once acquired, I then take the disc data and strip its own DRM off of it. Now I have the content with the absolute best quality and can just sit back and play it in my preferred player. Obviously this is a hassle compared to just clicking play on Netflix/buying online but I am still enjoying the ability while it lasts. After all, with declining sales of Blu-ray and 4K UHD Blu-Ray seeming like its a bust, there are probably only a few years left until we lose this avenue of control of our media.

How do you strip the DRM, is there a FOSS tool for this?

So there are some drives that allow you to install custom firmware called LibreDrive on them that bypasses the security checks. You can then use a tool called MakeMKV to rip the video streams into an MKV container. What is beautiful about this approach is that you can take the whole movie, all the subtitles, audio streams, different angles and dump it into a single file untouched(no re-encoding) and then operate it like a DVD player but using your native software's controls which is so much better than relying on the DVD menus.

The MakeMKV Forums will get you started on the best drives/proper techniques.

That's how I do it: download first, if it's worth it, buy it but never open or use it, just keep it as a token.

and if you will be lucky, some of those (and games) unopened might be worth quite a bit 20-30 years down the line

Yeah, I already got my money back from old copies of SNES games. Newer games, I'm waiting some 10 years or so to sell. They don't take much space after all.

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