Automatic Ripping Machine (2016)
b3n.org
b3n.org
https://www.mankier.com/1/grip
Years later when I was burning hundreds of CDs a month for our Linux distribution (I think peak was 700 CDs a month), I implemented an "autoburn" system:
- Detect insertion of a disc. - Burn the image to the disc. - Verify the burned disc. - If it succeeded verification, eject it.
So we could just go around to the CD drives, put in the blanks, and then come back a bit later and put the ejected discs into envelopes. Any drives not flashing their activity LEDs but with the drive bay closed were bad burns.
I eventually implemented a custom verification process based largely on time required to read each block, as well as the checksum. We found that any disc with any sectors that took more than some number of ms to read, would likely fail in some customer drives. We had some discs that would verify, but would take a little, or in some cases a long time to read. Instead of 3 minutes, we had some discs that would take 30 minutes to read, but would return the correct checksum.
We tracked this down by paying our users to send us back discs that they couldn't read, to identify the failure.
Not all blank CDs were created equal. We had some media that would produce up to 50% failures using this testing. Taiyo Yuden media was consistently inexpensive but produced few if any failures.
While this guide is cool, most people won't follow this guide, they'll just download what someone uploads for free.
The streaming mess of services we have now is the horror people demanded for decades: A la carte. People felt scammed by paying for bundles with hundreds of cable channels they never watched, and we have won! You can now subscribe individually to the five or six channels you want... at roughly the same total cost of your old cable subscription. ;)
What we have now is a la carte but each channel costs $20/mo.
Imagine how much more expensive it would be if they still paid for "almost all content"
A la carte would be having one or more places where you can go, select a show, pay for that show and then have access to that show.
What we have now is multiple competing subscription bundles. And for many people, there are only a few shows (not necessarily the same for all people) that are interesting out of a bundle. You do not get the choice to only pay for what you want to watch, you have to pay for the entire bundle. But now instead of there existing only one universal bundle for everyone, there are multiple competing bundles.
After fruitless argument with them I simply stopped sending them my money and kept watching all the same stuff, on bittorrent.
Their footgun is pretty impressive.
2. Why go through this trouble when you can get bit perfect copies (ie. remux) from the internet?
The very first item in the list that's inside the first paragraph clearly mentioned the transcoder used.
"MakeMKV is a format converter, otherwise called "transcoder". It converts the video clips from proprietary (and usually encrypted) disc into a set of MKV files, preserving most information but not changing it in any way."
It says on the about page that makeMKV is open but I couldn't find a link to a source.
At $13/TB (https://diskprices.com/), I think all of us can afford to keep archival copies of 50GB Blu-rays. That’s like $0.65 (and a little more for raidz) for a new release that would cost you $45 if you bought it retail.
Don’t get me wrong, making a 4GB copy is a hell of a lot better than what most people do, just letting the media slowly degrade in a cabinet until it disappears when you move.
There is not just a perceptible loss in quality by transcoding, but tools like Handbrake will mangle video in subtle ways - causing a number of minor yet extremely annoying issues such as dropped frames, jerky playback, audio lip sync issues, etc. Lip sync that's off by 50ms is barely perceptible but will drive me insane. All to shave off a few GB? No thanks. Transcoding HD content is just not worth it.
It's 2022. Storage is dirt cheap. 4TB spinning rust drives are < $70. If you can afford to buy Blu Rays you can afford more storage.
"HD" content from your average streaming service is overwhelmingly compressed to hell and just poor quality. Just because it's a certain resolution doesn't mean it's HD in my opinion. Film grain is not a waste of bandwidth.
I know that it is vague question, but is the ballpark - a couple of minutes, hours or are we looking at days ?
Worst case scenario, the drive can only read the disk at playback speed. So a 2 hour movie could take 2 hours. In practice it will be much faster than that.
Note that a 50GB Blu-ray that plays for 2 hours is only 56mbps on average. So you won’t be limited by decryption/disk/network speed even on a very old computer that writes to a single HDD on your NAS over 100mbps Ethernet.
If you want to transcode to make the file size smaller, don’t bother. An old computer will take ~20 hours to encode 2 hours of HD video unless you’re fine with YIFY level quality.
Transcoding is more time consuming, but for DVD resolution (480p or similar) it will be about the same as playback time (so 2 hr) or faster for an "5-10 year old computer" using x264+default slow setting.