Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3D30497420 | Hacker News Reader

I do this. I'll buy used disks and rip them to a personal media server. It works great. A friend actually created an eBay bot which monitors listings of disks he wants and will automatically buys them.

The ripping part is a bit annoying and time-consuming though. Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.

View on HN

> Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.

This is basically what mp3.com tried to do: treat the physical (music) disc as a license key that gives you access to a digital copy online. Sadly, the courts did not agree with their interpretation of copyright law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....

I've been doing this as well. Occasionally I'll have a disc that fails to rip for some reason (maybe my drive is more sensitive to defects than my player is, or there's some stupid copy protection scheme), and then I'll torrent it. Torrenting is always easier and faster, though it's hard to find special features this way.

> maybe my drive is more sensitive to defects than my player is, or there's some stupid copy protection scheme

FYI for UHD disks in particular common ripping software does not include "player" keys (because they are hard to come by and would be blocked by future releases) but only the disc-specific decryption keys. This means that new releases can't be ripped until someone submits a dump of the copy protection data, which can sometimes take a while if you don't do it yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com