It's annoying if you have some more obscure blu-ray release that nobody else has ripped, and even more so if you don't know a guy who can do you a favour.
I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.
Meanwhile the cheapest external drive I can quickly find on Amazon is $35, just under half as much as I paid, or about a bit under a third for the same drive today. Either way it's far less than 10-20x.
OK Claude.
Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.
> The drive in your laptop does not do this. The cheap drive I had ordered off Amazon does not do this. A consumer drive’s firmware is, in the technical sense, dumb. It sees a disc, it reports the contents, it lets the OS handle whatever happens next. The server drive is the unusual one.
> This is worth pausing on.
The "short punchy sentences, new paragraph, 'This matters' type sentence" style is very reminiscent of GPT-5.x.
Using DeCSS to rip your own dvd was never illegal.
The exemptions seem to be for pretty specific cases. Have you got a link to the EFF case?
a good bento box sounds better to me for the usual price points if your into a 50$ lunch.
A lot more activity, actually, because DVDs were state of the art then and today a 480p rip looks terrible on modern TVs even with upscaling.
Ripping commercial DVDs in 2026 is weird, unless it’s some out of print media that can’t be streamed in 4k from countless sites.
The Mist DVD for example has a special B&W version I’ve been dying to find in a second hand store. The DVD extras are pretty much the only reason I would bother, personally.
bethekidyouwant•1h ago
isoprophlex•1h ago