Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My husband was right about DVDs

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 428 posts

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#281

Post by bluGill »

danaris wrote: post #84
jasode wrote: post #19

>I still don’t actually use our DVDs and Blu-rays all that often. But every time I see them lining the shelves, I feel a bit of comfort. Because when I do need them, they’ll be there. The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned" . She had a DVD…

And there's even a third option: Rip the DVDs, keep the digital copies somewhere safe, and discard the physical discs. If you want to ensure that this remains safe, you'll need to both back up and periodically transfer the digital copies to new physical storage devices (in my case, I just upgraded from the ~4-yr-old 4TB HDD that was holding all my media to a new 16TB HDD). This is, however, kind of a necessity in any…

I keep the originals in a box. That way if someone finds put I can prove i'm morally right even though the law doesn't allow it.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#282

Post by phpisthebest »

Terretta wrote: post #51
snapplebobapple wrote: post #43

Her husband ian't right about dvds, the government is wrong about how they are regulating streaming services. The government needs to enforce reasonable content licencing across all the services like they did with music and radio stations decades ago so all content is on all services and the services start competing on vectors that actually matter to consumers like interface design and fast content delivery networks.

It's crazy that you can go to a grocery store as distribution aggregator and buy any type and brand of food in one place. You should have to go to a Kellog's store or a Quaker store depending what you want to eat next week. At least, that's what studios and labels think.

Retail exclusives including in grocery do exist. They are rare and limited to "high end" brands that are normally low volume, but there are things that I can buy at a Kroger that Walmart does not sell, and things I can buy at a Walmart that Kroger does not sell.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#283

Post by cogman10 »

hbarka wrote: post #267

Our legal department has stores of blank DVDs. It turns out that some legal artifacts must be stored in a permanent medium.

Yikes, Writable DVDs/CDs are not permanent, far from it! The dyes in writable DVDs degrades over time. If your storage requirements are more than a couple of years you might have already experienced some pretty major data losses.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#284

Post by ethbr0 »

maxwell wrote: post #245
kingforaday wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the reverse is true. Anyone remember the Wayans Bros. Movie "White Chicks"?

https://www.bet.com/article/hk8s72/shawn-wayans-on-people-wh...

My overriding memory of Shawn and Marlon Wayans will always be an MTV Movie Awards (or some such) from the 90s, where they were hosting.

Some smart-ass comic gets up on the stage and leads with "I always said you were the two talented ones in the family."

Ouch. And double-ouch at the big laugh it got from the audience.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#285

Post by zirgs »

pilotneko wrote: post #96
tpmx wrote: post #55

People tend to shit on Spotify (while still using it), but they did manage something that we all want: Access to (almost everything), for a nominal monthly fee. We need the same, but for movies and tv shows. Globally. It's an economical problem that currently has a suboptimal solution.

There is a ton of stuff not on Spotify. It might align well with your tastes, but they are subject to licensing issues. I’m not even talking about live versions or sessions, but bog-standard albums.

But if they are not on spotify then where are they? I don't know anyone who buys CDs these days and torrent sites definitely don't pay artists anything.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#286

Post by Scoundreller »

schmichael wrote: post #264

I wish this article had mentioned the greatest thing about DVDs: You can lend them. Have a friend over and find out they have never seen before?! No need to quick search and figure out if it's on a streaming service they have, just walk over and snatch it off your shelf and hand it to them. In the 00s the trade in media lending was so brisk my friends and I would keep spreadsheets and little databases of who-borrowed…

I need some automated streaming-service ripper that will burn DVDs whenever I pop in a blank disk. And maybe generate nice sticker label PDFs from some intermediate scene with the title.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#287

Post by deadbunny »

trelane wrote: post #255
deadbunny wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is trying to store DRM'd content locally? If you're ripping your DVDs/BluRays/HDDVDs striping copy protection and that's a solved issue. See AnyDVD HD, MakeMKV, etc. Also note that page is referencing releases of Ubuntu from 2008. Maybe take it's information with a pinch of salt.

Do you have better references on how to rip bluray?

For the BluRay drive itself I have a "Pioneer BDR-XD07TB"[1]. For great compatibility and can do HD/UHD (and DVD obviously).

For a purely Linux way (as you linked to an Ubuntu Page) this[2] is a reasonable guide (giving it a quick skim) using MakeMKV. This should also work on Windows. (Ignore the Haandbrake steps here).

If you're on Windows (or know how to setup a VM with USB passthru for the Bluray drive) and don't mind paying for a license AnyDVD HD[2] is very good.

Both of the above will strip the DRM and leave you with the raw files from the disk (AnyDVDHD also gives the option to make an ISO). You can keep there as a 1:1 backup of the disk or you can further refine.

Without going to a massive rabbit hole and reproducing some (unfortunately private) guides verbatim you have 3 main things you can do from here if you don't want the raw source files.

1. Straight Remuxing: Take the video/audio as is from the `m2ts` container and stick it in an MKV, this won't save you any real space but makes archiving the film alone easier, you'll save some space from extras etc. by deleting the raw source files here. Takes about as long as a copy operation would. You can do this with ffmpeg on the cli in a single command.

2. Audio transcode remuxing. Take the raw video, transcode the audio to something smaller. You use a bunch of tools to strip the Audio[4][5], then transcode it using eac3to, then remux everything[6]. Realistically you've saving maybe a gig here if you're just transcoding the main audio track and dumping the rest. Some time spend recompressing the audio, then remuxing maybe an hour once you know what you're doing. This is usually what you'll see as a "Remux" on the high seas.

3. Compress Audio/Video: This is where you'd use something like Handbrake[7] to recompress the video, you can use the presets and get a watchable file but not the best quality but usually a significant size reduction. You can also tweak a lot of knobs here for excellent quality with little to no visual fidelity loss (a transparent encode) but this will take a lot of time. If you're using a preset you're probably looking at roughly the film's length encoding (more with slower processors). This is usually what you'll see tagged as a "BluRay" release on the high seas.

Obviously this is all for backing up your legitimately owned media in jurisdictions which allow it.

1. https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634 2. https://www.howtogeek.com/161498/HOW-TO-BACKUP-YOUR-DVD-AND-... 3. https://www.redfox.bz/en/anydvdhd.html 4. https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=125966 5. http://haali.net/mkv/ 6. https://mkvtoolnix.download/ 7. https://handbrake.fr/

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#288

Post by comprev »

schmichael wrote: post #264

I wish this article had mentioned the greatest thing about DVDs: You can lend them. Have a friend over and find out they have never seen before?! No need to quick search and figure out if it's on a streaming service they have, just walk over and snatch it off your shelf and hand it to them. In the 00s the trade in media lending was so brisk my friends and I would keep spreadsheets and little databases of who-borrowed…

One added bonus of having a limited selection to pick from was the quicker decision making time.

With thousands of options via streaming services some of us become paralysed by choice!

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#289

Post by RajT88 »

deadbunny wrote: post #235
RajT88 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related, but different phenomena: Streaming episodes have been edited to inject product placement. I read an article a while back about how old Friends episodes have movie posters in the background of films which were released after 2010.

[citation needed] Can't find any evidence of this at all.

It was probably 10ish years ago I read about it. Most likely on BoingBoing.

Will see if I can find it. Indeed it is not easily dug up.

There are many ads about the coming trend of "Virtual Product Placement" but none that I can find which acknowledge the early attempts at it which I read about way back.

Re: My husband was right about DVDs

#290

Post by vidarh »

JuettnerDistrib wrote: post #118
edu wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my same conclusion. With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times. But that’s less than 10% of my media consumption.

> With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times. I don't own many DVDs, but when I see them in my bookshelf they remind of the story the tell, the context when I watched them, and my theories about society, sci-fi, and utopias that those movies inspired. With books it's even more extreme. I get the physical copy sometimes more to have a physic…

I have books I've never opened since I read them that is just a marker like that. I have one copy I've never opened: I read it as an e-book but got the physical copy just to complete my set and have it on my shelf.

I also have books I've suddenly taken down to reference 20+ years after I read it, and where the text was not online, so I also like to have physical copies of books where the idea mattered because I know that some day I'll want to pass that idea on and will need a refresher.

Post reply on HN