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Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

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Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#11

Post by adithyassekhar »

tehwebguy wrote: post #8

What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake

How are you planning on getting the dvd to show up in handbrake?

Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.

Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#12

Post by throwvava »

Is this GPT 5? In particular,

> 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.

Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#13

Post by jeroenhd »

tehwebguy wrote: post #8

What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake

Yes, as the article states, the $22 is for buying a USB DVD drive. I don't think many PCs come with optical media readers these days.

Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#14

Post by QGQBGdeZREunxLe »

peterspath wrote: post #7
kyrra wrote: post #4

It's also nice that this has been solved for Blu-ray as well. You just have to buy the correct kind of Blu-ray drive, and there's custom firmware out there to flash on the drive and let you rip any Blu-ray.

What drive would that be? Asking for a friend…

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634

Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#15

Post by rolph »

tehwebguy wrote: post #8

What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake

" -That meant I needed a separate consumer drive. So I bought one off of Amazon. Two day shipping, twenty two dollars, no-name brand, USB 3.0, plug and play,- "

Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#16

Post by whycombinetor »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #11
tehwebguy wrote: post #8

What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake

How are you planning on getting the dvd to show up in handbrake? Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.

libdvdcss

Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#18

Post by Dfiesl »

I'm a bit confused by the title. It seems to suggest that ripping a DVD in 2026 is no longer a federal crime, which I'm pretty sure it is. And that ripping a DVD in 1999 didn't require $22 worth of hardware and some free software -> both of which I'm pretty sure it did.

Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#19

Post by jeroenhd »

kyrra wrote: post #4

It's also nice that this has been solved for Blu-ray as well. You just have to buy the correct kind of Blu-ray drive, and there's custom firmware out there to flash on the drive and let you rip any Blu-ray.

I've looked into that, but it looks like the drives are ten or twenty times as expensive as a normal DVD reader capable of reading discs. Any time anyone publishes firmware for a new, affordable drive that can rip movie discs, the drives quickly go out of stock.

Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

#20

Post by madmod »

What is the point of taking an actually interesting subject and injecting gpt botox into it making it 50x more words than it needs to be. I liked some details in the article and I'm not against AI prose in general but this blog post novel could've been an email. The part about server drives refusing to read dvds with css is crazy.
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