Not the point the article is making but "Hardware Is $22" and "The cheap hardware costs less than a sandwich" makes me very glad I don't live in the US and want to buy a sandwich!
Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#22It'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 can the custom firmware do that the stock firmware cannot?
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#23It'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 can the custom firmware do that the stock firmware cannot?
Rip UHD blu-rays.
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#24Not the point the article is making but "Hardware Is $22" and "The cheap hardware costs less than a sandwich" makes me very glad I don't live in the US and want to buy a sandwich!
$22 is an expensive sandwich, to be fair! Certainly not unheard of, but probably more expensive than your average sandwich even in a big city.
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#25Also don't forget that in many countries it is illegal for you to torrent books and remove DRM from ebooks, notheless Meta was caught torrenting hundreds of GB of books without consequence
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#26Not the point the article is making but "Hardware Is $22" and "The cheap hardware costs less than a sandwich" makes me very glad I don't live in the US and want to buy a sandwich!
It's mentally carcinogenic clanker slop. Don't think about it too hard
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#27It'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.
Thankfully, the people who buy those drives for unreasonable prices are usually willing to share their spoils. Only one needs to actually have the hardware for the rest of the world to share the joy.
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.
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#28What changed is time. A clone of the NES lockout chip has been made now, 40 years after the NES. Nobody will enforce that because it didn't exist 40 years ago and Nintendo doesn't make money on NES games now, so they don't lose money on NES game piracy. The lockout chip worked, and its job was finished long ago.
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#29Nobody got a letter for copying a DVD at their home… I suppose if you sold them on the street corner you could maybe get in trouble maybe he’s confusing this with downloading movies which seems odd because he’s writing this as if he existed then
It's AI slop. Don't worry too much about the contents, it's only meant to evoke a passing resemblance to a coherently written piece
Re: Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
#30I'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.
Ripping a DVD is and was not a federal crime. The DMCA had carve outs for personal use and DeCSS was free speech (as argued and won by the EFF).
Using DeCSS to rip your own dvd was never illegal.