I ripped a ton of my stuff back in the day, guess I've been lucky, every generic BD drive i've used just worked.

But once you get past the "works" hurdle, the real struggle begins.

It's slow, like really slow. Assuming you can find the right titles and convince makemkv extract them, it's a start the process and go brew a cup of coffee slow. But hey, I've got time and you don't need to watch it ... mostly.

Depending on the disk, it's still either crap quality or it takes up an ungodly amount of space. Even a decent sized drive buckles sooner or later if you're generating 20GB images.

Unless you're up on your network game, your streaming sticks/tv's can hardly handle the throughput to stream the video.

So you encode the video. HEVC (which is getting dicey starting january as the royalties go up and processors stop support hardware decoding) or hopefully AV1, which still has spotty support in places. and the re-encode? The easy software isn't free, the free software isn't easy, but FFMPEG isn't that hard to work with.

OR, you find an ISO provider and download it.

Pioneer is a well known Japanese electronics company, they are still going strong, but have exited the optical disc drive business.

So no, Pioneer has not gone out of business, they have however changed focus from optical drives.

There are some external/portable USB blu ray drives that work with MakeMKV and cost like $30.

I think optical media is a dead platform. Hence, there is an apparent lack of interest I think in implementing alternative solutions. I’ve had success with MakeMKV using the docker container approach, but never tried to rip UHD.

The Corpo-inspired future is that you should not get to own any of your media outright. They will decide when you can stream it and to which devices. Piracy is quickly becoming the only viable option if you value your freedom, and it’s a very unfortunate state of things.

I guess I lucked out when I bought my BD-R drive before I was aware that MakeMKV needed extra stuff like firmware. But my LG WH16NS60 is one that took the flash (never had to mess with firmware on an optical drive and was worried I would brick it). But the process was pretty easy and getting into ripping BR after so long meant that the easy option was around to handle the steps. Kind of considering getting a back-up drive to have around if/when the one I have dies (especially since big brands are dropping out or may do so in the coming years).

While not as easy as just using torrents or other P2P. I have found it kind of fun to get back into ripping CD/DVD/BD and learn/re-learn how things work these days. Also nice to have all the options I can to be able to have access to media in the event any of them are down. The only super frustrating thing is that so much of modern releases don't get physical (or even purchasable digital) releases. And in some cases where a physical release is an option, they are DVD and not even a 720p BD. Digital options are even worse in a lot of random cases where a store might have just part of a show (or even episodes in a season not part of it).

Currently the only real issue that I have is that I really really need to build a new main PC and finally turn my current PC into only being for ripping and hosting what I have. And to get large HDDs to replace the 2TB and 4TB SSDs I currently have for it all of course. I really would like to have good copies of 4K stuff without having to worry about going with bad encodes that look worse than many 1080p releases that my TV upscales.

I bought a modified BD drive from a person who was flashing libredrive supported firmware and then got a registered copy of MakeMKV.

It’s been stupid simple for me to rip any BD or 4K disc that I can get my hands on. If you choose the “backup” option it spits it out to a folder structure which then use mkisofs to create an iso of things.

Honestly my biggest problem is constantly running out of hard drive space because I want to keep the original, uncompressed isos. What’s nice though is once i have the iso I can pop it back into MakeMKV and just extract what I want. I can then run that through Handbrake and compress to my exact specifications.

I recently got into the rabbit hole of digitizing my DVDs after discovering that disc rot is very real. I bought an LG blu-ray external driver, followed steps to flash firmware, bought a MakeMKV license to support the software, and bought a NAS to run a RAID 1 configuration to hold the backups of the DVDs.

I do think with Netflix buying out Warner Bros, optical media will take a hit. But companies like the Criterion Collection keeps optical media alive. Also CDs are alive and well when it comes to music.

I got the dune 1984 uhd and I can't even play it on PC let alone rip it.

As always, the Arch wiki helps us out a fair chunk here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Blu-ray

Best of luck it seems. What a shitshow

Look on the makemkv forum for Libre Drives and what models are usable.

ASUS BW-16D1HT is a valid drive for libre drive and is what I use and can be sourced on Amazon. The pop it in an external enclosure if needed and flash the firmware for it on one of the pinned posts.

I personally don't pirate, but want to power my media server with the movies I buy, libre+makemkv does the trick for me.

The copy protections on Blu rays are exceptionally annoying, to the extent where there is really only one closed source software – MakeMKV – that can work around them.

Not quite, RedFox formerly SlySoft (RIP) used to market their own Blu-ray ripper and it worked quite well. What it used to do is on-the-fly decryption so you'd run it in the background and could use any other software to read the decrypted Blu-ray (e.g. using Handbrake or whatever). It did also have an option to just rip to a file IIRC. Unfortunately they randomly disappeared so their software is pretty much done. (some background on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedFox)

That aside they always a competitor, DVDFab, that still exists today. Their Passkey software is the rough equivalent of what the old RedFox/SlySoft software used to do but they also sell a standalone Blu-ray ripper if that's more your thing (see https://www.dvdfab.cn/).

But yeah, in some ways you're stuck with MakeMKV, DVDFab, and maybe some others (?).

I'd have to dig it out but I actually bought a Blu-ray drive a while back that was on the list of drives compatible with these rippers but honestly it's been a few years since I've tried using it. Most times someone else already ripped a Blu-ray I'd be interested in.

Speaking of - If anyone knows offhand, how do people do this stuff on Linux? Does the Linux version of MakeMKV work well for this and/or are there other tools (?)

If the basic version of MakeMKV isn't enough for you and you don't want to register for the full version, Handbrake is a good alternative.

Because Blu-Ray is the format for enthusiasts and collectors. A burned one don't have the same collection value, and many times even the same content since you don't have extras or alternative version of the movie. USB or Streaming is just more convenient for mosts.

Still would be nice to see more FLOSS support in this sense. We used to make custom art for our burned CD in the 90s.

I always prefer dedicated physical media for the stuff I really care and/or can afford: people underestimate the value of something you can easily show, gift, play, sell, etc. Digital contents don't have this intrinsic value in our physical world, so I don't think physical media will disappear in the next future.

Does the future seem bleak? Are we going to be stuck with shitty WebDLs for most new content?

For mainstream content and somewhat well known content, both regular BD and 4K BD rip are widely posted shortly after release.

You do have some truly niche content and non-english content where it's difficult to find BDRips / BD Remuxes, but you can usually access older DVDRips. If you're into this kind of content (as I am), you might as well just buy the BD (or stick to the DVDRip which is fine as far as I am concerned).

Best Buy is trying to make it a trend for retailers to stop selling physical media, with Target only selling them online. A lot of tech companies now have basically exited from optical media, with fewer weighing their options.

Physical media still has a place but it's on slow-burn right now, where we're seeing major players dropping out from bothering with them, so in the oncoming years, we're going to have to rely on grabbing them out in the wild or hope third party manufacturers keep it alive.

I think there are probably enough collectors, AV nerds, and people without consistent high bandwidth unlimited internet to keep physical going for a while. It'll just be niche, like vinyl, I suppose.

It is kinda weird that optical stopped advancing. You can fit more data on a MicroSD card than BluRay. You can fit something like 240 blurays on a consumer HDD (and much more if you further compress).