I wonder if we’ll finally get an actual case testing the reasonableness of the DMCA out of this. Probably not, since I’d imagine the companies involved will simply move to off-site domains.
About a year and a half ago I paid a reasonably decent amount for DVDFab so that I could rip my BluRays easily for streaming upstairs to my AppleTV. I guess I’m one of those mythical unicorns, I truly do only rip the movies I own. I simply don’t want to be bothered to find more and more readily available space for storing my discs when I can simply pop a digital copy on a multiTB hard drive and have it available at the touch of a button from the comfort of my couch, on any TV in the house, at a resolution that I find acceptable compared to the original disc.
I also like the idea of being able to convert my media to a format amenable to whatever portable player I have access to and may want to take along with me. PSVita? Rip it to that aspect ratio/capability. iPad air? Rip it to that one.
The idea that I’m ever going to pay Sony for a copy of a movie, Apple for a copy of the same movie, and the studios for yet another copy of the same movie (for bluray watching on the big TV) is absurd. It would be akin to having to pay websites for reading from Safari, separately from reading from Chrome, and once again from reading from Firefox.
Damn. DVDFab was about the only reliable ripper I’d found for Blu Rays. I only do it with movies I own, and honestly, I don’t do it that often. I like the idea of having my movie library with me on trips, but in practice I usually don’t watch them.
If you guys are looking for an alternative, AnyDVD HD works great in conjunction with Handbrake (free). AnyDVD HD is really quite expensive though. For a lifetime license it’s 119 Euros. The nice thing about it is that it simply removes protection on the fly, so you can rip with whatever program you want. It gets updated about once a week for new Bluray protections.
I’m finally going to move all my DVD’s and Blu-Rays to my new 2 TB Green HD and stream the video to either my Roku 3 player or Panasonic Blu-Ray Smart player. Would both of those work? If so, what format would I use to have the highest quality but smallest space? Older DVD’s like Black Books, Red Dwarf, and Black Adder already look a bit poor, and after watching the Two Towers this past weekend, I realized how bad some of the CGI work is (when the Hobbits are being carried by Treebeard it looks quite fake - you can tell it was done against Blue-screen - maybe I should have waited to buy the Blu-Ray version of the series). SO I’d be a bit worried about reducing that quality even more. But I’ve got a lot of crap and am not sure how many Blu-Ray & DVD shows/movies would fit into 2 TB.
Well, all MakeMKV does is rip the blu ray (or DVD). Basically makes a perfect backup copy on your drive, but fully decrypted. Depending on what’s being ripped, it’ll use about 25-40 GB.
I then use Handbrake (also free) to transcode the movie or TV episodes into an h264 format. If I want high quality (which is basically 1080p), I’ll use the high profile, my Core i7 4770 transcodes at roughly 22-26 fps. Since film is around 24 fps, it basically takes a second to transcode each second of video. File size for an hour-long TV episode is about 2-2.5 GB.
If I want something 720p or medium quality (but still HD and quite sharp), I’ll use a medium profile, and my PC can transcode about 120-140 fps, or about a second to transcode about 4-6 seconds of video. So an hour-long TV episode gets done in about 12-14 minutes. This might be best mix of quality/space, as a TV episode is about 1.2-1.5 GB. And it still looks waaaay better than anything you get on Comcast, which has absolutely shitty compression/bit rate for HD.
AnyDVD HD with Handbrake is essentially doing that in one step. Transcode the video as it reads it decrypted from the disk. I have my settings tweaked and set fairly high so an average bluray movie takes about 15-16 gig. It looks nearly identical to the original Bluray when streaming to my HTPC. (If anyone is interested, I’d be happy to share my Handbrake settings).
Yeah, that’s supposed to be the plan, but it’s technically in beta, and it’s been in beta for almost 4 years, and will probably be in beta for a long, long time to come. And while it’s in beta, it’s free. All you need to do is go to the forums and they post the latest temporary beta key every month.
What’s the consensus on how legit RedFox/AnyDVD is these days? Now my NAS is set up I’d like to rip all my DVDs, but I don’t want to have a backdoor bitcoin mining operation running on my PC while I do it.
