I love their summary of what the patched firmware does:

'A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself “revoked”.

(...) Change the optical drive embedded software in a way that the drive becomes a “primitive” device - one that just positions a laser, reads and decodes the data. Make a drive free from “policing” functionality, a drive that just passes all data from the disc to the user.'

- from What is LibreDrive? at https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=18856

And once you've pried the data out of the drive's hands you still have to decrypt it.

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&p=96988 https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=24312

And, like what SGX is providing, if the film industry really want to stop pirating, they can. Then makemkv will be a history.

I doubt that, if for nothing else the Analog Hole[0]. At some point in the chain, the video data has to be turned into usable information for a display panel and speakers.

They keep adding steps to the chain, moving the final step closer and closer to the end, but it is still possible to bypass. In the ultimate case, you could probe the display board directly and convert the raw panel voltages, but in practice there are many earlier opportunities.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

But I'm not talking about doing the copying itself. I'm talking about circumventing DRM which is a separate offense from copyright infringement. That is illegal in the USA, with certain specific, narrow exceptions, whether you use such circumvention to infringe copyright or not. Trafficking in circumvention devices, including publishing or downloading firmware that disables access protection measures, is illegal full stop.

(Remember DeCSS? Yeah, hosting that is still a federal crime, irrespective of what you or your audience intends to do with it. The irony is, that means the Feds have every right to take Eric S. Raymond's guns away and bar him from owning a gun for life: http://www.catb.org/esr/netfreedom/)

Now whether "latest Intel chips don't support playback" is sufficient to fall under this flag is obviously a complex topic but I think it is certainly not cut and dry.

The issue here is that the DMCA makes bypassing copy protection illegal regardless of whether or not the actual use of the media infringes on copyright, and exceptions are only added every 3 years[1] and are generally very specific in scope.

From my understanding it's less of a gray area and more of a dithered black and white area that can look gray from afar.

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/1201/

Otherwise if you just want to watch a movie and don't care that it might not be available at a later time, use a streaming service, it's by far the most convenient.

I find this phrasing quite fascinating. What does it even mean to "own" a movie? If you torrent or rip it, you now simply possess a copy and with the ability to watch it without any artificial restrictions, but I'd hardly say that you "own" it at that point.

I find it so depressing that our legal system does not even have the concept of an individual having access to a movie such that they can play it for themselves conveniently without restrictions. Even when you physically own a DVD there is no "sanctioned" way to watch it without being forced to watch the commercials and legal disclaimers at the beginning.

Which reminds me of the irony always repeated in these threads, that the folks who rip or torrent the film never see these legal disclaimers and only the folks who obey all the "rules" and don't need to see the disclaimer are constantly exposed to it.

Why can't we have nice things? This world is so distopian.

Bonus: As technologists and developers, we are actively creating this dystopia! I'm sure a non-zero portion of HN's audience is hard at work implementing DRM, locking users out of products they own, and coming up with new roadblocks for users. Perhaps someone reading this very comment implemented this exact Blu-Ray DRM in a devices's firmware. To the rest of us, it's dystopia, but to that person, it's just another JIRA ticket Boss says they need to implement, so they do.

Blame the evil managers all you want, but you, dear reader, are the one writing the code and hitting Commit.

Because if you don't implement DRM, then you simply raise the marginal price that it costs a company to do so, and you make another engineer – who is willing to implement it – marginally richer, thus indirectly rewarding behavior you despised in the first place!

The only ways to eliminate things like DRM are to either globally coordinate all software engineers' efforts (probably impossible), or somehow... socially change the incentives such that DRM is a net-loss for content producers? Also seems probably impossible.

I still refuse projects and jobs I consider unethical, but realize it's pissing in the wind until there is some larger coordinated framework (like a Hippocratic Oath for developers).

And of course there's always the whole, "Well actually the government has the final say in everything so does it count that you 'own' something if the government can simply take it away from you." but that's a whole other can of worms!

DRM is as anti-consumer as Apple and Tesla's policy saying the owner of a product can't repair their own product. Having physical ownership and removing drm is the only meaningful way to take ownership of a movie that doesn't rely on the good grace of an outside party. The US has laws against unrightful search and seizure and due process. The government can't "simply" take things away from me, at least in the US. True digital ownership of media requires the ability to playback things without relying on a third party. That's only possible having a dedrmed rip/reencoded copy. In practical terms, my legal rights on how I can view content is tangential to owning media, what matters is my actual ability to view it.

Yeah, maybe calling it "simple" was a mistake, but here I'm thinking about exactly such things as search & seizure and eminent domain where you can be legally deposessed of literally anything that you "own".

This works for them as most people do not how the technical know-how to break through the DRM and most people are therefore discouraged by it.

Although what is the alternative in a world where producing digital copies is a matter of pressing a button?

The whole idea of IP is to protect content creators. Those content creators sell their IP to large corporates to maximise their earning potential. Corporates subsequently take steps to protect those rights. Taking the ability to take those steps away from corporates by extension means taking those rights away from content creators. Is that what you're advocating for?

* I pay $10-25 for a movie

* I can then personally view that movie with myself and my family on the display I want (the last hotel I stayed at didn't have a HDCP compatible TV so I couldn't display my purchased film on the TV)

* I am not forced to watch advertisements or piracy warnings before the film

* I can put the film on other devices I own to watch via more convenient methods (my phone, tablet, home theater setup)

Are those requirements fundamental to having a legal system that protects the rights of copyright owners? Honestly I don't think they are! Because the DRM schemes that enable the above situation clearly aren't stopping pirates in the first place. But who knows, maybe there's an alternate universe where content creators allow all the above bullet points and – as a consequence – very few entities invest in creating art! In the end if I had to choose between that universe and the one we have today, I'd still take the one we have today where art is legally well protected enough that we have a plethora of it.

Moreover, it can follow RSS feeds for automated downloads, and has plethora of other features.

[0]: https://put.io

However, they're still operating, they only know my e-mail, nothing else, and they honor DMCA take down notices.

Oh, and the company is local to me.

They don't access to your card details. Just an API integration, that's all.

So, yes, people easily could be sued for torrenting and plenty of people have suffered significant penalty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-39961502

[3] https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later

FWIW almost all the people listed on your wiki page were tracker operators, but I am aware that there have been a few exceptions.

This is mostly an issue when streaming, which I prefer not to do for that reason. When I've had slow connections, torrenting a movie has generally been fine as I just let it run overnight.

Similar constraints, different solutions.

Is there any evidence to suggest that the likes of Netflix and Disney+ are doing this?

Of course, if the privacy policies do not include a data sharing provision, then evidence of the sharing would be interesting.

Viewing data is largely used in aggregate to make decisions about content. They’ll collect demographic data because it’s useful to know, but by and large it’s all used in aggregate or as cohorts because there really aren’t enough permutations. On a streaming service like Netflix or Disney there just isn’t enough content for people to look all that different at an individual level.

You might not care about Z, but the rest of those variables could be sensitive.

- to watch things I don't wanna watch,

- while being gouged for double the BR-retail price PER person PLUS overpriced amenities,

- with no option for original audio but only trash-tier dubs (in Germany you'd have to go to one the bigger cities like Berlin for the option)

- while sitting together in a hot and stuffy room with a bunch of other (noisy) people

- not to mention the time investment of going to the city, standing in line for tickets, waiting for the movie to start and going back home, not even being able to have a beer unless you can/want to take the bus (slightly more money if it's even still running at that time) or a taxi home (considerably more money).

In all this makes it:

- ~5-15€ per BR, rip it to external drive, watch what I want when I want anywhere in my local network with Jellyfin or on that connected computer with mpv in full quality, with any of the available audio tracks (though usually original audio), in multiple different playback speeds with no extra time and/or money investment

OR

- 15-20€ per cinema ticket, for any of the small collection of German dubbed they have at what times they decide to show them, ~30-45 minutes of going to the cinema (plus costs thereof), ~20 minutes wait till the ads stop and the movie starts, "enjoy" the full length of poorly dubbed movie in an uncomfortable environment, ~30-45 minutes of going back home (plus costs thereof).

So WHY would I EVER choose to go to the cinema?

Personally I find the quality of the cinema projectors to be lacking, but I still enjoy going.

The last time we tried (again), the sound was overdriven (again) to the point we had all go to the toilet and muffle our ears with toilet paper.

Except for small, independent cinemas it has been the same crappy experience for me: expensive, bad sound quality

* filehosters - they get money from subscribers (some offer a free crippled options just to frustrate users into buying the subscription) * uploaders - they got money from filehosters * downloaders - they got the content they need

Take for example PTP. It is one of the best movie trackers. It recently exceeded 250,000 unique titles available in many different formats. Netflix in contrast only has 15,000 unique titles and their library is shrinking not growing.

We also have unlimited cards here, they're tied to each movie chain. So if you have the AMC unlimited thing it only works at AMC owned theaters etc. It's a great deal. I canceled mine in early 2020 for obvious reasons though.

https://princecharlescinema.com/PrinceCharlesCinema.dll/What...

It was surprisingly hard to do the homework on the "best" way to do this on a Mac -- I ended up using MakeMKV to rip + Handbrake to encode, but it was hard to find a robust recent technical discussion of what the pros do.

At one point in this process I was looking at the Internet Archive's copy of http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/ which has just quietly disappeared from the Web? It was a bizarre experience.

No annoying upsells, no subscriptions and you can use the officially provided beta key (valid until the end of a month, a new key gets released every month) to check it out.

U.S. copyright law (Title 17 of the United States Code) generally says that making a copy of an original work, if conducted without the consent of the copyright owner, is infringement. The law makes no explicit grant or denial of a right to make a "personal use" copy of another's copyrighted content on one's own digital media and devices. For example, space shifting, by making a copy of a personally owned audio CD for transfer to an MP3 player for that person's personal use, is not explicitly allowed or forbidden.

Existing copyright statutes may apply to specific acts of personal copying, as determined in cases in the civil or criminal court systems, building up a body of case law. Consumer copyright infringement cases in this area, to date, have only focused on issues related to consumer rights and the applicability of the law to the sharing of ripped files, not to the act of ripping, per se.

The reason you can’t find a commercial vendor that will directly ship something to bypass the DRM is because it also says “No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”

This is also why for a while the t-shirts with the dvd decss key were popular among nerds, because they are illegal.

Are you saying this is incorrect?

> The 2021 exemptions, issued in October 2021, are for:[15]

> Motion pictures (including television shows and videos), as defined in 17 U.S.C. 101, where circumvention is undertaken solely in order to make use of short portions of the motion pictures for the purpose of criticism or comment, for supervised educational purposes, to accommodate for accessibility for disabled students in educational institutions, for preservation of the motion picture by a library, archive, or museum, or for research purposes at educational institutions;

And that exemption only adds cases in which stripping DRM from a DVD becomes legal. It's still generally illegal, and most people using makemkv are likely using it illegally.

I'm not sure this has ever been tested in court, though. And even the DMCA itself does provide for a rather clunky system of "exemptions" to the no-circumvention provision.

EDIT: DVD Decrypter! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-10-28/pdf/2021-2...

But it's worth noting that virtually every country in the world has a prohibition on acquiring software to bypass DRM. In the UK for example it's a criminal offense with potential jail time attached to import it (i.e. download it from a foreign server) or sell it.

Format shifting à la iTunes CD rips is tortuous in the UK, AFAICS, making iTunes unlawful as it's produced in order to enable infringing behaviour.

iTunes isn't unlawful in the UK, as there's no prohibition on making software to format shift. It's just using it to format shift that's unlawful. But software to bypass technical protection measures is prohibited, and similar laws exist in almost all countries because having them is a requirement for WTO membership.

It's just that I come from VCD rips and still think that anything better than DVD is fantasticly detailed. Just never had the urge to let myself get used to better, but I'm starting to with 1080p.

Mind, it's not worth it for most movies. However, those flames are a good example of why bandwidth can matter.

Which doesn't really matter though, you can also find 40GB files of most movies, they should (if encoded well) definitely match the quality.

The disc capacity contributes a lot to disc authors tweaking codec settings to value quality above file size. Visible artifacts are fairly rare even on complex scenes. You could practically believe you're watching a lossless source.

What's the point of a beautiful 2500 kbps h.265 video if they're going to kill the audio quality by squashing it to 128 kbps?

So I gave up, googled rarbg and can get the same stuff in perfect quality in a few minutes. UHD killed legal "dvds" for me, it's so stupid.