You might have noticed that streaming is getting worse (more expensive, less selection, more ads, more fragmentation). For me, they crossed a breaking point, where I decided I'd just find something more convenient.
So, I went down to the local record store, where they have 10,000s of DVDs and Blu Rays in stock; many for $1 (DVD), $2 (BluRay), most under $5-10, and a few gems for $20-30. The prices are for a mix of new and used DVDs; some new DVDs are over-printed, and cost $1.
Problem half-solved. I looked around to figure out how to play these anachronistic shiny disks on my TV, and eventually settled on a USB BluRay RW drive (I guess you can get rewritable BluRays!)
I never figured out how you're supposed to actually use that drive to play movies. Instead, there's DeCSS from the article, then something comparable for BluRay. For the "easy" decryption, you end up downloading per-disk decryption keys for every disk ever printed.
For the more advanced stuff, they have this giant Java Rube Goldberg machine that xors glitches into the video stream. This gets applied at the factory, and then (on some hardware I guess you can purchase?) again via some complicated JVM stack that was originally meant to just render the scene selection menu.
[spoiler alert]
The easiest way to play those BluRays back is to just download the output of the Rube Goldberg machine. At some point the industry realized that scheme was dumb, so there's a finite set of glitch masks. The whole dataset for all BluRays that will ever be produced with this scheme is a few GB.
You might think that when I say "play", I mean "transcode + pirate", but it turns out that's not particularly practical. BluRays are multiple GB, and already compressed with codecs that are competitive with modern ones, so they don't shrink down like DVDs unless you're willing to lose a lot of quality.
So, yes, we have a growing collection of physical media. I target 20-30 movies / $100 when I go to the store. It's grand.
The only downside is that I've noticed that the used DVD sections are definitely getting smaller. I guess fewer people are donating their collections these days.
I've bought a couple of DVD sets from Amazon, used, but the prices there aren't so competitive. Still it's nice to have physical media, with real/original soundtracks.
buy a bd player? i don't know why you would settle on a usb rw drive when you could just have a box that plugs in via HDMI and works
At some point nobody will make bd players any more. Several big companies have already stopped production.
Then you would have a useless BluRay collection after your own player stops working.
The solution is of course to rip off the BluRay discs as soon as you buy them. Then you can have a higher-quality playback on a PC (due to much faster random access and sequential access on an SSD) and you can recopy them forever when the available storage media will change in the future, so you will not lose what you have paid for.
Anyway, I bought a bluray player, plugged it in via USB, and it works.
Also, do modern bd players let you skip DVD trailers and fbi warning videos? My USB setup does...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
Some people were opposed to DIVX's 'phone home' PPV option, but the bigger issue was it seemed like a nasty format war was brewing. Then DIVX flopped quickly. Instead, the MPAA got the US Congress to "patch" CSS by passing a law.
Apple had an advertising campaign that you could "Rip. Mix. Burn." your CDs with a Mac. Obviously nerds could rip DVDs, but nobody ever could productize it like that.
As long as CSS was not broken, I bought neither discs nor drives, because I believe that only naive customers (to not say losers) are willing to buy any kind of information that cannot be protected from the certain eventual destruction due to the decay of its storage medium, by making copies of it on any other kind of storage medium.
After CSS was broken and the tools to read DVDs became available publicly, I have bought several DVD drives during the following years and many hundreds of DVDs.
So the breaking of the CSS was how the DVD industry got my money, and presumably the money of many others. They should have been grateful to the one who did this.
When you "buy" copy-protected information you are not really buying it. You are just renting it until the time when its storage medium will become corrupt, which is certain to happen, sooner or later. (Or until your reader becomes defective and you can no longer buy a replacement, due to obsolescence.)
The copyright laws are stupidly named and frequently stupidly formulated. Making copies not only is not a crime, but it is a fundamental right of the owner of any kind of information, being the only way in which information can be preserved.
Only the distribution of copies to third parties may be criminalized. While most stupid copyright laws claim that even making copies by the owner is a crime, that is not only unjust but it also not enforceable against any careful owner, so the laws are doubly stupid.
DVDs/BRs/etc were always a scam imo, unless it your favorite movie that you will watch repeatedly forever. For most people buying DVDs was just expensive PPV.
As they say, piracy is a service issue.
Also, this is a false history, and more of an ex-post-facto justification.
The original DeCSS was a VisualBasic program written by some W1nd0z h8X0r teenager. Not for any greater cause, just because they could.
If any I can just see C++ code which is pretty much portable because you can decouple I/O with ease, altough under Unix you would need to use ioctl's to command the DVD drive in a low level way.
https://github.com/cthpw103/decss
But for just decoding a dumped ISO Perl would be more than enough, from parsing UDF headers to unscramble the media.
It would last hours instead of 15 minutes under my Athlon 2000 but if would work the same.
He released a tool for circumventing a protection measure. While already illegal to do in America, it wasn't made illegal in Norway until less than 2 years later.
> descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner
where
> a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
A sticker doesn't count as a "technological measure".
The disk key is small (40 bits) and I'm suspicious it's actually encoded as wobble frequency [0], like the PS1's copy protection scheme.
Because CD/DVD burners can't write wobble. Blank CDs/DVDs ship with a pre-made wobble in the pre-groove, which the burners use to determine the absolute position of the write laser.
Newer drives I bought will refuse reading what they won’t decide themselves (e.g. wrong region).
