I'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.
dlcarrier 1 days ago [-]
The DMCA includes a provision for the Library of Congress to grant exemptions, and they exempted DVDs, but if I remember correctly the exemption does not include Blu-Ray disks.
parineum 1 days ago [-]
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.
The exemptions seem to be for pretty specific cases. Have you got a link to the EFF case?
madmod 1 days ago [-]
What is the point of taking an actually interesting subject and injecting gpt botox into it making it 50x more words than it needs to be. I liked some details in the article and I'm not against AI prose in general but this blog post novel could've been an email. The part about server drives refusing to read dvds with css is crazy.
kyrra 1 days ago [-]
It'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.
jeroenhd 1 days ago [-]
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.
delecti 1 days ago [-]
The drive I got for ripping blu-ray discs cost me $80, 2 years ago. The current best seller on amazon is also $80 (both $79.99, to be precise, so the same price down to the cent). The same drive I bought is $116 on Best Buy right now. It can also write to discs (ostensibly, I didn't consider that when buying it, and don't have any reason to test it).
Meanwhile the cheapest external drive I can quickly find on Amazon is $35, just under half as much as I paid, or about a bit under a third for the same drive today. Either way it's far less than 10-20x.
jeroenhd 1 days ago [-]
For context: 21% VAT and Amazon resellers pretending 1 euro is worth 1 dollar in their pricing makes for the biggest price difference between what I found and what you bought.
From what I can tell, the affordable BD players cannot play all discs. They can read (and probably write) all data discs, but when I buy a disc, there's no guarantee I will be able to rip it and make it accessible over my LAN. That's the kind of drive I want, and that's what ends up getting scalped.
delecti 6 hours ago [-]
The one I bought can play and rip all discs, after a firmware update. It was the one currently for sale for $116.
It only takes a little bit of research, and there are plenty that are not being scalped (or probably more commonly, scooped up by people who intend to use them). I found some in EU pricing in just a minute of searching. The MakeMKV forums are full of suggestions for suitable drives.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
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.
jeroenhd 1 days ago [-]
There's a piece of merch that I want to buy that will take weeks to ship to where I live. I currently have nothing that's capable of playing optical disks, so I was looking into buying a drive that can help me out (I'd rather rip the thing and stuff it into my Jellyfin than deal with a dedicated machine hooked up to my TV).
I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
Big bummer. I bought a drive way back to make sure I could rip disks if I wanted to, but I haven't had the need yet.
chocochunks 1 days ago [-]
Blu-ray is more annoying. DVD has one key used forever. Blu-ray has constantly changing keys. The LibreDrive firmware still needs the new keys to decrypt the disc but the drive won't refuse (like the server drive in the article) to read the disc and the encryption key can't be revoked.
foresto 1 days ago [-]
What can the custom firmware do that the stock firmware cannot?
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
Rip UHD blu-rays.
foresto 22 hours ago [-]
That much is obvious.
Just in case you didn't mean to be snarky, I was asking what the custom firmware brings to the device that allows using it to rip blu-ray discs that could not be ripped using the stock firmware.
Telaneo 19 hours ago [-]
It's not that the custom firmware brings anything to the device. It just gets rid of the DRM.
Blu-ray is DRMed, so the stock firmware is capable of telling you 'no'. You don't always get direct access to the bits on the disc with the stock firmware (you can write your own discs that aren't protected, but store-bought ROM-discs are (always?) encrypted. The flashed firmware gives you direct access to the bits on the disc no matter what (region codes don't matter, the encryption doesn't matter, since your custom firmware will happily decode the disc and just hand you the files on it).
foresto 19 hours ago [-]
I see. I expect DRM-encumbered discs to contain encrypted data, but I think this is the first I've heard of an optical drive withholding the encrypted bits from an application.
(And region codes aren't what I think of today as DRM. They've never been much more than silly speed bumps, so I wouldn't expect them to be at the heart of what's going on here.)
Telaneo 19 hours ago [-]
I mean, you can get the encrypted bits on the disc, except the key, so those don't really help you anything. If you ask the drive for the key, it'll tell you 'what? no, fuck off'/'that address is invalid', while one with custom firmware will just hand you the key, as it's just normal data, and then you can use that to decrypt the rest of the disc and get what you were really here for.
foresto 18 hours ago [-]
> I mean, you can get the encrypted bits on the disc, except the key, so those don't really help you anything.
They do, because a key can be obtained externally, such as with a software library made for decrypting the discs.
In any case, thanks; I think I finally understand what's going on here. Based on what you've written, custom firmware is not actually required, but it makes things more convenient (especially for folks without much technical experience).
Telaneo 11 hours ago [-]
> Based on what you've written, custom firmware is not actually required
This is correct for normal blu-rays, but not the UHD ones, since they add another layer of encryption. There's some nonsense going on with VUKs and MakeMKV not being able to decrypt all UHD discs, since some are encrypted with keys that aren't easily available (though you can send in a dump of the disc to the devs and they'll often change that fact for that disc).
If you know of a software library that can decrypt any random UHD disc without external keys, then please, do tell, since the MakeMKV people apparently don't know about it.
What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake
adithyassekhar 1 days ago [-]
How are you planning on getting the dvd to show up in handbrake?
Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.
whycombinetor 1 days ago [-]
libdvdcss
jeroenhd 1 days ago [-]
Yes, as the article states, the $22 is for buying a USB DVD drive. I don't think many PCs come with optical media readers these days.
LocalH 1 days ago [-]
It's been mostly solved since DeCSS
rolph 1 days ago [-]
" -That meant I needed a separate consumer drive. So I bought one off of Amazon. Two day shipping, twenty two dollars, no-name brand, USB 3.0, plug and play,- "
1 days ago [-]
ralferoo 1 days ago [-]
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!
mplanchard 1 days ago [-]
$22 is an expensive sandwich, to be fair! Certainly not unheard of, but probably more expensive than your average sandwich even in a big city.
rolph 1 days ago [-]
if you have expensive, "high quality" organic sandwich ingredients, such as prosciuto, smoked salmon, small batch cheese, that goes down well with an all out starbucks.
a good bento box sounds better to me for the usual price points if your into a 50$ lunch.
isoprophlex 1 days ago [-]
It's mentally carcinogenic clanker slop. Don't think about it too hard
isatty 1 days ago [-]
I’m pretty sure I did it for much cheaper back in the day.
trumpdong 1 days ago [-]
What 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.
mingus88 1 days ago [-]
Everything in this article was actively being done 20 years ago. Nothing has changed on the tech side.
A lot more activity, actually, because DVDs were state of the art then and today a 480p rip looks terrible on modern TVs even with upscaling.
Ripping commercial DVDs in 2026 is weird, unless it’s some out of print media that can’t be streamed in 4k from countless sites.
The Mist DVD for example has a special B&W version I’ve been dying to find in a second hand store. The DVD extras are pretty much the only reason I would bother, personally.
witx 1 days ago [-]
Also 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
throwvava 1 days ago [-]
Is this GPT 5? In particular,
> The drive in your laptop does not do this. The cheap drive I had ordered off Amazon does not do this. A consumer drive’s firmware is, in the technical sense, dumb. It sees a disc, it reports the contents, it lets the OS handle whatever happens next. The server drive is the unusual one.
> This is worth pausing on.
The "short punchy sentences, new paragraph, 'This matters' type sentence" style is very reminiscent of GPT-5.x.
bethekidyouwant 1 days ago [-]
Nobody 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
isoprophlex 1 days ago [-]
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
triyambakam 1 days ago [-]
> The kind of thing every kid with a Dell tower in 2003 spent an entire weekend trying to figure out.
OK Claude.
lloydatkinson 1 days ago [-]
At this point I don't even read Medium, Substack, or any of the other slop monger sites.
akkartik 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 18:32:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Using DeCSS to rip your own dvd was never illegal.
The exemptions seem to be for pretty specific cases. Have you got a link to the EFF case?
Meanwhile the cheapest external drive I can quickly find on Amazon is $35, just under half as much as I paid, or about a bit under a third for the same drive today. Either way it's far less than 10-20x.
From what I can tell, the affordable BD players cannot play all discs. They can read (and probably write) all data discs, but when I buy a disc, there's no guarantee I will be able to rip it and make it accessible over my LAN. That's the kind of drive I want, and that's what ends up getting scalped.
It only takes a little bit of research, and there are plenty that are not being scalped (or probably more commonly, scooped up by people who intend to use them). I found some in EU pricing in just a minute of searching. The MakeMKV forums are full of suggestions for suitable drives.
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.
I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.
Just in case you didn't mean to be snarky, I was asking what the custom firmware brings to the device that allows using it to rip blu-ray discs that could not be ripped using the stock firmware.
Blu-ray is DRMed, so the stock firmware is capable of telling you 'no'. You don't always get direct access to the bits on the disc with the stock firmware (you can write your own discs that aren't protected, but store-bought ROM-discs are (always?) encrypted. The flashed firmware gives you direct access to the bits on the disc no matter what (region codes don't matter, the encryption doesn't matter, since your custom firmware will happily decode the disc and just hand you the files on it).
(And region codes aren't what I think of today as DRM. They've never been much more than silly speed bumps, so I wouldn't expect them to be at the heart of what's going on here.)
They do, because a key can be obtained externally, such as with a software library made for decrypting the discs.
In any case, thanks; I think I finally understand what's going on here. Based on what you've written, custom firmware is not actually required, but it makes things more convenient (especially for folks without much technical experience).
This is correct for normal blu-rays, but not the UHD ones, since they add another layer of encryption. There's some nonsense going on with VUKs and MakeMKV not being able to decrypt all UHD discs, since some are encrypted with keys that aren't easily available (though you can send in a dump of the disc to the devs and they'll often change that fact for that disc).
If you know of a software library that can decrypt any random UHD disc without external keys, then please, do tell, since the MakeMKV people apparently don't know about it.
Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.
a good bento box sounds better to me for the usual price points if your into a 50$ lunch.
A lot more activity, actually, because DVDs were state of the art then and today a 480p rip looks terrible on modern TVs even with upscaling.
Ripping commercial DVDs in 2026 is weird, unless it’s some out of print media that can’t be streamed in 4k from countless sites.
The Mist DVD for example has a special B&W version I’ve been dying to find in a second hand store. The DVD extras are pretty much the only reason I would bother, personally.
> The drive in your laptop does not do this. The cheap drive I had ordered off Amazon does not do this. A consumer drive’s firmware is, in the technical sense, dumb. It sees a disc, it reports the contents, it lets the OS handle whatever happens next. The server drive is the unusual one.
> This is worth pausing on.
The "short punchy sentences, new paragraph, 'This matters' type sentence" style is very reminiscent of GPT-5.x.
OK Claude.