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Good Disk Library Solutions?
First time submitter fikx writes "How do Slashdotters manage large collections of disks? I'm hoping for a way to manage a large collection of movies that would give me menu type access to the content, and the only consumer device left seems to be the Sony disk changer, which is discontinued. I would have thought that handling disks would have been a solved problem and on sale in many forms, but I guess not. Have Slashdotters found or built solutions? Or has this problem gone the way of the typewriter?"
... is to rip everything to a large hard disk and set up some sort of media center.
Rip discs. Use media center application.
which is totally what she said
Googling for cd rom jukebox first hit in shopping is a 100 disc cd/dvd jukebox with usb and dasychainable for ~150 bucks each. other than that ISO's and a fat NAS
of doing that and if say you have blu rays that like 25-50GB per disk.
I've watched 720p movies that were compressed down to 400-700 MB and were still an order of magnitude better than DVD quality.
How big is your budget?
http://www.kaleidescape.com/
http://www.kaleidescape.com/products/
Beautiful stuff. Flawless operation. Drains your bank account.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Handbrake takes care of DRM for DVDs. For Blu-Ray use MakeMKV to extract the disc from DRM, then Handbrake to bring the file size down to 5 to 10 GB depending on the quality you want.
I'm amazed anyone DOESN'T rip their discs. Who wants to be forced to wade through stupid menus and messages that you can't skip?
... sitting on the living room floor. The system is managed by an ugly bag of mostly water.
Surprising efficient and effective.
Low tech for high brows.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
of doing that and if say you have blu rays that like 25-50GB per disk.
That's a really good point. BD movies would fill a tb drive in 20-40 movies. That's bad, but not crippling. I doubt a carrousel BD changer for 20-40 disks would be much cheaper (and you can always expand a FS).
I still think backing physical content up on HDs and then long-term storing the physical copies wins.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
In March of 2011 I bought an HP desktop that has a media center remote. (It also has a TV tuner, BluRay, and HDMI.)
I installed XMBC, which supports the remote. It provides a great menu to navigate EVERYTHING, isos, avis, mkvs, mp3s, aacs, flacs, and some of those other whacky DVD rip formats.
The only problem is that my hard drive with about 500 gigs of DVD rips crashed! Just make sure to back up everything on a regular basis!
No, I will not work for your startup
At 50GB/disk, you can still get 40 movies on a single 2TB drive. Even with the hard disk shortage, this is an affordable solution. In reality, you can delete all the extras when you rip and get far more movies on the drive, or you can even re-encode. Though I use FreeBSD with ZFS to add disks in pairs for redundancy, a Windows Media box can also work well, as it has a way to add capacity... a co-worker of mine goes this route, though I think ZFS has him intrigued.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Leave it in disc format and get up and browse your movie collection on a bookshelf for 5 minutes before resuming your sedentary lifestyle sitting motionless for the next 2+ hours. Geez.
While the price of HDDs have gone up only recently, it's a temporary "action-of-god" hike which will dissipate shortly (January?). Besides that, HDDs are dirt cheap. It's unlikely that the OP is talking about blu-rays as people who want a disc database usually have multiple (usually ripped/leeched/home) movies on each disc.
It wasn't until the middle of second line that I noticed that the poster was suggesting optical disks.
People actually use optical storage for anything but backups?
http://dacal.com.tw/ with Windows disk database, stackable with USB through ports. ;-) if you take a unit without internal drive (which reduces capacity by 50 disks).
Robot arm optional by DIY
Encode to h.264 before copying to hard drive. SD movies range from 800 Mb to 2 Gb each. HD range from 2 to 5 Gb -- Lord of the Rings notwithstanding.
A pair of 2 Tb hard drives and XBMC ot the OpenELEC variant and problem solved with more than enough room for all your music, too.
The price of the drives is nothing compared to the replacement cost of all the movies.
Is there a good option (for mac preferably) that will rip a DVD after looking it up in some database (like CDDB) to get the names and indexing information correct. Ripping is easy enough, but I'm tired of choosing all the chapters for each episode when ripping season 3 of whatever. The last time I let RipIt have a go at a DVD I ended up with Battlestar Galactica disc 2 starting half way through the third episode.
paul reinheimer
The two are unrelated, actually. There a players which offer unconditional skipping and which use the disc directly.
Just put all your movies on a shelf in alphabetical order. If you have LOTS of them, then use a more orderly system. For the 5 seconds it takes to manually swap out a disc to watch a one or two hour movie, anything else is massive overkill.
Huh? ripit, in its basic mode of operation, creates a decrypted, clean copy of a dvd, without any bogus sectors etc. That's it. Why would it do what you claim is beyond me, perhaps it's a bug. I haven't used ripit's compress feature, so perhaps you're referring to that?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
http://mymovies.dk/ installed on a windows home server serving up entire collection to any windows media center client http://slysoft.com/ AnyDVD HD for aiding the ripping You can skip the windows home server and put it on any old machine, but if you are going to use windows at home, it is the best backup/restore/server solution
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f104/tsudhonimh/bookcases/bookcase_4unit.jpg
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I wanted a home theater PC with instant-access to all of my films. My solution was as follows:
(a) Rip all discs to hard drive,
(b) Index and link to files with software solution
In detail:
(a) I chose to go with MakeMKV for most of my ripping. It rips the mpeg2/4 video directly to an mkv file, without reencoding, and you can choose all the tracks you want to go with it. (I.e., some titles I rip multiple audio streams and subtitles, some I take just English 2.0). For me, I just ripped the main title from each film; if I want to see the special features later, I'll take the box down off the shelf and pop the disk in. (Special features don't really matter to me that much.) Each rip averages 3 to 6Gb. Now MKV, while a great file format, isn't compatible with some (especially older) consumer electronics. You can always re-encode, if you really need to make a particular title portable. And for my Blu Ray / HD-DVD titles, I re-encoded anyway. I found a 1080P 6Gb-target-size h.264 two-pass re-encode to be indistinguishable on my 52" TV from the original. In fact, it's probably quite a bit of overkill.
For storage, I have a couple of 3Tb drives in an external enclosure, with a duplicate unit for backup. (Got them for a song before the manic price gouging going on now started!.) So far, it's holding over 500 titles and several TV series, and plenty of room to grow. And I can always increase capacity.
(b) For keeping track of everything, I eventually went with Collectorz.com Movie Collector. I've tried many solutions, both free and payware, and Movie Collector was the one that fit my needs the best. (There is a lot of good software out there -- look around!) As I ripped my collection in my spare time, I simply scanned in the UPC on the back of each film using an old CueCat barcode scanner. The software then populates all of the data for the film. Once the film was ripped, I simply linked the title in Movie Collector to the video file on the hard drives. Now I can visually browse my entire collection and watch any title at the click of a mouse. And it's nice to be able to go, "Hey, how many Humphrey Bogart movies do I own?" and find out with a simple filter.
What worked for me might or might not fit your needs, but hopefully it gives you ideas.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
BluRay jukeboxes aren't exactly cheap either. Plus the software isn't very widespread. DVD jukeboxes had the exact same problems which is why it became more common to see people rip everything.
Furthermore, the DRM of your disks is still going to limit you with a physical jukebox solution. It's still there and getting in the way.
The only way around that really is to just get rid of the DRM to begin with.
People have put together hard drive based solutions specifically because they don't like DRM limitations and are cost conscious.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Gosh, disk cataloguing software brings back memories of software we used to keep track of floppies back in the early '90s. I can't find any examples specifically from the Amiga (I definitely had some PD utility to do just this though), but this Windows shareware from the late 90s is a suitably crummy example: http://equi4.com/catfish/
When it comes to CDs and DVDs, I now rip them and store the originals in the loft. They go in to iTunes and that make it easy to find them again. It stops the children wrecking the actual disks too. When we're low on space I either upgrade the disk or delete stuff they've lost interest in.
"Handbrake takes care of DRM for DVDs."
For *some* DVDs. It doesn't handle all of them because the producers of the DVDs keep updating their bogus DRM techniques and thus it is a constant arms race. And it is genuinely bogus, because that's what most of these techniques do: insert bogus sectors and other trickery that trips up a simple ripping program but not most DVD players (and the ones that don't work are collateral damage). Why the media producers bother to keep throwing money at a problem that people will just find a way around in order to use the product they have already bought is beyond my understanding. Do they really think they're stopping anything by spending all that money on DRM? And, no thank you, I don't want to disclose all sorts of unnecessary personal information in order to activate a digital copy that isn't ripped the way I want it anyway.
These days it's easier for a pirate to set up a movie library than a legitimate purchaser, and that situation *sucks*.
He's asking for more than just a decrypted copy of a DVD.
He wants the same thing that is commonplace and expected for a music CD: something that detects all the tracks and matches them up to content titles. Clearly he wants something that can sort out a pile of Buffy DVDs, correctly label season, episode and title names and possibly fetch extra metadata.
A simple ripper doesn't do that.
Besides Kaledescape, I am not aware of anything that does.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Like many commodity shortages this one is aggravated by hoarding. The hoarders will likely suffer as they usually do, by overpaying. Some few will make a killing by gouging late hoarders. Eventually things straighten out.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That only applies to copy protection and CSS isn't copy protection. Moreover it only applies to effective copy protection and CSS definitely isn't effective at controlling copies by any definition one might want to apply.
People have DVD collections and claim they like to watch their movies many times.
But if you do the math they'd have to spend a crazy percentage of their time watching movies over and over again to make it worthwhile.
And if they did that, they'd be missing out on the other million things they actually would rather be doing, but don't realize.
Don't be a hoarder... just rent a movie once in a while.
Rip it, store it on a network storage system that XBMC can access (there are many), and stream it to your display device. There are many thin-clients you can use as an XBMC box. I personally use an old Acer Aspire Revo (which have since been discontinued). Probably the cheapest device you can use as an XBMC box that's currently available and doesn't look hideous is the Apple TV 2. For $99 with a remote that works out-of-box, you can't really beat that (granted, it can only output up to 720p).
I struggled with this problem too and ended up building a homebrew raid using OpenSolaris and a large CoolerMaster case full of drives. The ZFS filesystem has been bullet proof on this box since 2005. I ripped all my DVDs to ISO format so that I could preserve the DVD menus on those discs. The box sits on my network and is shared via NFS and Samba.
To play back all those movies on my TV, I put my older Mac Mini on it and have it boot up into a default user and start VLC right away. I use VLC Remote on the ipad to access the library that is NFS mounted on the Mac Mini.
The overall experience has been great! Using the iPad, I can browse hundreds of ISO images, select one and it plays within a few seconds.
The iPad remote solution was the final peice to this puzzle as I was previously using a mouse and keyboard to navigate the movies.
Hard drive solutions are all well and good. But if you are using discrete disks (CD, DVD) for storage, then I highly recommend Discgear Selector products. While not automatic like a disk changer, finding and getting a disk out is as simple as sliding a knob and lifting the lid. I have several of the larger models.
And you can use the included software to maintain your library index, and print index labels for the containers.
I'm glad more 18th century Bostonians didn't think like you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Anything that Handbrake can't handle, AnyDVD will.
There are really very few DVDs that you will need to use AnyDVD for. There have been a few failed attempts at extra copy protection on DVDs. However, for the most part it's mainly Disney disks that will give you trouble.
The vast majority of DVDs won't give you trouble.
However, since you're going to need AnyDVD for BluRays anyways you've got that as a backup option.
+...yeah. It's easier to pirate than use modern video media to it's full potential.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Niether Blu Ray or DVD are compressed for storage, they are compressed to fill their respective discs. Please keep this in mind for all future conversations involving home media theaters and internet streaming.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Citation needed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Do it old-school.
Have bookshelves and sort by whatever works best for you, e.g. genre, title, etc.
OK, so you only get one sorting key, but at bookshelves/DVD-shelves won't be discontinued any time soon.
Oh, and you may want to rip anything you'll watch more than once in the next 12 months and put it on your favorite media player.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That law isn't kicking in until you give those files (or discs) to someone else.
However, I don't blame you for not wanting to be seen downloading the tools to do it.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
but I'm retiring it out (at my own pace) for a stack of hard disks which have far higher data density.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Anecdotal, but my brother does.
RAID can be done in software. So it doesn't have to be inherently expensive. You aren't trying to be Pixar. You're just (maybe) trying to make multiple disks look like one disk.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Apple's prohibited programs fulfilling some of those requirements from being sold in the AppStore. Off the AppStore, however, there are some solutions. You might look into iVI, though it seems targeted at the anime audience. http://www.southpolesoftware.com/iVI/iVI.php
I have it straight from the horse's mouth: **AA would rather you went to HMV and BOUGHT (read: LICENSED) another copy. They DO NOT LIKE people to be able to back up their own duplicates. That's in violation of their ideal license restrictions and hurtful for their bottom line. This is why we have Macrovision et. al.; why Macrovision go mental at people who sell region-free players exclusively, and why **AA spend SO DAMN MUCH money that isn't theirs, on advertising trying to convince people that copying media that they bought hence to any right-minded individual, own, is a more heinous offence than rape or possibly infanticide.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Just to fill in some detail, I have the collection alphabetized on shelves, and yup, I can walk over and get them easy enough. Just trying to declutter the movies (and possibly games, CD-ROM's, blue ray, whatever) like I did the audio CD's a while back. I ripped the audio CD's to disk easy enough, and was looking to do same with others but ripping movies I kept running into little issues. Nothing that would make it impossible, just was hoping that since discs were common for several generations of media, there was something out already to just drop the discs into. The Sony player looked promising, but it's depreciated by Sony and got lack luster reviews. Sometimes, even with unlimited HD storage, it's just nice to have the disc available for any media...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
A surprisingly little known case (MCE UPS systems inc. vs. General Electric) made it clear that the DMCA applies only if the underlying action is an infringement of copyright. If a 3 judge panel can rule that cracking a dongle is not a violation of the DMCA, then ripping your DVD collection certainly cannot be.
Rip with a clean conscience.
Because as much as I hate and disagree with it, breaking DRM is illegal in the US under the DMCA, and there are still some of us who grudgingly but respectfully honor the rule of law.
This is a classic example of stage 4 morality on Kohlberg's scale. Both stage 3 [social conformity] and stage 4 [obedience to authority] appear to be common in modern societies. Luckily, your Constitution was written by people operating (perhaps temporarily, and just for that purpose) at stage 5 [social contract], and who recognized that laws which are counter to the general welfare should be changed.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
VLC
BD movies would fill a tb drive in 20-40 movies. That's bad, but not crippling.
You can easily double that capacity by recoding both the video and audio streams at lower bitrates.
For my own Blu-ray archival, I convert all of the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD audio tracks to AAC 5.1-channel 640kbps or 2-channel 224kbps using eac3to. Next, I convert all of the H.262, H.264 and VC1 video tracks to H.264 using a constant quality value of "16" and the "slower" encoder preset using x264. Lastly, I convert the graphical PGS subtitles to text SRT using SupRip. For a two hour 1080p movie, I average around 11GB.
There are a few dark grainy movies where I had to use a higher CRF value of 14 or 15, but the resulting file is still smaller than the original M2TS file.
Maybe in six or seven years when 6TB and 8TB drives are the norm and I've upgrade my 42" 1080p plasma, I'll go back and grab the original streams. Until then, I'm fine watching the recodes.
Are you saying that you have never performed an unauthorized public performance of "Happy Birthday"? You always keep the car complately under the speed limit? Never do 58 in a 55? I have yet to meet one of these mythical people that even grudgingly honor the rule of law in real life. While you might be that rare exception, I highly doubt it.
What I do see every day are people who see the law as shades of gray, and see anything darker than the shade they chose to draw their line as being criminal, and anything lighter not counting. This includes me. I consider raping, murdering, and eating your neighbors to be criminal. I don't consider copying the DVD you purchased to a hard drive that you purchased so that you can watch a movie on the TV you purchased without jumping through hoops to be criminal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKYQ5ibxslI
with only two manufacturers of 3.5in form factor hard drives (seagate, wdc), don't expect prices to fall to pre-flood prices this year OR next (if ever)... much easier to conspire and collude with only two players than with 5+ this market once had...
Why the media producers bother to keep throwing money at a problem that people will just find a way around in order to use the product they have already bought is beyond my understanding. Do they really think they're stopping anything by spending all that money on DRM?
It's called greed. They're trying to get the vast majority of unsophisticates to buy the DVD, then a separate version from the iTunes store, then another copy when they get an iPad, then another when they want a copy of the DVD for their car entertainment system or vacation or something...
Is there a good option (for mac preferably) that will rip a DVD after looking it up in some database (like CDDB) to get the names and indexing information correct. Ripping is easy enough, but I'm tired of choosing all the chapters for each episode when ripping season 3 of whatever. The last time I let RipIt have a go at a DVD I ended up with Battlestar Galactica disc 2 starting half way through the third episode.
For the Mac, I use MetaX can write tags to ripped movie files, which gets data from tagchimp.com. But it's user-contributed data, so duplicates, errors and typos can creep in.
Too bad the people in positions of power are infested with stage 3 and 4 (most damagingly, stage 4). If there was suddenly a law passed making it illegal to consume yellow apples, a large portion of the population would roll over and throw out their yellow apples.
FC Closer
Give it to XBMC, then point it to thetvdb.com and imdb.com. Name the files correctly, "Farscape 1x2" for example, and let the magic of the media center software do the rest.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I found the "one size fits all" actually "fits none". So it depends on the format.
Everything: In Delicious Library. Useful for lending and knowing what you got.
Everything Ripped: In a "Ripped" section. Otherwise, it follows the same order than non-ripped.
Movies: Most are on my shelf, by approximate alphabetical order (At least the first letters are somehow OK). ... I meant: by approximative style, and by order of artist.
TV Series: By alphabetical order, in its separate section.
Music Videos: Ripped using Handbrake.
CDs: By approximative style, and by order of artist.
Vinyls: A freaking mess! Erm
Books: By collection, and in no particular order inside a collection.
Games: By console, by major collection and then by name.
Wine: In a 200-pages book, with etiquettes when the wine was drank, and commentaries. Otherwise, by Y-X position in the cellar.
Good luck!
Unjust laws with no repercussions don't bother me. Or rather, they bother me and so I don't obey them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm using dvdbackup. It uses libdvdread and creates a VIDEO_TS folder on the hard disk that looks just like the DVD filesystem. It will rip anything that VLC can play (because they use the same code for reading the disk) and the result contains everything from the original disk, including videos and so on. When you can fit over 100 DVDs on a 1TB hard disk, there doesn't seem much point in transcoding unless it's for playback on a mobile device.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://goo.gl/nYP9z http://goo.gl/lZhul http://goo.gl/SNHh2 Search Amazon or Google for "DVD JukeBox" or "DVD Autoloader" just watch out for Duplicator systems. Most, hint all, aren't library style systems. Most are expensive. Have fun!
with only two manufacturers of 3.5in form factor hard drives (seagate, wdc)
Samsung?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Apple's prohibited programs fulfilling some of those requirements from being sold in the AppStore.
Yes, it is well known, and well documented, and actually part of the developer agreement. Apple pans any software that tries to do what Apple's own software already does compentantly.
If you try to submit software that is superior to Apple's solutions, generally, Apple just buys you.
The Admin and the Engineer
I bought 3 2TB disks for about £150 a few months ago. In a RAID-Z configuration they give 4TB of usable space for backups. I could dump my entire DVD collection on it without recompression without making a significant dent in the space. BluRays are a bit different, but I don't own any of them yet, and I'm not really interested in buying them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The vast majority of DVDs won't give you trouble.
simpsons dvd's are notorious for doing strange things. you can get a copy, but 'things are broken' inside. the simpsons intro logo where it shows 'the simp' and then adds 'sons' to the right - that shows up 'wrong' on my anydvd copy. the 2nd part of 'sons' does not show up (or something like that; its been a long time since I watched that copy).
when I tried cloning some 3 stooges (nyuk!) and they had dual b/w and colorized versions, one came out but the other did not. i think they played some game like alternating sectors or something goofy like that. the copy never worked.
I have legal copies of anydvd and clonedvd (I support slysoft with my dollars). so the program was fine, but copies didn't always come out.
I think the latest snafu was copying some family guy dvd's and only the commentary audio track got copied. that was more annoying that no sound at all, to be honest. you really have to verify that things worked and you can't just assume they did because the program completed.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Your circular discs of media are offline backups. As soon as you think of them like that a multitude of other options opens up to you, many of them mentioned here.
Doing this will also make it easier to add more modern (non-physical) media to your collection since it is all managed in one place.
I don't bother to back up. That's what the spindle of disks in the closet it for.
I am a fan of DVDCatalyst (www.tools4movies.com). It will rip and convert DVD files to various formats; has batch renaming so you can use various databases to pull information; experimental Blu-Ray support; and is inexpensive. The developer responds fast to questions (sometimes I wonder if he sleeps). I've been a fan of it for many years.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I've used Handbrake in the past, and like their software. I tried using it recently on my new laptop, though, and was having trouble with playing the output. Probably I tweaked some setting wrong... whatever it was, VLC didn't like it. Instead of slogging through and trying to figure it out, I went looking for alternative software. I tried Freemake Video Converter, and it worked pretty well for my needs (i.e., giving me disc-free Wrath of Khan on-the-go).
I use boxes to manage my disk collection. But bags or shelves will work equally well.
First rip the contents to hard drives then put the disks in boxes.
Is "a slow day on Slashdot" oxymoronic?
Store those movies in these file folders with plastic pockets. Buy the kind that will let you also store the jewel case printed material.
Figure out how many hours a week you are planning to watch movies from your collection. Figure out how many years it is going to take to finish what you already have. Finally realize the only reason you have such a big collection is to brag about the size of the collection. So save some money on the techno solutions and buy more movies to enhance the bragging.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I consider raping, murdering, and eating your neighbors to be criminal.
So as long as I don't eat them, it's cool? Cool.
DVDCAT is cheap and works well and gets blueray down to a reasonable size. Also converts existing formats to mobile devices with nice presets for Android and iProducts.
"Keep at least 3-6 full bottles of hard alcohol on hand, a 2 week resignation notice,..." - Poetmatt
What I do see every day are people who see the law as shades of gray, and see anything darker than the shade they chose to draw their line as being criminal, and anything lighter not counting. This includes me.
You are mistaken. The law is not a shade of grey. It is generally black and white. Get caught doing this illegal act and pay this penalty. The speeder, when caught, will pay a fine or lose their license. They are aware of the law and know that they will be
forced to pay the penalty, if caught. However, they have decided that the expense of the penalty is worth the risk.
I like how you start off with a scofflaw attitude and then try to imply some sort of moral superiority by declaring murder as criminal. Going back to the cost versus risk I was talking about. Most people are will to pay the $200 fine for speeding, if caught. But, they aren't willing to risk permanent incarceration or execution for murder. If there were only a $200 fine for murder, you'd do it too.
The fact of the matter is that DRM circumvention, like speeding is illegal. But, most people still do it anyway because the risk of being caught is low, as is the penalty cost. The law is not a shade of grey and it is rarely a moral decision.
Yeah, I upgraded my FreeBSD 8.1 box to 9.0-RC2 so I could start playing with ZFS v28. Madly sacrificing chickens in triplicate, after a Gentoo-like recompile of 400 ports, freebsd-upgrade left me a somewhat hosed system where basic services (startx, portupgrade) won't run complaining that libz.so.5 is missing. I guess I'm looking at a fresh install.
As far as I got with ZFS, it totally rocked. In my test I set up a three drive mirror (which I think of as a plain mirror with a presilvered hot spare). Seeing 35MB/s copying over the LAN with rsync/ssh. A test involving recursive scp starting following symlinks recursively on a 20GB file set, which put the gears to deduplication. It ran great. I finally killed it at a duplication level of 7.8. Doubt dedup will do much for me in production on my little LAN.
My biggest worry is that you really need ECC to protect the long-duration content in the ARC cache, not to mention critical ZFS memory structures themselves. On the Intel side, for ECC you're looking at an X3400 chipset, or an expensive Xeon chip. Apparently there are somewhat cheaper solutions on the AMD side. For the ZIL cache, people recommend mirrored SLC.
For a while we enjoyed 60% annual drive capacity growth rate, but this is projected to fall to 20% annual growth as we head toward bit patterned media. I wouldn't assume vastly greater capacities in the near term.
Here is a nice paper, sans authorship date (which the author will regret when his time comes in the Beetlejuice afterlife lobby) :
End-to-end Data Integrity for File Systems: A ZFS Case Study
He cites a recent analysis of Google server farm metrics:
DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study
It's a little unclear how to translate this for a home-use ZFS box. Error rate is usage dependent and seems to depend on the quality of the mainboard memory access path.
A feature that might help ZFS outside of the enterprise is an ARC cache scrubber using the ZFS checksum data.
I'm still figuring this stuff out, but my impression so far is that ZFS makes the most sense where data preservation must coexist with high availability and there are fall-back measures in place on the preservation front.
"Name the files correctly"
That's exactly what he *doesn't* want to have to do. We don't have to do that with cds, and it's about time that a similar solution for dvds showed up.
with only two manufacturers of 3.5in form factor hard drives (seagate, wdc)
Samsung?
Actually, it's Hitachi. And Toshiba has (re?)entered the 3.5" space, at least on the enterprise side of the world - I have no idea if they make consumer 3.5" drives.
-Ster
Personally, I just want to know if he meant in that order. Perhaps if they weren't in that order?
He wasnt saying the law wasnt black and white. He said that peaople see the law in shades of grey and they do.
You cant update dvd drm without it causing it to fail on dvd players, and dvd players that worked 10 years ago still work with dvds that come out today. Thats called a standard.....
As far as you know, he does.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Trust me... I know.
RAID is not backup.
For that price you can buy two 6TB consumer NAS and use one as the backup of the other (rsync, if they have it). The 6TB will either be multiple sharable (DLNA, too) volumes or a Linux "LINEAR" MD, LVM or BTRFS span of the media.
Anything that's fun is illegal in some way so you have to be a complete sourpuss to obey every single law in existence. I doubt if it's even physically possible.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
with only two manufacturers of 3.5in form factor hard drives (seagate, wdc)
Samsung?
Hitachi?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
They are uncommon and not easily run across without extensive research.
I'd love it if region coding and disc lock-out features were ruled illegal for being anti-consumer (as they have been in some places).
Learn to love Alaska
Being "let off with a warning" is quite common for speeders. Police often completely ignore anyone going less than 20km/h over the speed limits on the 401 highway in Ontario. Plea deals and overlap on types of charges create the very grey areas that you deny exist.
Any one law, in complete isolation from reality, might be "black and white" but you don't live in complete isolation from reality... do you?
mplayer as well.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
There is no such service (as CDDB) to get DVD chapters. DVD "chapters" don't really exist outside the menu-software of the DVD (a random software or hardware DVD player will never enumerate chapter names), Handbrake can handle CSV's if you really want to name them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Interpretation and enforcement of laws is typically a shade of grey though. There is not a single law that says do x and pay y, there's always exceptions, loopholes and if you have enough money to afford lawyers, judges and lawmakers you're typically going to be on the white side of the law, if you don't have enough money you're typically on the black side.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Also, software raid is plenty fast, and typically more robust than consumer-grade "hardware" solutions.
Very happy with MD raid-5.
"Rule of law" usually implies that laws were written by some other criteria than "he who has the gold makes the rules" (since otherwise they just become rule by the strongest, or dictatorship). Since copyright laws were written based on what Disney wanted with no regards to anything else, obeying or not obeying them has nothing to do with the rule of law.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
does AnyDVD-HD have a linux port yet? around 2 years ago I looked and it seemed to be windows only.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
I import my DVD's into Mythbuntu, then, I don't need to touch them again. They are gathering dust, I just watch them from the recording.....
Does anyone know if there's a way to keep directory structure and metadata from data disks saved to a local computer so you can search them or browse them in a regular file browser without physically going through discs?
In Windows or Linux.
That only applies to copy protection and CSS isn't copy protection.Moreover it only applies to effective copy protection
It most certainly is copy protection. And why would you think the DMCA only applies to "effective" protection? I know of no such distinction in the law. You'd be surprised how many times the DMCA has been invoked during lawsuits: printer cartridges, garage-door remotes ... even data streams that were not by any stretch of the imagination "encrypted" have still fallen under the DMCA.
Regardless, you could take your data, XOR each byte with 0xFF, call it copy protection, and anyone that tries to recover your data by flipping the bits back is in violation of the relevant DMCA provisions. Period.
and CSS definitely isn't effective at controlling copies by any definition one might want to apply.
Sure it is. It's extremely effective. The reality is the bulk of people who buy DVDs will never bother to make a copy, and for those that do, CSS stops them in their tracks. Sure, it's not effective at controlling decrypted copies disseminated via the Internet, but that was never the purpose of CSS. It's intent was to raise the bar sufficiently that only the most knowledgeable individuals would be able to make physical copies, to make it too inconvenient for Joe Average. And you know what? That's still true today.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That law isn't kicking in until you give those files (or discs) to someone else.
However, I don't blame you for not wanting to be seen downloading the tools to do it.
You have the legal right to make copies for personal use, but the media companies got around that by making the requisite software illegal. Your basic Catch 22.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Kohlberg's scale has it's uses as an academic model but it's far too naive to apply in the real world.
Take the Heinz dilemma from the wiki. It is implied that stage six (universal human ethics) should be the only consideration despite there being 6 valid points made. Saving a life seems a clear win only in such a sharply defined, stark and simple example.
Conformity is implied to be little more than obedience to perceived expectations, while respecting law-and-order is obedience to a rule book. Obedient people who cannot or will not make a true ethical decision. Putting aside this ignorance for the true value of society and law, both of these are things which have evolved between a lot of people and a lot of time to be protector of rights and a shortcut for morality.
People can seek "universal human ethics", accept that it is impractical for them to make a fair judgement and default back to social expectations/law. People can accept they are ignorant of the full facts and implications, or that their stance on rights and ethics in the situation is too heavily influenced by their personal bias.
A justification based on rights or ethics does not make it a valid or true justification. Usually when politicians and people of power start gesturing excitedly and talking of rights and fundamental values I get concerned about what shit they're trying to pull now. These are the justifications and rationalisations given for decisions that were really made in self interest.
People can also accept that the ethics/rights issues at stake are truly pedantic and accept the law issues as more important. On more important issues, people can take a stand for rights and ethics yet still observe a law that runs to the contrary. Where is the category which said Heinz found a flaw in law and society therefore should seek to address it?
I notice comments promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony, and just how conformist Slashdot is?
Screw IMDb. They don't want us there. They make an effort to keep us out of there. TheTVDb and TheMovieDb have much better artwork anyway.
VLC and Mplayer are uncommon?
You think so? I'd be surprised if more than a token percentage of legislators in the country had progressed beyond stage 2...
Sounds like a Lego Mindstorms project... Start building!
It depends upon the enclosure if it's external. I have two 12TB enclosures with Firewire 800 running RAID 5 with parity so each "drive" (enclosure) holds about 9TB. Prior to buying I called the company's tech support folks and confirmed that should a drive go down I would need another drive of the same manufacturer and model *and* the same firmware version (and the same capacity, obviously) if I wanted to reconstruct the array myself should a drive fail. In short, buy an extra drive at the time I purchased the enclosure and specify that the extra drive *has* to be matched to those in the enclosure. The support person said that should the drive fail within the warranty period I would have to copy the data off the enclosure and send it to them. He told me they would have to replace all 4 of the 3TB drives and that they would charge extra if I wanted *them* to copy data from the drives onto the new drives. I can not speak to all RAID enclosures, but in my case the drives have to be the same right down to the same firmware version.
Interpretation and enforcement of laws is typically a shade of grey though. There is not a single law that says do x and pay y, there's always exceptions, loopholes and if you have enough money to afford lawyers, judges and lawmakers you're typically going to be on the white side of the law, if you don't have enough money you're typically on the black side.
More to the point, we have judges in the loop, because not everyone should receive the exact same punishment under the law. For example, I got nailed for making a left turn in front of a school bus at an intersection. I stopped and waited for the bus to go, since it pulled up first. The bus driver waved me on, so I made my turn.
Five blocks later, I get pulled over for passing a school bus with its sign out (I mean, wtf?) by a fat cop with coke-bottle glasses. I doubt he could have seen ten feet in front of his nose, much less five blocks away. Regardless, a couple of weeks later I show up in court. The judge told me that according to a new statute, this particular offense carried a mandatory six-month suspension of my driver's license. My jaw dropped, and I remember saying "Six months, Your Honor." She said if I were to be convicted of the charge, there was nothing she could do, but recommended that I come back in a month with an attorney.
So I came back in a month, with my lawyer, and ended up in front of the same judge. She asked me how long it had been since my last moving violation. It had been about seven years, and I told her that. So she has the prosecutor poring over a huge tome, looking for some way to reduce the charge. Turns out that the law did allow the judge some discretion: the ticket was plead down to "making an illegal left turn." So that's what I was convicted of: a relatively minor violation. The judge wanted to throw the case out (I think she knew that cop pretty well) but the law didn't allow her to do that, apparently. Yeah, it cost me a $100 plus $250 for my attorney, but at least I walked out of there able to drive my car. She also gave me court supervision, so it didn't end up on my driving record.
Yes, traffic tickets are a money-making system for the State, but that's not the point. That judge was able to perceive some shades of grey, and while justice was hardly served (I had actually done nothing wrong) the punishment ended up not being ridiculously out of line with the crime. I commute sixty miles a day: not being able to drive for half a year would likely have cost me my job.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Anything that's fun is illegal in some way so you have to be a complete sourpuss to obey every single law in existence. I doubt if it's even physically possible.
It's worse than that, really. An innocent man is hard to control: make him a criminal, especially if he isn't even aware that he is, and you have him by the short and curly any time you want him.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Also, software raid is plenty fast, and typically more robust than consumer-grade "hardware" solutions. Very happy with MD raid-5.
Yes, my Debian servers run software RAID. For what I do at home it's more than adequate, and it is damn fast.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Not to be TOO pedantic, but Handbrake uses the libraries in VLC or DVDCSS to decode DVDs. Not a big deal, since they're both Open Source and (fairly) easy to find.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
You are mistaken. The law IS a shade of grey. Circumvention of DRM for personal use was made illegal in writ by the Legislative branch with the DMCA, but will not be illegal in fact until it passes muster with the Judicial branch in court. An end user is going to actually have to be brought up on charges, criminal or civil, and lose, before the law has any merit.
Companies and programmers have been brought up on charges for distributing tools to circumvent DRM, users have been brought up on charges for subsequent distribution of previously DRMd content, but in its 13 years of existence, not one individual has gotten so much as a threat for breaching it for personal use. Until that happens, and is upheld in court, the law is just as likely some text on paper in violation of your Constitutional right to personal property.
It's less about updating the DRM technique (since CSS is statically defined) and more about making a non-compliant or broken DVD in such a manner that most DVD players don't notice or care, but stricter PC ROMs choke on trying to recover what it thinks are damaged sections of disc.
Imagine the same scenario but you couldn't afford the lawyer or time off work to go to court.
That's exactly what I meant with "if you're rich enough to afford a lawyer, judge or lawmaker" you'll be on the good side, the rest (of us - depending on the severity) is going to be on the bad side.
It seems if you have money for someone to pour over enough tomes of law you will win or get a massively reduced sentence. These tomes are huge, some large lawyers offices have a small library (the size of a community library in some small towns) with only law text and interpretations on it.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
breaking DRM is illegal in the US under the DMCA
Actually, in the case as described, it is not illegal.
1201(c)(1):
Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
Fair use covers copies for personal use, including media and time shifting.
The closest they have come to making circumvention for fair use purposes illegal is making distributing tools intended for non-fair-use purposes illegal. See DVD X Copy. Neither possession of the tools nor using them for legal purposes have not been found to be infringing, and the DMCA is actually pretty clear that neither case is covered.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
You didn't specify how large your collection is. If it's just a few hundred discs, then I personally agree with whoever it was way up there that just recommended one of those big honking disc binders. One or two 320-disc binders, while weightier than you might imagine, are nice and easy to keep in alphabetical order, if you've got a fairly static collection.
Once the numbers get much above that, though, yeah, I'm not sure, either. Six of those binders can break through a cheap ikea-type shelf (true story), and anyone who pipes up "rip them" can go suck on a tesla coil... I'm still trying to find a solution myself, maybe something like a DIY Redbox Kiosk, though I don't know how much those actually hold...
you'll just need to resort to priatebay to get good copies then.... the universal law of supply and demand.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
No they aren't. They are compressed to meet a certain quality point. Most Bluray disks don't even top 40GB, and the feature content is generally only 20-30GB. Disks are (were) cheap, and asymmetric compression is expensive and lossy. Better to just store the original data, and only bother transcoding if you need to meet the requirements of some specific device.
Still Windows only, but it will work in a virtual machine on a Linux host.
Why exactly?
What would your life have been like otherwise? Would the US now be more like eg Australia instead?
Frankly these days I'm struggling to see how that exactly would be a tragedy for your rights and freedoms.
Cool. I'm still on FreeBSD 8, just because I'm redoing rooms in the house and don't have time to experiment :)
Like most home users crazy enough to run their own basement server, I use it for several jobs. It's a time machine target, it's a music server, it's a pictures repository, it's a CrashPlan target (thanks to Linux emulation), it's a web server, and probably things I'm forgetting. For me, the main appeal of ZFS is the data integrity. A few years ago, my backup scheme involved Unison, and it caught a bunch of corrupted pictures on my main drive trying to overwrite the good backups. So I learned - almost the hard way - never to blindly backup, to always do some kind of checksum. ZFS is even better, checking the data integrity all the time. I also happen to love the ease with which I can swap in larger drives, but that's secondary since I've always managed using other methods. Snapshots have proven to be just awesome debugging tools - but again, this is not really anything new (shadow copy, time machine, etc). I also like that I can move the drives all over to another machine and import. Actually tried this between an old Mac and FreeBSD and it works as advertised.
To deal with the ECC issue, I bought a used HP workstation from eBay. Then I stuffed a 5-disk cage in it and it hasn't had a hiccup yet. Of course, right after I did this, a coworker pointed me to an AMD-based server with bulit-in 5-disk cage on Newegg for the same price, but my timing is always awful. The OS runs off a USB stick, and every once in a while I clone the USB stick.
This is my first experience with FreeBSD, and I must say it is a very nice OS to work with. Haven't tried freebsd-upgrade yet, though :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How many DVDs can you watch?
7 a week? Really? Haven't you got a life?
I suggest a normal person with varied interests and in employment won't watch more than 2 DVD's per week on average (and with TV, movies, music, gaming, Internet and other exotic activities like going to concerts, doing sports, or reading a book requiring our time, I reckon the number may be smaller. Have you got kids? You watch more than 2 DVDs a week, but I guess you are tired by now of watching Toy Story yet again).
So lets say you will watch 100 DVDs this year. All of them only once. And most of them, perhaps all, will never be seen again ever, because you have other 100 to watch next year.
At this time of the year if you have a DVD "collection" what I suggest you should be doing is to get rid of half of it in order to make space for next year 100 DVDs.
The situation does not change much if these DVDs are in your computer (or server farm, whatever).. YOu won't watch most of it ever anymore.
So my solution is keep a collection of 100 and be scrupulous about this: a new disk gets in one gets out. It is that simple. Eventually you build a real collection of movies that you may watch sometime again. Keep the collection in a shelf, alphabetically, and forget the bloody computer and ripping: you have better things to do with your life (I hope).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
VLC isn't a "DVD player" (in the sense that 99.99% of the public would take that phrase if you said "I'm going to get a "DVD player."
Not to mention that on Windows and such, it will still be region locked by the OS, so even if we accept you as right, you are still wrong. Yes, they are common, but they do not have the necessary features of being able to play DVDs (as they have no lasers in the VLC program) and the decoding is still limited by OS limitations, which in most cases is Windows. You might as well have answered "crows are common." It's a true statement, but unrelated to the discussion at had.
Learn to love Alaska
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
Vocabulary tip: "Accept" means to receive and is commonly used to mean agrees with, "Except" means to exclude from a set. These are not interchangeable terms.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Typically, there is a single bit of content per title on a DVD.
One title might be the main feature or all of the episodes looped together. The rest may be different things including special features or individual episodes.
Once you have a list of the titles, it's pretty easy to guess what is what and automatically pull the appropriate bits off.
You still have to sort out that "track 3 is episode 7 of season 6" and whatnot. THAT is the part where a CDDB equivalent is needed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And, when your local debian mirror apt-mirror machine stops booting and just flashes the power button LED, you can take your array drives out, put them in a new machine, do a quick OS and apache reinstall, copy backups of configs in, and be up and running again in about 30 minutes...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Except that the discussion was clearly about DVD playing software. Otherwise the qualifier "which use the disc directly" would be unnecessary. Plus, it's in the context of access to the contents of the DVD from computer software. (That is, after all, what TFQ and essentially every substantive comment is about.)
VLC isn't actually limited by the operating system's region restrictions. It will ignore DVD regions as well on Windows as it does on Linux. It can, however, be limited by the DVD reader firmware.
If the disc isn't defective, AnyDVD will handle it.
I have ripped a lot of stuff. If the disc is a problem, then it's likely defective rather than being encoded with some special extra attempt at copy protection. Movies are far more likely to have extra special copy protection on them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
..says the person afraid to tie an identity to a post.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Indeed - DVD quality is limited by its reliance on MPEG-2 video codecs. I haven't done any testing, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could compress Blu-Ray movies down to 5 GB or less with no noticeable loss in quality, considering (1) the higher efficiency of modern MPEG-4 codecs, and (2) the high quality of the source material (your 50 gig Blu-Ray).
Now, you'd still want to keep the plastic circle around, just as a backup. You could have your 5 GB encodes on some type of media server, and just play them off that. You'll be able to get 400 movies on a 2 TB disk.
Ripping and transcoding the movies will take a while if you have a large collection, though. Personally, I don't watch enough movies for the 60 seconds it takes to load a disc to bother me... but if you absolutely must have all your movies "on demand", there's really no other option besides putting them on a media server.
"Hey guys, is there anyway to automate boring task?"
"Sure! Just manually perform boring task first and this program will perform irrelevant task for you automatically!"
Thanks. Really.
Similar distinctions are made in the qualification of terms in the Computer Misuse Act here in the UK. A password does not have to be strong to be covered under Statute as a device intended to protect a data stream, to encrypt a data stream, or do anything else to make it *legally* secure (even if it isn't that well physically secured). The fact that such measures are in place is enough to define intent (to let others know that that data will be aggressively protected not by technological measures but by legal measures).
That said, weak passwords and the state and speed of data networks these days are mutually attractive; once the cat's out of the bag, you ain't getting it back in no matter who you prosecute.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
Women.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Heck, better than that, if it's hardware that failed? Just stick it in a similar box(i.e. same arch) and it'll usually just boot right up!
With software issues, I've had great luck just installing mdadm and being able to auto-detect/assemble my raids, without needing any config file.
Even better yet, if the stakes are higher, you are more likely to get a lawyer, and if you are rich, you are more likely to be in the position to commit some high stakes crime. Witness people who find it profitable to lie (with plausible deniability) on their taxes, let the IRS sue them, then hire a lawyer and get their tax bill reduced below what it would have been in the first place. For them it makes more sense to do it this way, because they save more money than the lawyer cost.
As such, we see low level crimes sentenced heavily, while people who steal millions, if they ever even see justice, can expect to at least stave it off for years.
Some system.
Someone had to do it.
I got some good links and lots of suggestions. Thanks for the input!
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Indeed - DVD quality is limited by its reliance on MPEG-2 video codecs. I haven't done any testing, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could compress Blu-Ray movies down to 5 GB or less with no noticeable loss in quality,
And you would be wrong. DVD is limited by its resolution, not by its codec. At some point, enough bitrate makes older codecs as good (in terms of quality) as the new ones. The DVD specs allows that much bitrate.
Blu-Ray movies can be easily encoded down to ~8-10 GB. Further down you'll start to see artifacts, banding and other stuff noticeable if you know where to look.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
... promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony ...
I don't find it ironic. It's just a visible example of how far modern law has deviated from the principles of the Constitution.
I think the point is that older codecs *need* the extra space to contain the data. DVD's quality to bitrate ratio is limited by the codec used. Taking that meaning, DVD can be easily be compressed to around 1GB and lose little to no quality, using an MPEG4-based codec.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
this solution. Though a bit pricey these days.
Balderdash!
I've not had a lot of sleep, but I don't see where he's used "accept" incorrectly.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I don't consider copying the DVD you purchased to a hard drive that you purchased so that you can watch a movie on the TV you purchased without jumping through hoops to be criminal.
Well you can argue all you want as to whether or not it should be criminal, but the law itself seems pretty clear to me.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It's all very well ripping to Hdd and so forth, but it doesn't meaningfully equate to the reasons for having an achingly hip shelf of subtitled Dvds in the first place. Same with the Kindle, really, and all those pretentious books the careless might replace - if they want to become celibate, that is: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/e%11readers-'a-threat-to-impressive%11looking-bookshelves'-201105163819/
Then the problem isn't just pulling information, it's matching some signature of the disc to that information and building that database of disc signatures.
Not true - you can still make a reasonable copy via component inputs if you so choose. There is no DRM on those, and the equipment is readily available.
So then the real issue becomes, if I can effectively do A but not B, when the net effect is the same, is B really illegal? (I know that the DMCA says it is, this is more a philosophical question) For instance, if I fill a water barrel from my tap versus capturing rain water it would seem insane
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You don't need AnyDVD.
MakeMKV works just fine.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Agreed. Last night I tried to watch a Blu-Ray I had ripped to a plain image (I do usually use MakeMKV, but this was the 'Life' documentary series with various features that don't quite get captured right in MKV). First, PowerDVD insisted I needed to update it, which took a while. Then it told me a variety of error messages before crashing. In the end Blu-Ray is just such a pain to use on a PC that I can imagine why no one wants a disc loader type system.
Rip everything to MKV - it is way easier.
You don't want RAID, except to increase volume size or create a hot redundant system. What you really want is offline backups, in case you do something like "rm -rf *" or something similar in the wrong directory, like the root of your media library....
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The Blu-Ray one is on Amazon for ~$610.
They're listed as discontinued in the US store but I don't know if that's because there's something wrong with them now or if they just stopped being profitable. It might be worth looking into though if the "ripping to a server/media center system" doesn't appeal to you.
There is an even easier solution: The Pirate Bay. Buy the disc, download the torrent, no need to worry about DRM. Also works with games, magazines, music, books etc.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As someone who has like 500 DVDs I understand the idea of ripping all of it is not something you want to look forward too but rip it all. It'll make it much easier to use your media anywhere and ensure you get to keep it and use it longer.
Fourth paragraph, seventh word, is what GP is (incorrectly) referring to. It caused me to double-take as I was reading it because "except" would fit that structure; however, my brain then decided that it was correct as written, and I would have forgotten it had I not seen your response. So I read the hidden intermediate post and saw that foniksonik (573572) is lacking in reading comprehension skills, and seems to be overly blessed with the condescension skill.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Having tried to "fix" the Windows systems of many people who wouldn't know their ass from a USB port, I can assure you this is not the case.
Is there a way to avoid ripping BRs and just play videos directly from them like older disc formats? I noticed VLC, Windows Media Players, and other free media players don't play them natively directly? Hence, why I still haven't bought a BR drive.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
>*receipts only demonstrate that you've paid for the discs, they don't demonstrate that you still own them* //
Isn't the burden of proof on the copyright holder to demonstrate that you didn't purchase them and so unlawfully copied? In copyright cases I think (in the UK) it's on the basis of "balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond all reasonable doubt" but still. It would be interesting to see how the defence "I purchased the discs, downloaded a digital copy to save time ripping them and then disposed of the discs" would fare? You purchased the license to view the work, created a local digital copy (soon to be legal in the UK too!) ... why should this be deserving of punishment and in what way is it [will it be] tortuous infringement?
For example you could have disposed of the discs. Aren't the media companies the ones telling us that it's not the article we're purchasing but a license to use the content of the article, the data (music, game, movie, etc.)?
Believe me, I've had to do my share of family and friend fixes, not to mention taking care of a small county courthouse. Malware and viruses are one thing you don't need to go out and find, and they seem to be drawn to the potato like a moth to a flame.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Called a shelf system, check out Ikea. Perhaps you have to address the problem of why you need to buy every movie you watch opposed to figuring out how to manage it. Realize how much money you are wasting buying a movie that you will most likely watch once. In fact unless you watch a movie say more then 4 times, you will never recover the cost vs renting. Also Netflix and iTunes and other services offer acceptable quality for a large majority of movies. I save the big blockbusters for my Blu-ray 7.1 surround viewing experience, but there are a ton of movie releases every year that really don't benefit at all from that kind of set-up, so I just stream them. You can be a movie buff but not obsess about owning every movie you watch, address that issue first and you will find you don't need to invest thousands in disk management systems, or the disks themselves.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Like providing a downloadable version of their entire database? The bastards!
Hi, i have over 9000 rolls of papyrus and i want something to sort them all without me having yto read it. And Sony papybox is not made anymore.
man, just rip it and file under a decent dir structure.
We don't have to do that with cds, and it's about time that a similar solution for dvds showed up.
Well, I usually have to manually name CD tracks, but that's because most of my CDs were originally records and tapes. Occasionally I'll be surprised and FreeDB will find a CD I've sampled from tape, but not often, and never with LPs.
Free Martian Whores!
Yes. While that 800MB of compressed flat file text database (about 3.5GB uncompressed) might be nice for non-profit research purposes, it's simply not practical for use with any sort of end user application. Besides which, it only offers text, no graphics, so its really of little use to gussy up applications like XBMC. Chances are if XBMC did make the IMDb database their primary source of information, resulting in hundreds of thousands of users all needlessly pulling new copies each week to ensure they had the most recent data, IMDb would shut down that very quickly.
They decide not to cater to our needs, so we take our load elsewhere. It's that simple. So yes, screw pulling data from IMDb.
I just pile the Frisbees in a closet.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I notice comments promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony, and just how conformist Slashdot is?
It's neither ironic nor conformist. The constitutionalist will ask "is this law legal?" I see no point in accepting a law that's clearly illegal, and I see nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress the power to pass a DMCA. And any comment saying "you should OBEY YOUR MASTER" is clearly flamebait, especially if they say something like "only assholes smoke pot or download movies."
Free Martian Whores!
Anything that's fun is illegal in some way
That's an incredibly naive statement. How is playing catch with your kids in any way illegal? How is my having a beer illegal (yes, it was in my grandfather's time). How is your having sex with your congressman's wife illegal (unless you pay her for it)?
Free Martian Whores!
Then the problem isn't just pulling information, it's matching some signature of the disc to that information and building that database of disc signatures.
Right, which is what CDDB, FreeDB, et. al. do. There must be some reason this has never happened for DVD's. One factor may be that CDDB existed before DMCA.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There is always the Ziotek Media Carousel that stores 150 discs per device and it includes software: http://www.cyberguys.com/product-details/?productid=10670
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
RAID isn't a backup, but the original optical discs are...
Umm, wait, wasn't he asking for software to do all of that automatically, not manual file-naming?!?! That sounds like a lot of drudgery.
RAID certainly is backup if your original media is a bunch of optical disks. And it's probably the best way to get a large amount of storage with some reasonable level of reliability. Doing LVM with striping and mirroring would also work, but performance is nowhere near RAID10 (or even RAID5) on Linux. And I only say "on Linux" because I've not tried a comparison on other platforms which have the option to compare.
>> These days it's easier for a pirate to set up a movie library than a legitimate purchaser, and that situation *sucks*.
>>
>
>Wouldn't a software pirate have said the same exact thing, even 20 years ago?
A software pirate would have been right then too.
Some of us did that very thing: downloading pirated copies of games we already owned to avoid the intrusive copy protection.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I speed in my car. I am breaking the law. I have gotten 2 speeding tickets in my life. I deserved those tickets because I was breaking the law.
How does that not make me incapable of being a person who "honor[s] the rule of law in real life"?
I am honoring it -- knowing that by breaking it, I may get a ticket and be punished for the breaking of it.
Your mistake is thinking that law is rational or logical.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
[citation needed]
I'm serious. If the citation is the Sony vs Universal case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.), then I'm not sure that that covers this issue. IANAL, but that lawsuit specifically covered time-shifting, as you say, but specifically did NOT cover what they called "librarying" (meaning to record for keeps and not time-shifting for one-time watching). It seems to me (again, IANAL) that copying, onto another hard drive, is effectively the same as librarying.
Maybe there have been other cases that covered this in terms of "back ups", though again, that would also require you to delete your back up if you sold/gave away the original disc, and you'd have an illegal copy if you used the version off your server AND someone used the disc at the same time.
MakeMKV doesn't leave you with a decrypted copy of the original.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Depends upon what you want. I just want the movie. MakeMKV does that perfectly.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
As far as you know, he does.
Furthermore, as far as _0xd0ad's brother knows, he does. I'm curious how self-proclaimed (or brother-proclaimed) "law-abiding" citizens comply with America's secret laws.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
+...yeah. It's easier to pirate than use modern video media to it's full potential.
Well, as long as you're unwilling to pay for AnyDVD, it's easier to pirate. Once you've covered that hurdle, however (and I did, because I got tired of navigating the mess of tools required to rip my wife's collection of >150 DVDs), it's incredibly easy to use AnyDVD to rip to the HDD, and Handbrake to encode. That way, I get full control over what gets ripped and how well it's encoded (I have Handbrake set up for a very high quality encode, because time is not a premium). It was worth it for me.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
[citation needed]
Pardon if this sounds glib, but, umm, you only need a citation for the right to personal use copies if you haven't been tracking copyright for the past decade. I don't recall, offhand, specific cases where it has been addressed, but it has been tested repeatedly. I wouldn't be surprised if the one I mentioned, DVD X Copy, touched on it.
It is a little painful for me to read this thread. We've been talking about this stuff on Slashdot since the late 90's. Yet in this thread I see several early fallacious arguments of the RIAA lawyers creeping into the common wisdom, despite having been discarded at court years ago. Is this what is going to happen to our judges? Will the MAFIAA poison the minds of future generations and lead us to losing what little protection we still have from the execution of these fiat monopolies? Will future judges, steeped in monopolist propaganda, simply assume these protections never existed?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
[citation needed]
As an aside, it just occurred to me how rude you are being. I offered some information which is based on years tracking copyright. I pointed out that fair use covers copies for personal use. That has been tested extensively, and is the reason you can still buy an iPod, and the reason that iTunes has not been wiped from the face of the Earth. Your response was not, "Thank you for the information, I am interested to learn more, do you have specific details on where this has been covered in code or at court?" Instead, your response was, "Give me a citation, you're wrong, and here's a red herring that pretends to prove it!"
Seriously, think about it: I offered some info to the general public -- info which, on further reflection, is observably true because making copies for personal use is pervasive and has not lead to a single successful infringement case -- and you, rather than showing some mental adventurousness and probing the answer space, simply demand that I give you more, like Henry VIII waving a drumstick in the air. That is not very nice, not to mention intellectually lazy.
that would also require you to delete your back up if you sold/gave away the original disc
Most definitely. You lose the rights to the work that you purchased (or otherwise acquired) if you transfer those rights to another party...
hmmm ... I think I get it. You're new to this, aren't you? OK, let me try to be more convivial: If you are nicer when asking for details on subjects that you are learning about, it will be more likely to yield a positive response.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
By the way, here's the cheap ECC/4-drive bay box that I was talking about. For my setup, I would need to buy an external SATA dock to do my drive shuffle, but it's still an awesome looking box.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
must need pass through access to the blue-ray drive, or do you just rip an ISO and feed it to anydvd?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Then why can i buy DVD ripping software from staples for 29.99?
Probably because they haven't been sued yet. A number of software companies have been put out of business because of the copy-protection provision of the DMCA. Possibly an exception was allowed for that purpose, I don't know. But I doubt it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.