@Gargron HDCP was why I never bothered getting a BluRay drive originally

@Gargron copy protection really be a bitch

I bought the Louis de Funès collection from France because it advertised having English subtitles, and those movies are very difficult to find online and I was worried someday they might disappear completely; but that was a lie too, only one of the 9 movies has English subtitles.

@Gargron DRM: The gift that keeps giving.

@Gargron

Oh, wow, I'm glad I never bothered.

@Gargron There's moments when you can reeeeally tell that VLC is 23 years old, others not so much.

@Gargron Blu-ray is "a bag of hurt"
- Steve Jobs

@Gargron I'm using daum potplayer as my default, and as it seems, they support blueray (not 100% sure). I'm too lazy to connect my blueray player right now ^^

@Gargron it’s the increase of encryption/copy protection that made them harder to play on a computer I think. The height of the Napster blowback era. Much much easier just to find a BluRay player, XBox or some such to play them. There is no comparison between DVD and BluRay in quality obv.

@Gargron

Hmm. Kinda like saying eh, this 4K retina screen might be nice and all but my MacSE still has the superior display.

@Gargron I agree, Blu-Ray was ****.
My previous carrier, my job was distributing WinDVD innJapan and got tons of troubles… Everyday, customer support staffs were annoying about claiming not to play Blu-Ray disks…. I studied how Blu-Ray copy protection works and concluded that the system is ****.

@Gargron It's actually kinda insane how the insistence on DRM and weird licencing arrangements has made it virtually impossible to legally play BluRays on a computer.

I flashed a BD drive with firmware that bypasses DRM to watch my BluRays in Linux and, while that works flawlessly, it's ridiculous that it's necessary.

@Gargron do you not recall how hard it was to play a DVD on Windows in the early days?

@Gargron I got a Blu ray drive a month or two back.

Got some free software that plays them fine, and free software that will rip them too and bypass the region coding (or so it seems, can’t say I’ve tried many).

All on Windows and not dodgy software found on torrents or anything.

Reply to this and I’ll find out what software it is later when i aren’t working.

@Gargron makes you need to pirate the media instead of buying it... Logical...

@Gargron they’re 480p at best. Just pirate everything

@Gargron HD-DVD was the superior format. Sony paid outrageous sums of money to defeat it and support blu-ray.

@Gargron I appreciate that Blu-rays can't be taken away from me, and their DRM is pretty suitably broken generally. so it preserves ownership at reasonable quality. But yeah playing on a PC is incredibly annoying, paid software is the most reliable way to do it, and 4K Blu-rays are no longer supported at all because the DRM relied on a deprecated processor feature.

@Gargron you’re right that dvd was/is superior to blueray. That’s main reason why im sticking with dvds instead of jumping into bluerays.

@Gargron Video2000 for the win

@Gargron this was my realization when I bought a 4K blu ray drive: it can only play movies on Windows, on Intel CPUs, where the HDMI port is connected to the integrated intel graphics card, only to enforce some hell-ass DRM

@Gargron The DRM on DVD was relatively rapidly cracked, to the studios insisted the BluRay consortium make their new version of DRM uncrackable. The result is players that are user-proof.

@Gargron MakeMKV will let you dump a Blu-ray disc to your drive and play it with VLC. There should still be a beta version with a time-limited free key that you can use. (I have only used the Windows version but there are also MacOS and Linux versions).

@Gargron The best thing about my old 720p TV is it has kept me from switching to Blu-ray

@Gargron makemkv! Is actually free, beta forever... https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1053

@Gargron I don’t want to get too technical for anyone here, but years ago I circumvented this problem by buying a device that was specifically designed to play blu-rays 😀

It was a little pricey at the time, and I had some issues setting it up (at first I just set it on the floor and waited for it to start playing blu-rays, but after some Googling I learned it needed to be plugged into a TV) but it worked well for a long time. Now my only issue is finding stores that sell blu-rays.

@Gargron one of the many reasons to ditch windows

@Gargron interesting. I never had a problem with my br-discplayer on windows.

But I mostly rip them for ease of use

@Gargron there used to be an app called makemkv for ripping Blu-ray's to an mk you can play with VLC etc.

@Gargron

MP4

@Gargron e pensare che i blu ray esistono da solo 20 anni, un po' tardi per scoprirli ora