What I'm about to show you isn't exactly legal,
but legal doesn't necessarily mean something is right anyway, does it?
It's legal to raise my subscription fees whenever they want.
It's legal for them to control how I use my own account
and the media I paid for. It's legal for them to keep showing me ads
and steal my data when I pay for the service,
and it's even legal for them to take my money and disappear into the night with my media.
Now piracy can be just taking things
without paying for them, but sometimes it's a little more noble than that.
Sometimes it's about taking control back from the powers that be,
reasserting our right to own the things that we've paid for and use them however we please.
So I beg you, look at this big movie studio exec,
it's blurred so you won't have any ammunition for a DMCA takedown, but believe me when I say
that it's your Blu-ray and I'm streaming it from my PC
to my phone because I don't care about your rules.
And guess what? I'm gonna take it one step further and show everyone watching how to do it.
Who knows, if you have a tech savvy nephew or something, you might even get them to watch along
and set it up for you. It truly is very convenient.
Of course, as you know, creating video costs money though, so I can't tell your nephew anymore
until we get through this message from our sponsor. To rip a Blu-ray, all you need is the disc,
a compatible drive like this one from LG, we'll have a full list linked down below,
and a computer or NAS with a lot of free storage space.
Start by downloading and installing MakeMKV, an SDF tool flasher, as well as the custom firmware
for your drive from the guide that will also have linked down below.
Then use SDF tool to flash your drive by pointing it to the firmware you downloaded.
Next, pop the disc in and use MakeMKV to back it up,
making sure that you select decrypt video files.
Hit okay, and in about an hour, you're gonna have a copy of your entire Blu-ray disc
that is tucked safely away in your computer. And you're done.
Well, sort of. You can play the full quality M2TS video
that's usually found in the bdmv slash stream folder.
The biggest one is gonna be your movie and the smaller ones are usually gonna be extras
or special features. But if you want a more broadly compatible file
that will play nicely with more devices, we recommend re-muxing or re-encoding your video.
Remuxing means simply changing the container of the video file without altering the quality or size.
If you go back a few steps, you can actually choose this option right in MakeMKV.
This is a great choice, especially for discs that have playlist obfuscation as an anti-piracy measure,
which could lead to glitches or your movie being split into chunks.
Apparently, Lionsgate movies are notoriously bad for this.
MakeMKV can attempt to load the Blu-ray menu in Java
to help you sort which playlist holds the correct files to re-mux.
But if you're having issues, there are resources that would prefer to remain anonymous,
but that can be found with a quick Google search on a per movie basis.
But if you want the whole disc on your drive, you can also use MKV tool next
to convert specific files to MKV for your personal enjoyment.
If you want both better compatibility and a smaller size, though,
a full re-encode with Handbrake is the way to go.
Re-encoding means fundamentally rearranging the ones and zeros of the media file
in a matter that can shrink the video's size, but usually at the expense of some quality.
To do this, open up Handbrake and drag the entire backed up folder into the window.
Let it scan, and when it's done, use the dropdown menu to select the right video file
or files. Look for the ones that are the proper length,
then choose your export preset. This one is great for very high quality Ultra HD,
but some of your devices might play better with HEVC.
You'll have to play around with things a little bit to see what works for you, but here are some starter presets.
There's a lot more to fine tune in here, like audio tracks, the ability to keep
or remove certain languages of subtitles, or even burn them in.
We'd also recommend changing the frame rate to same as source, and once you're done,
you can hit go and wait anywhere from several minutes to several days, depending on your settings and hardware.
Once everything's encoded up the way you like, you add it to your favorite
self-hosted video streaming library, and that's it. You've got your own personal Netflix,
one that can't be taken away from you and never goes up in price.
But the simplicity of this whole process is a little deceptive.
Before these user-friendly tools could be developed, a lot of hard work was done to break the encryption
of Blu-ray disks and of the DVDs that came before them.
But that wasn't always the case. The difficulty curve has actually gone very easy,
very hard, back to very easy. So how about a fun little piracy history lesson?
In the early 1980s, when CDs were unveiled to the world,
hard drives for home computers were hovering around 10 megabytes of total capacity.
To put that in perspective, it would take about this many hard drives
to store a single CD album.
Sony and Philips, the joint creators of the CD standard,
didn't bother to write any form of copy protection into the specification because the pricing of CDs
was so competitive compared to those hard drives. I mean, what are you gonna do?
Spend a quarter million dollars on drives or just head to the local Sam Goody for a new $20 copy.
But by the early 2000s, things had changed.
CD burners had become commonplace in home computers
and the price of storage had plummeted. That, combined with the adoption of compressed audio formats
like MP3, the growth of broadband internet, and the rise of easy to use piracy networks
like Napster took music sharing mainstream.
By the time things really reached the masses, DVDs had already been a thing for about four years,
but the makers had definitely learned at least some lessons from CDs.
There were many restrictions built into the DVD specification
that prevented duplication and piracy.
However, they were relatively primitive and were ultimately defeated by brute force attacks.
By the time most new PCs shipped with a DVD drive then,
libraries that could decrypt DVDs were readily available.
You just needed to know where to look. Blu-ray, on the other hand, took longer.
The copy protection is vastly more sophisticated, even including the ability to revoke
and issue new encryption keys through new disks.
But the industry was also going up against much more powerful computers
in the hands of much more experienced hackers.
It's an arms race that the studios can't possibly hope to win in the long term.
Speaking of long term, that's reason number one why we made this video and why we think
you should be ripping your Blu-rays. Mass failure of entire generations of optical media
is coming and it's coming really soon due to something called disk rot.
Blu-rays actually have the shortest expected lifespan
of any commercial disk format yet at only five to 20 years.
And while hard drives and SSDs also fail,
sometimes even faster, once you've backed up your disks,
it's much easier to move that data around and back up your backups.
Reason number two is video quality. Streaming services are absolutely a viable alternative
to get convenient access to your media. But to hit their profit targets in a very competitive
industry, they've made serious compromises to picture quality.
A 4K Blu-ray can go as high as 144 megabit per second,
whereas most streaming services are currently sitting under 20.
Now, most of the time it's fine, but as TVs get bigger, or as you get to those
ever more popular under exposed dark scenes,
ugh, the lack of detail in the graininess can take you right out of the drama.
And that's even ignoring the loss in audio quality. I get it, encoding efficiency has come a long way
in the last decade, but no, it's not enough to make up for that sweet, sweet raw data.
Number three, if you're buying your Blu-rays to rip,
you will actually be better rewarding the movies that you actually like.
And this one is probably the most important point. The best movies rarely have the best box office returns,
but in the past, home sales have rewarded those filmmakers that took a risk
and couldn't find an audience in the multiplexes of yesteryear.
And at the time, the accepted wisdom was that a movie only really needed
to double its reported budget to remain profitable. This is due to marketing budgets
often matching that of production budgets, not to mention the fact that a theater
takes a lot of the gross receipts. However, it's been suggested in recent years
that to break even, the required box office target is now more like a factor of three or four
as streaming services have cut a hole out of the post theater profits.
Now, I sure as heck don't miss paying $30 for one movie,
but it's also important to actually support the creators making the content you love
if you ever want to see any more of it. As content creators ourselves,
we rely on multiple means of supporting ourselves, ads, subscriptions, and the fine merchandise
on lttstore.com, like the insert merch promo of the week here.
Well, we'll have something that pops up. Anyway, I realized that my take on this stuff
is a little more nuanced than the average editor is going to be able to process,
but I'm definitely not anti-piracy.
You do whatever lets you sleep at night. I've always said that.
I just feel that it's my responsibility to paint the complete Corsair canvas.
Studies have shown conflicting reports on the damages of copyright infringement
on creative industries. For example, an EU study,
often disproportionately cited by proponents of piracy,
shows that video game sales actually go up as a result of piracy,
presumably due to increased word of mouth. However, of 34 academically reviewed studies
pertaining to piracy, 29 of them have found that online copyright infringement
causes statistically significant harm to legitimate sales.
Only five studies found no harm to legitimate sales.
In fact, that same popular EU study that seems to validate game piracy
showed that both the book and movie industries have suffered due to piracy,
especially when it came to newer movies. So in this end game, corporately-driven society,
we know that only your money speaks and divesting from the services that are proud to announce
they now use only 30% machine judgment to greenlight their shows is a good first step,
but you may also wish to invest in the things you want to see more of.
It's also kind of fulfilling to own a piece of what you love.
And yes, I unironically love Despicable Me.
Deal with it. That's reason number four. Under the current state of digital laws,
you don't own anything. You're more or less leasing the right to access the content
and that applies even to digital purchases of full movies
from services like Prime, Apple, or Google TV.
When you read the terms of service, these platform holders reserve the right
to revoke that access on a whim, huge L.
I mean, luckily, most platforms that have tried this have faced a backlash so severe that they had to backtrack,
but that is at best a temporary W and I wouldn't count on it to last.
That last bit is a big part of why buying this stupid piece of plastic is so much better.
Sony is not going to be able to enter your home and blend up your copy of Morbius,
despite probably wishing that they could. Another big one is special features.
The behind the scenes from the Lord of the Rings box set literally set one of our production guys
who happens to be the one filming this video on his current career path.
That stuff is dead on streaming platforms. I mean, yeah, some studios still produce short
making of documentaries about their films that autoplay as the credits roll,
but they almost never feel as raw and plain awesome as the old ones.
If you guys love sailing the forbidden seas, hey, give this video a thumbs up,
and maybe if you're looking for something else to watch, go check out the one where we compared Plex and Jellyfin,
a couple of the aforementioned personal Netflix services
that we really love around here.