WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.000 What I'm about to show you isn't exactly legal, 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:07.880 but legal doesn't necessarily mean something is right anyway, does it? 00:00:07.880 --> 00:00:11.720 It's legal to raise my subscription fees whenever they want. 00:00:11.720 --> 00:00:15.160 It's legal for them to control how I use my own account 00:00:15.160 --> 00:00:19.960 and the media I paid for. It's legal for them to keep showing me ads 00:00:19.960 --> 00:00:22.960 and steal my data when I pay for the service, 00:00:22.960 --> 00:00:29.400 and it's even legal for them to take my money and disappear into the night with my media. 00:00:29.400 --> 00:00:32.600 Now piracy can be just taking things 00:00:32.600 --> 00:00:36.440 without paying for them, but sometimes it's a little more noble than that. 00:00:36.440 --> 00:00:40.640 Sometimes it's about taking control back from the powers that be, 00:00:40.640 --> 00:00:46.840 reasserting our right to own the things that we've paid for and use them however we please. 00:00:46.840 --> 00:00:51.400 So I beg you, look at this big movie studio exec, 00:00:51.400 --> 00:00:55.220 it's blurred so you won't have any ammunition for a DMCA takedown, but believe me when I say 00:00:55.220 --> 00:00:58.800 that it's your Blu-ray and I'm streaming it from my PC 00:00:58.800 --> 00:01:03.120 to my phone because I don't care about your rules. 00:01:03.120 --> 00:01:08.760 And guess what? I'm gonna take it one step further and show everyone watching how to do it. 00:01:08.760 --> 00:01:13.200 Who knows, if you have a tech savvy nephew or something, you might even get them to watch along 00:01:13.200 --> 00:01:16.580 and set it up for you. It truly is very convenient. 00:01:16.580 --> 00:01:21.800 Of course, as you know, creating video costs money though, so I can't tell your nephew anymore 00:01:21.800 --> 00:01:26.680 until we get through this message from our sponsor. To rip a Blu-ray, all you need is the disc, 00:01:26.720 --> 00:01:30.840 a compatible drive like this one from LG, we'll have a full list linked down below, 00:01:30.840 --> 00:01:34.560 and a computer or NAS with a lot of free storage space. 00:01:34.560 --> 00:01:40.320 Start by downloading and installing MakeMKV, an SDF tool flasher, as well as the custom firmware 00:01:40.320 --> 00:01:43.680 for your drive from the guide that will also have linked down below. 00:01:43.680 --> 00:01:48.140 Then use SDF tool to flash your drive by pointing it to the firmware you downloaded. 00:01:48.140 --> 00:01:51.880 Next, pop the disc in and use MakeMKV to back it up, 00:01:51.880 --> 00:01:55.360 making sure that you select decrypt video files. 00:01:55.360 --> 00:02:00.280 Hit okay, and in about an hour, you're gonna have a copy of your entire Blu-ray disc 00:02:00.280 --> 00:02:04.000 that is tucked safely away in your computer. And you're done. 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:08.040 Well, sort of. You can play the full quality M2TS video 00:02:08.040 --> 00:02:12.040 that's usually found in the bdmv slash stream folder. 00:02:12.040 --> 00:02:16.200 The biggest one is gonna be your movie and the smaller ones are usually gonna be extras 00:02:16.200 --> 00:02:19.760 or special features. But if you want a more broadly compatible file 00:02:19.760 --> 00:02:24.680 that will play nicely with more devices, we recommend re-muxing or re-encoding your video. 00:02:24.680 --> 00:02:30.560 Remuxing means simply changing the container of the video file without altering the quality or size. 00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:35.160 If you go back a few steps, you can actually choose this option right in MakeMKV. 00:02:35.160 --> 00:02:41.380 This is a great choice, especially for discs that have playlist obfuscation as an anti-piracy measure, 00:02:41.380 --> 00:02:45.240 which could lead to glitches or your movie being split into chunks. 00:02:45.240 --> 00:02:48.800 Apparently, Lionsgate movies are notoriously bad for this. 00:02:48.800 --> 00:02:52.640 MakeMKV can attempt to load the Blu-ray menu in Java 00:02:52.640 --> 00:02:57.160 to help you sort which playlist holds the correct files to re-mux. 00:02:57.160 --> 00:03:01.680 But if you're having issues, there are resources that would prefer to remain anonymous, 00:03:01.680 --> 00:03:06.120 but that can be found with a quick Google search on a per movie basis. 00:03:06.120 --> 00:03:10.480 But if you want the whole disc on your drive, you can also use MKV tool next 00:03:10.480 --> 00:03:14.160 to convert specific files to MKV for your personal enjoyment. 00:03:14.160 --> 00:03:17.800 If you want both better compatibility and a smaller size, though, 00:03:17.800 --> 00:03:21.040 a full re-encode with Handbrake is the way to go. 00:03:21.040 --> 00:03:25.840 Re-encoding means fundamentally rearranging the ones and zeros of the media file 00:03:25.840 --> 00:03:31.640 in a matter that can shrink the video's size, but usually at the expense of some quality. 00:03:31.640 --> 00:03:36.800 To do this, open up Handbrake and drag the entire backed up folder into the window. 00:03:36.800 --> 00:03:40.920 Let it scan, and when it's done, use the dropdown menu to select the right video file 00:03:40.920 --> 00:03:44.280 or files. Look for the ones that are the proper length, 00:03:44.280 --> 00:03:49.000 then choose your export preset. This one is great for very high quality Ultra HD, 00:03:49.000 --> 00:03:52.200 but some of your devices might play better with HEVC. 00:03:52.200 --> 00:03:57.160 You'll have to play around with things a little bit to see what works for you, but here are some starter presets. 00:03:57.160 --> 00:04:01.620 There's a lot more to fine tune in here, like audio tracks, the ability to keep 00:04:01.620 --> 00:04:05.680 or remove certain languages of subtitles, or even burn them in. 00:04:05.680 --> 00:04:09.440 We'd also recommend changing the frame rate to same as source, and once you're done, 00:04:09.440 --> 00:04:14.680 you can hit go and wait anywhere from several minutes to several days, depending on your settings and hardware. 00:04:14.680 --> 00:04:17.680 Once everything's encoded up the way you like, you add it to your favorite 00:04:17.680 --> 00:04:22.120 self-hosted video streaming library, and that's it. You've got your own personal Netflix, 00:04:22.120 --> 00:04:26.680 one that can't be taken away from you and never goes up in price. 00:04:26.680 --> 00:04:30.520 But the simplicity of this whole process is a little deceptive. 00:04:30.520 --> 00:04:36.000 Before these user-friendly tools could be developed, a lot of hard work was done to break the encryption 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:39.800 of Blu-ray disks and of the DVDs that came before them. 00:04:39.800 --> 00:04:45.280 But that wasn't always the case. The difficulty curve has actually gone very easy, 00:04:45.280 --> 00:04:50.920 very hard, back to very easy. So how about a fun little piracy history lesson? 00:04:50.920 --> 00:04:54.440 In the early 1980s, when CDs were unveiled to the world, 00:04:54.440 --> 00:04:59.840 hard drives for home computers were hovering around 10 megabytes of total capacity. 00:04:59.840 --> 00:05:03.520 To put that in perspective, it would take about this many hard drives 00:05:03.520 --> 00:05:06.560 to store a single CD album. 00:05:06.560 --> 00:05:09.580 Sony and Philips, the joint creators of the CD standard, 00:05:09.580 --> 00:05:15.000 didn't bother to write any form of copy protection into the specification because the pricing of CDs 00:05:15.040 --> 00:05:19.040 was so competitive compared to those hard drives. I mean, what are you gonna do? 00:05:19.040 --> 00:05:25.160 Spend a quarter million dollars on drives or just head to the local Sam Goody for a new $20 copy. 00:05:25.160 --> 00:05:28.560 But by the early 2000s, things had changed. 00:05:28.560 --> 00:05:32.040 CD burners had become commonplace in home computers 00:05:32.040 --> 00:05:38.480 and the price of storage had plummeted. That, combined with the adoption of compressed audio formats 00:05:38.480 --> 00:05:44.080 like MP3, the growth of broadband internet, and the rise of easy to use piracy networks 00:05:44.080 --> 00:05:47.700 like Napster took music sharing mainstream. 00:05:47.700 --> 00:05:52.960 By the time things really reached the masses, DVDs had already been a thing for about four years, 00:05:52.960 --> 00:05:57.900 but the makers had definitely learned at least some lessons from CDs. 00:05:57.900 --> 00:06:01.280 There were many restrictions built into the DVD specification 00:06:01.280 --> 00:06:04.360 that prevented duplication and piracy. 00:06:04.360 --> 00:06:10.480 However, they were relatively primitive and were ultimately defeated by brute force attacks. 00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:14.040 By the time most new PCs shipped with a DVD drive then, 00:06:14.040 --> 00:06:17.360 libraries that could decrypt DVDs were readily available. 00:06:17.360 --> 00:06:21.920 You just needed to know where to look. Blu-ray, on the other hand, took longer. 00:06:21.920 --> 00:06:26.920 The copy protection is vastly more sophisticated, even including the ability to revoke 00:06:26.920 --> 00:06:30.800 and issue new encryption keys through new disks. 00:06:30.800 --> 00:06:35.440 But the industry was also going up against much more powerful computers 00:06:35.440 --> 00:06:38.480 in the hands of much more experienced hackers. 00:06:38.480 --> 00:06:42.880 It's an arms race that the studios can't possibly hope to win in the long term. 00:06:42.880 --> 00:06:48.200 Speaking of long term, that's reason number one why we made this video and why we think 00:06:48.200 --> 00:06:53.040 you should be ripping your Blu-rays. Mass failure of entire generations of optical media 00:06:53.040 --> 00:06:57.520 is coming and it's coming really soon due to something called disk rot. 00:06:57.520 --> 00:07:00.740 Blu-rays actually have the shortest expected lifespan 00:07:00.740 --> 00:07:05.320 of any commercial disk format yet at only five to 20 years. 00:07:05.320 --> 00:07:08.720 And while hard drives and SSDs also fail, 00:07:08.720 --> 00:07:11.880 sometimes even faster, once you've backed up your disks, 00:07:11.880 --> 00:07:16.320 it's much easier to move that data around and back up your backups. 00:07:16.320 --> 00:07:22.160 Reason number two is video quality. Streaming services are absolutely a viable alternative 00:07:22.160 --> 00:07:27.600 to get convenient access to your media. But to hit their profit targets in a very competitive 00:07:27.600 --> 00:07:31.440 industry, they've made serious compromises to picture quality. 00:07:31.440 --> 00:07:36.080 A 4K Blu-ray can go as high as 144 megabit per second, 00:07:36.080 --> 00:07:40.320 whereas most streaming services are currently sitting under 20. 00:07:40.320 --> 00:07:46.920 Now, most of the time it's fine, but as TVs get bigger, or as you get to those 00:07:46.920 --> 00:07:50.080 ever more popular under exposed dark scenes, 00:07:50.080 --> 00:07:54.920 ugh, the lack of detail in the graininess can take you right out of the drama. 00:07:54.920 --> 00:08:00.480 And that's even ignoring the loss in audio quality. I get it, encoding efficiency has come a long way 00:08:00.480 --> 00:08:07.120 in the last decade, but no, it's not enough to make up for that sweet, sweet raw data. 00:08:07.120 --> 00:08:10.200 Number three, if you're buying your Blu-rays to rip, 00:08:10.200 --> 00:08:13.960 you will actually be better rewarding the movies that you actually like. 00:08:13.960 --> 00:08:20.280 And this one is probably the most important point. The best movies rarely have the best box office returns, 00:08:20.280 --> 00:08:25.120 but in the past, home sales have rewarded those filmmakers that took a risk 00:08:25.120 --> 00:08:28.720 and couldn't find an audience in the multiplexes of yesteryear. 00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:32.560 And at the time, the accepted wisdom was that a movie only really needed 00:08:32.560 --> 00:08:37.000 to double its reported budget to remain profitable. This is due to marketing budgets 00:08:37.000 --> 00:08:41.000 often matching that of production budgets, not to mention the fact that a theater 00:08:41.000 --> 00:08:45.640 takes a lot of the gross receipts. However, it's been suggested in recent years 00:08:45.640 --> 00:08:51.280 that to break even, the required box office target is now more like a factor of three or four 00:08:51.280 --> 00:08:55.880 as streaming services have cut a hole out of the post theater profits. 00:08:55.880 --> 00:08:59.680 Now, I sure as heck don't miss paying $30 for one movie, 00:08:59.680 --> 00:09:04.160 but it's also important to actually support the creators making the content you love 00:09:04.160 --> 00:09:08.120 if you ever want to see any more of it. As content creators ourselves, 00:09:08.120 --> 00:09:13.840 we rely on multiple means of supporting ourselves, ads, subscriptions, and the fine merchandise 00:09:13.840 --> 00:09:17.680 on lttstore.com, like the insert merch promo of the week here. 00:09:17.680 --> 00:09:22.360 Well, we'll have something that pops up. Anyway, I realized that my take on this stuff 00:09:22.360 --> 00:09:26.080 is a little more nuanced than the average editor is going to be able to process, 00:09:26.080 --> 00:09:29.360 but I'm definitely not anti-piracy. 00:09:29.360 --> 00:09:33.040 You do whatever lets you sleep at night. I've always said that. 00:09:33.040 --> 00:09:38.360 I just feel that it's my responsibility to paint the complete Corsair canvas. 00:09:38.360 --> 00:09:42.080 Studies have shown conflicting reports on the damages of copyright infringement 00:09:42.080 --> 00:09:45.640 on creative industries. For example, an EU study, 00:09:45.640 --> 00:09:48.880 often disproportionately cited by proponents of piracy, 00:09:48.880 --> 00:09:52.920 shows that video game sales actually go up as a result of piracy, 00:09:52.920 --> 00:09:59.560 presumably due to increased word of mouth. However, of 34 academically reviewed studies 00:09:59.560 --> 00:10:04.040 pertaining to piracy, 29 of them have found that online copyright infringement 00:10:04.040 --> 00:10:07.840 causes statistically significant harm to legitimate sales. 00:10:07.840 --> 00:10:11.480 Only five studies found no harm to legitimate sales. 00:10:11.480 --> 00:10:16.080 In fact, that same popular EU study that seems to validate game piracy 00:10:16.080 --> 00:10:20.200 showed that both the book and movie industries have suffered due to piracy, 00:10:20.200 --> 00:10:25.800 especially when it came to newer movies. So in this end game, corporately-driven society, 00:10:25.800 --> 00:10:31.720 we know that only your money speaks and divesting from the services that are proud to announce 00:10:31.720 --> 00:10:37.880 they now use only 30% machine judgment to greenlight their shows is a good first step, 00:10:37.880 --> 00:10:42.440 but you may also wish to invest in the things you want to see more of. 00:10:42.440 --> 00:10:45.800 It's also kind of fulfilling to own a piece of what you love. 00:10:45.800 --> 00:10:48.920 And yes, I unironically love Despicable Me. 00:10:48.920 --> 00:10:52.880 Deal with it. That's reason number four. Under the current state of digital laws, 00:10:52.880 --> 00:10:57.320 you don't own anything. You're more or less leasing the right to access the content 00:10:57.320 --> 00:11:01.560 and that applies even to digital purchases of full movies 00:11:01.560 --> 00:11:05.320 from services like Prime, Apple, or Google TV. 00:11:05.320 --> 00:11:08.520 When you read the terms of service, these platform holders reserve the right 00:11:08.520 --> 00:11:12.560 to revoke that access on a whim, huge L. 00:11:12.560 --> 00:11:18.160 I mean, luckily, most platforms that have tried this have faced a backlash so severe that they had to backtrack, 00:11:18.160 --> 00:11:23.160 but that is at best a temporary W and I wouldn't count on it to last. 00:11:23.160 --> 00:11:28.800 That last bit is a big part of why buying this stupid piece of plastic is so much better. 00:11:28.800 --> 00:11:33.520 Sony is not going to be able to enter your home and blend up your copy of Morbius, 00:11:33.520 --> 00:11:37.480 despite probably wishing that they could. Another big one is special features. 00:11:37.480 --> 00:11:42.040 The behind the scenes from the Lord of the Rings box set literally set one of our production guys 00:11:42.040 --> 00:11:46.440 who happens to be the one filming this video on his current career path. 00:11:46.440 --> 00:11:50.920 That stuff is dead on streaming platforms. I mean, yeah, some studios still produce short 00:11:50.920 --> 00:11:54.160 making of documentaries about their films that autoplay as the credits roll, 00:11:54.160 --> 00:11:59.680 but they almost never feel as raw and plain awesome as the old ones. 00:11:59.680 --> 00:12:03.600 If you guys love sailing the forbidden seas, hey, give this video a thumbs up, 00:12:03.600 --> 00:12:08.920 and maybe if you're looking for something else to watch, go check out the one where we compared Plex and Jellyfin, 00:12:08.920 --> 00:12:12.080 a couple of the aforementioned personal Netflix services 00:12:12.080 --> 00:12:13.680 that we really love around here.