
The Blu-Ray Reauthoring Project - Adamantcheese
http://temporary.directory/blog/10-23-2018.html
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hlandau
The Blu-Ray video format is pretty cancerous in terms of DRM; there's not
really any salvaging it.

One of the most nauseating restrictions of all is that replication plants
aren't even allowed to fabricate Blu-Ray video discs which don't have AACS.
This means that if you want to get some Blu-Ray video disc fabricated which
contains Creative Commons content and you disagree with DRM, for example,
you're out of luck: AACS is _mandatory_. Archive Team had issues with this -
as I recall, the best compromise they were able to find was to just put video
files on a normal Blu-Ray data disc and get that fabbed. I suspect this is
enforced using conditions in the patent licences Sony hands out to fabs or DRM
in the software used by fabrication plants, or both.

You start to realise why this is the case when you research how the production
process works. When you send a Blu-Ray video disc to a fab for mass
production, you don't apply the encryption; the fab does, and you have no
control over the process. Moreover, this process involves sending a request
for encryption keys to AACS LA, who then issue newly-minted encryption keys
for the disc. Yes, this means that all Blu-Ray video discs must be centrally
approved by a single organisation in realtime, as an integral part of the AACS
application process. Which explains why AACS is mandatory; it lets them catch
attempts by commercial pirates to get discs replicated in mass.

So I don't think Blu-Ray can ever become a non-helldamned format. The fact
that the specifications are all secret is just the icing on the cake (this is
actually the case for DVD too, open source implementations all had to reverse
engineer it). I always found it deeply ironic that by comparison, the AACS
specification, which specifies a DRM scheme, a type of thing fundamentally
dependent on security by obscurity, is freely available.

~~~
pathartl
I find this deeply amusing. I see how this could have worked in the DVD era,
but these days with all of the options we have it's no surprise why most
people don't have bluray players. It is kinda sad though because as much as
streaming gives us options, the quality is always terrible.

~~~
superflyguy
YouTube and Netflix stream for me just fine. Are you on 4g/fibre?

~~~
Jaruzel
Theoretically, UHD (4k) blu-rays can go from 80 mb/s to 120 mb/s depending on
the authoring of the disc, compared to Netflix's maximum of 25 mb/s that's a
massive difference.

However... unless you have a UHD projector, or VERY large TV (60"+) then you
are unlikely to see the difference under normal viewing.

Where I feel streaming typically fails, is in the audio. They may 'say' it's a
5.1 surround sound mix, but if so, why does it sound _so_ flat compared to the
same film on blu-ray ? All I can think is that the audio is compression is
also 4x as compressed which to our ears is quite significant.

~~~
yathern
Actually even at 1080p, Netflix streams are visibly worse quality than blu-
ray. Particularly in the compression of dark colors. I'll occasionally see
color-banding, which you never see in Blu-ray.

~~~
Jaruzel
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in the Blu-ray camp; Netflix is for casual
viewing, but proper viewing such as big hitter movies are on blu-ray always
(I'm yet to get a 4k projector).

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AdmiralAsshat
I wonder, with some amusement, how much the current state of multimedia
ripping, editing, encoding, MUXing, etc. owes to the underground community of
internet nerds that just wanted to watch their anime.

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mrec
I'm a little puzzled as to why he's so set on having a physical disc as
output. If this is for personal use, wouldn't it be easier to just rip the
episodes to mp4 using Handbrake, which can also add subtitles? And once you've
got eps as separate files, no need for menus.

I buy a fair few Blu-Rays, but I've never watched one directly. It's just a
distribution format for me.

~~~
esotericn
Yeah. I take the UNIX approach to media storage, everything is a file.

If it's not a file, that's probably due to some anti-user nonsense (a dvd,
bluray, whatever could just be an FS with an mp4/mkv/whatever file on it, but
it's not, 'cos DRM.). A challenge, then.

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conwaytwitty
I personally own a lot of dvd's and blurays, but it's been a while since I
actually watch them in that format.

I just rip the disc to my harddrive, demux/convert what i want (usually just
the main audio to flac), then remux to mkv and store the result (video + audio
+ eng subs + commentary tracks). Then just watch in kodi/plex.

Dealing with the actual discs etc seems just weird, neither dvd nor bluray as
a media was never any fun to use. Using a remuxed copy of a tv series i'd be
half way through an episode by the time the trailers and fbi warnings stopped
playing on the disc version.

~~~
sigi45
I had probably 400 DVDs and i never started with BluRay.

Not because of the cost, i can afford what i like to watch, but having to buy
the physical copy, which i would rip and put on my storage system and than
would probably need to store or throw away, sucks.

Why can't i just buy a digital BluRay? Like yes i can do whatever i want with
it :|

Yes i know people would copy those asap but still AARGH...

~~~
compsciphd
If you're really rich, you can. Kalaidescope. But the studios really fought
them hard on that.

~~~
sigi45
"I liked it so much I had it installed in all of my homes."

-_-

~~~
jumelles
There's also a whole section about their experience installing systems on
yachts!

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gambiting
"Blu-Rays are very hard to edit and it's no wonder that they're dying in
comparison to streaming"

I see zero corellation here. Out of people buying blu-rays maybe 0.00001% will
want to rip them and edit them.

~~~
lozenge
But they might want to watch a video of their kids' school play or some other
video not from a big studio.

~~~
paulie_a
Do people actually ever watch those videos though? People love to record
events and then it collects dust afterwards.

~~~
jpfed
My family definitely rewatches videos all the time. As they grow, my kids
become new people every year or so; I like the chance to at least briefly
visit every one of the people they have been.

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ohithereyou
For comparison between BluRay and DVD: I did something similar, also for an
animated series, for DVD. I took DVDs from Japan, ripped the video, and
inserted good subtitles (the original subtitles for the series as released in
the US were trash), and burned to DVD.

The hardest part was making sure the subtitles were in sync. After that, a
simple shell script and dvdauthor were all I needed. With some modifications,
this shell script could also take speedsubbed episodes and produce DVDs
containing between four and six episodes per disc (this was before streaming
simultaneous releases).

To address a question from mrec above about why physical media was chosen - I
was making this set of discs for a friend for a lending library for their
club. The easiest way to move video around at the time was DVD (this was right
as BluRay was taking off). Having the disc images was also helpful in case the
(relatively fragile) DVD-R media got damaged while it was lent out.

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m-p-3
I'm kinda glad the piracy community exists because of all the tools and file
format they bring to the masses that are useful for legitimate archival
purpose, which are well thought and make sense.

MKV containers with multiple audio tracks and embedded subtitles in actual
text format makes so much sense that you wonder who the hell thought the Blu-
Ray specs made sense.

It tells a lot when mainstream device manufacturers starts sorting these
formats that came from the scene.

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ocdtrekkie
I haven't done much Blu-ray ripping, but I try to keep an eye on it to make
sure it's still "working" as a thing. I want a movie collection, but I don't
want to invest heavily in maintaining a RAID array of live drives to store
giant 25 GB archives of each movie. I'd much rather just hang onto the Blu-ray
discs, and know that inevitably they all get cracked, so I'll always have
ripping options if I need it.

As a physical disc you can keep in your possession, it's still really the only
way to "own" a movie these days. Vudu is nice, and I'll do a lot of casual
watching via my digital copy codes, but the discs are my "collection".

~~~
aidenn0
A WD 4TB external drive can store 160 25TB blurays for $100. That adds a "tax"
of $1.60 per disc if you rip the raw disc.

I tend to re-encode as libx265 (preset veryslow CRF=18) which is a fairly
transparent reencode at 20-40% the size, which lowers the storage cost to
under $1 per disc. If you also have backups, that will double the cost, or you
can accept the risk and re-rip them if you lose the drive.

[edit] They have 6TB and 8TB options now that are cheaper per-disc if you have
more than 160 bluray movies.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Or I could just get the disc off the shelf and pop it in the drive on the rare
occasion I want to watch it. What's the benefit to spend the time ripping it?

Like, I manage an ebook library, and I easily spend more time and effort
managing said ebook library than I actually spend reading the ebooks. So I'm
hesitant to bring myself into movie library management when I have a fairly
robust physical storage medium already handy.

~~~
veridies
Kodi has a great interface for browsing movies, and automatically tags things
like director, year, nationality, and summary. My fiancée likes to flip
through that to pick things to watch; it's a lot easier and faster than trying
to figure out all those details from the backs of BDs, which often make it
very difficult to even see the duration of a film.

And it allows me to mix together video files from BDs and DVDs with files from
other sources (a lot of which are commercially unavailable, such as an
Ethiopian film which has never been released except on VHS and a version of
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg which has been modified to fix a color error) into
one seamless interface.

Obviously, though, this is just what works for me. If physical BDs are easier
then by all means go for it.

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slartibardfast0
Back when I cared about physical media I wrote a substation alpha to blu-ray
subtitle encoder.

It isn't exactly spec compliant. Hilariously, the spec is patented dispite
prior art & simple run length encoding:
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090185789/da](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090185789/da)).

Output is good enough for power dvd when using the admittedly closed source
TSMuxer. Always meant to try to port it to ffmpeg, but it just doesn't seem
worthwhile, given the context of Netflix.

[https://github.com/slartibardfast/punkgraphicstream](https://github.com/slartibardfast/punkgraphicstream)

~~~
Adamantcheese
I actually tested out PunkGraphicsStream as a subtitle renderer, but it had
issues with some fade effects which is why I had to go with easySup instead.

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babypuncher
What a strange end-goal. I'm not sure why you would want to "reauthor" a DVD
or a Blu-Ray, as their contents are much more convenient once you've ripped
and transcoded them. The difficulty he encountered doesn't sound like a good
reason at all to buy DVDs instead.

I have roughly 200 Blu-Rays in my collection, and I've watched maybe one or
two of them in an actual Blu-Ray player.

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pjc50
I'm secretly pleased that I never really took up the format and am still
buying DVDs if I want a hardcopy of something.

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wccrawford
I'm rather disappointed that he pirated some software for this. I thought this
would be a how-to to help people in the future.

>You can find a copy of the BDFix Pro installer and a keygen here.

~~~
mparramon
He said that the cart page of the software website was blank, the last version
of the software was from 2012 and the web page was last updated in 2014, so he
had no other option.

~~~
mnw21cam
Legally dubious, morally ... make your own mind up?

~~~
superflyguy
Legally dubious? Not sure of the "website is old so pop along to a .ru site"
exemption to copyright law. Did the author attempt to contact the copyright
owners or discover an alternative?

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Adamantcheese
I did attempt to contact the owner of the site. Nothing happened for 2 months.
All other alternatives were expensive or not maintained, so that was the best
I could find.

~~~
mnw21cam
Indeed. It may be legally wrong, but what is the risk that they will actually
sue you?

~~~
Adamantcheese
Likely none. The product in question is a translation and upgrade of a Chinese
tool anyways.

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zzo38computer
Blu-Ray is complicated and stupid.

A better way is, simply patent-free unencrypted video files with track numbers
and caption streams, perhaps on a HD-DVD disc (without using the HD-DVD video
format). We don't need menus and AACS and all of that other junk, please.

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johnchristopher
So basically you'd be better off ripping and then adding subtitles and video
files as data on your media of choice (BDRay, HDD, networked HDD, etc.).

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elheffe80
My son, 11, just asked me "What's a blu-ray?" Need I say more?

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mixmastamyk
> We'll be using easySUP to convert our ASS file to a SUP file.

Was the spec written by precocious twelve-year olds?

~~~
Adamantcheese
ASS stands for Advanced Sub-Station (Alpha). It's a newer version of the Sub-
Station Alpha format. Acronyms aren't always made to be funny, sometimes they
just turn out that way.

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SCAQTony
Off-topic: Accessibility-wise reversed out type is difficult to read, if one
must have a black background a green colored font is best.

