I'm a bit confused by the title. It seems to suggest that ripping a DVD in 2026 is no longer a federal crime, which I'm pretty sure it is. And that ripping a DVD in 1999 didn't require $22 worth of hardware and some free software -> both of which I'm pretty sure it did.
madmod 6 minutes ago [-]
What is the point of taking an actually interesting subject and injecting gpt botox into it making it 50x more words than it needs to be. I liked some details in the article and I'm not against AI prose in general but this blog post novel could've been an email. The part about server drives refusing to read dvds with css is crazy.
witx 2 minutes ago [-]
Also don't forget that many countries it is illegal for you to torrent books and remoce DRM from ebooks, notheless meta was caught torrenting hundreda of GB os books without consequence
ralferoo 5 minutes ago [-]
Not the point the article is making but "Hardware Is $22" and "The cheap hardware costs less than a sandwich" makes me very glad I don't live in the US and want to buy a sandwich!
isoprophlex 2 minutes ago [-]
It's mentally carcinogenic clanker slop. Don't think about it too hard
mplanchard 2 minutes ago [-]
$22 is an expensive sandwich, to be fair! Certainly not unheard of, but probably more expensive than your average sandwich even in a big city.
kyrra 18 minutes ago [-]
It's also nice that this has been solved for Blu-ray as well. You just have to buy the correct kind of Blu-ray drive, and there's custom firmware out there to flash on the drive and let you rip any Blu-ray.
jeroenhd 8 minutes ago [-]
I've looked into that, but it looks like the drives are ten or twenty times as expensive as a normal DVD reader capable of reading discs. Any time anyone publishes firmware for a new, affordable drive that can rip movie discs, the drives quickly go out of stock.
foresto 5 minutes ago [-]
What can the custom firmware do that the stock firmware cannot?
What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake
jeroenhd 13 minutes ago [-]
Yes, as the article states, the $22 is for buying a USB DVD drive. I don't think many PCs come with optical media readers these days.
adithyassekhar 14 minutes ago [-]
How are you planning on getting the dvd to show up in handbrake?
Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.
whycombinetor 9 minutes ago [-]
libdvdcss
LocalH 14 minutes ago [-]
It's been mostly solved since DeCSS
9 minutes ago [-]
rolph 10 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
isatty 18 minutes ago [-]
I’m pretty sure I did it for much cheaper back in the day.
bethekidyouwant 19 minutes ago [-]
Nobody got a letter for copying a DVD at their home… I suppose if you sold them on the street corner you could maybe get in trouble maybe he’s confusing this with downloading movies which seems odd because he’s writing this as if he existed then
throwvava 13 minutes ago [-]
Is this GPT 5? In particular,
> The drive in your laptop does not do this. The cheap drive I had ordered off Amazon does not do this. A consumer drive’s firmware is, in the technical sense, dumb. It sees a disc, it reports the contents, it lets the OS handle whatever happens next. The server drive is the unusual one.
> This is worth pausing on.
The "short punchy sentences, new paragraph, 'This matters' type sentence" style is very reminiscent of GPT-5.x.
triyambakam 17 minutes ago [-]
> The kind of thing every kid with a Dell tower in 2003 spent an entire weekend trying to figure out.
OK Claude.
lloydatkinson 15 minutes ago [-]
At this point I don't even read Medium, Substack, or any of the other slop monger sites.
akkartik 31 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 17:20:26 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Edit: I thought I was making a joke, you really weren’t thinking about pc’s not coming without dvd drives.
> The drive in your laptop does not do this. The cheap drive I had ordered off Amazon does not do this. A consumer drive’s firmware is, in the technical sense, dumb. It sees a disc, it reports the contents, it lets the OS handle whatever happens next. The server drive is the unusual one.
> This is worth pausing on.
The "short punchy sentences, new paragraph, 'This matters' type sentence" style is very reminiscent of GPT-5.x.
OK Claude.