As some of you may know, I’ve ripped every DVD I own and store them on a file server. It’s a lot of space and it took a lot of time, but for my uses, it’s worth it.
I started this because one movie, I don’t remember which one, forced me to wait on FBI warning, another copyright violation warning, the same in French, and a disclaimer. Then it displayed two previews and a lengthy menu before I could hit play. This was followed by another lengthy menu animation, studio logos, and finally the movie. In the whole process, the studio logos and the previews were the only portions I was able to skip, the other screens marked as not skippable on the DVD. Now that I have my DVDs ripped, when I want to watch a movie, I browse my collection on the TV, and play the movie. No warnings, no menus, just the movie. I actually moved 8 months ago, and I have yet to unpack the DVD player.
This past weekend, I was at my parents’ house and I played a few of their BluRay disks. One movie, I think it was Flyboys, spent a considerable amount of time on the loading screen, had large sections of menus/screens that were not skippable, even included a section where it tried to download a trailer. Once the movie started playing, I paused it and to help feed some kitties and give them attention for a few minutes only to return to a custom screen saver of some sort. The movie would not resume. Upon repeating the process, a total of 15 minutes was wasted excluding the time spent with the movie paused.
So now, I seriously question the value of keeping media in these physical formats. I was considering BluRay in the near future, but now I think I’ll elect to forgo a player for an external drive and rip every disk that I might buy. Now I just need to find a good external drive that allows easy ripping. Thoughts?
Legacy Comments:
Rolf - Dec 24, 2011
I’ve ripped all my DVD’s for exactly the same reason. Funny how media companies don’t understand that their actions are causing the very behavior they don’t want from their customers. It’s not strange that people download “instant play” movies for free instead of buying a €7,- DVD which presents 15 minutes of unskippable “do not copy this” to the wrong person (the one who payed actual money). And then there is this funny Apple TV which lets you “rent” movies for the same price as physical rentals, and they stop you from watching it if you didn’t finish it on time. WTF? It would be much simpler and cheaper to just let the user download the whole movie so he can view it anytime. My prediction is that if media companies sell media uncrippled for a low price online (say €3,- for a movie, and €1,- for a song), they would make a lot more money and piracy would almost dissapear because it’s not worth the hassle at that price. Great blogpost, no tips on external drives for ripping, sorry. I’m using Handbrake on a Mac, works great for most (older) dvd movies.