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by jeroenhd 4 days 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.
2 comments
delecti 4 days ago
The drive I got for ripping blu-ray discs cost me $80, 2 years ago. The current best seller on amazon is also $80 (both $79.99, to be precise, so the same price down to the cent). The same drive I bought is $116 on Best Buy right now. It can also write to discs (ostensibly, I didn't consider that when buying it, and don't have any reason to test it).

Meanwhile the cheapest external drive I can quickly find on Amazon is $35, just under half as much as I paid, or about a bit under a third for the same drive today. Either way it's far less than 10-20x.

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jeroenhd 4 days ago
For context: 21% VAT and Amazon resellers pretending 1 euro is worth 1 dollar in their pricing makes for the biggest price difference between what I found and what you bought.

From what I can tell, the affordable BD players cannot play all discs. They can read (and probably write) all data discs, but when I buy a disc, there's no guarantee I will be able to rip it and make it accessible over my LAN. That's the kind of drive I want, and that's what ends up getting scalped.

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delecti 3 days ago
The one I bought can play and rip all discs, after a firmware update. It was the one currently for sale for $116.

It only takes a little bit of research, and there are plenty that are not being scalped (or probably more commonly, scooped up by people who intend to use them). I found some in EU pricing in just a minute of searching. The MakeMKV forums are full of suggestions for suitable drives.

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Telaneo 4 days ago
Thankfully, the people who buy those drives for unreasonable prices are usually willing to share their spoils. Only one needs to actually have the hardware for the rest of the world to share the joy.

It's annoying if you have some more obscure blu-ray release that nobody else has ripped, and even more so if you don't know a guy who can do you a favour.

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jeroenhd 4 days ago
There's a piece of merch that I want to buy that will take weeks to ship to where I live. I currently have nothing that's capable of playing optical disks, so I was looking into buying a drive that can help me out (I'd rather rip the thing and stuff it into my Jellyfin than deal with a dedicated machine hooked up to my TV).

I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.

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Telaneo 4 days ago
Big bummer. I bought a drive way back to make sure I could rip disks if I wanted to, but I haven't had the need yet.
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