Well, guess I can kiss ever being able to properly backup my CD's 1:1 goodbye forever.

I seriously hate the DMCA and all these stupid copyright laws... What am I supposed to do when the CD's get messed up and the copy-protection refuses to work on the legitimate CD or at all?

A sad day. May the copyright mafia burn in whatever hell they choose to believe in.

A sad day indeed. 😢

Indeed 🙁 I use CloneCD to accurately copy my own discs and the Virtual CloneDrive to mount them, which was the whole point 🙁

With modern operating systems discarding support for safedisc, securom, starforce, tages and so on, there is really not much you can do other than buying steam/gog re-releases or creating fixed exes.

Or using virtual machines.

I can run my games on my machines that are dedicated just for that purpose.

Unless you rip BD discs there are many alternatives. I use Daemon Tools Advanced to create images of my old games, there's also Alcohol 120%.

Well, that does it. No more Blu-ray purchases for me. If I can't rip the movies to my file server, I see absolutely no point in spending big bucks on BDs only to view them with half-assed playback software/hardware. PowerDVD and standalone BD players are just horrible and really detract from the home theater experience. They're unreasonably slow and unstable, sometimes require firmware updates to play the latest discs, and force the viewer to sit through all of the copyright warnings and even some of the trailers.

Dang, I have close to 300 movies on BD (plus several more on DVD, HD-DVD, and Laserdisc) and was really looking forward to Ultra HD Blu-Ray. Jerks. 😒

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Well, that does it. No more Blu-ray purchases for me. If I can't rip the movies to my file server, I see absolutely no point in spending big bucks on BDs only to view them with half-assed playback software/hardware. PowerDVD and standalone BD players are just horrible and really detract from the home theater experience. They're unreasonably slow and unstable, sometimes require firmware updates to play the latest discs, and force the viewer to sit through all of the copyright warnings and even some of the trailers.

Dang, I have close to 300 movies on BD (plus several more on DVD, HD-DVD, and Laserdisc) and was really looking forward to Ultra HD Blu-Ray. Jerks. 😒

I would never ever pay for a movie I cant backup.

What do they think I should do if I want to watch the movie on my laptop when traveling.

I don't even HAVE an optical drive anymore. Last time I had one was, I don't know, 4 years back? 5?

People still use discs? What for? 🤣

realnc wrote:

I don't even HAVE an optical drive anymore. Last time I had one was, I don't know, 4 years back? 5?

People still use discs? What for? 🤣

You can not stream in high enough quality for us with really big screens. Like Steve I was also waiting for Ultra HD Blu-Ray, I was thinking I finally would get a reason to replace my full HD Plasma TV.

You can not stream at all on a train with slow Wi-Fi.

DracoNihil wrote:

Well, guess I can kiss ever being able to properly backup my CD's 1:1 goodbye forever.

I seriously hate the DMCA and all these stupid copyright laws... What am I supposed to do when the CD's get messed up and the copy-protection refuses to work on the legitimate CD or at all?

As GL1zdA said there are still alternatives - Daemon Tools, Alcohol 120%, VSO's Blindwrite. And even though SlySoft is no more, CloneCD and Virtual CloneDrive will continue to work with older CD games and images - they're not dependent on a verification server or an online database. There's also the (slim) hope that source code for all SlySoft software could be made public in the future; it all depends on what happens in the coming weeks/months.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Well, that does it. No more Blu-ray purchases for me. If I can't rip the movies to my file server, I see absolutely no point in spending big bucks on BDs only to view them with half-assed playback software/hardware. PowerDVD and standalone BD players are just horrible and really detract from the home theater experience. They're unreasonably slow and unstable, sometimes require firmware updates to play the latest discs, and force the viewer to sit through all of the copyright warnings and even some of the trailers.

Dang, I have close to 300 movies on BD (plus several more on DVD, HD-DVD, and Laserdisc) and was really looking forward to Ultra HD Blu-Ray. Jerks. 😒

There's still DVDFab, but now they have also caved in.

https://torrentfreak.com/dvdfab-says-no-crack … y-discs-160226/

Looks like BD ripping will have to go underground for the time being 😐

DVDFab folded because they just stole from Slysoft.

realnc wrote:

I don't even HAVE an optical drive anymore. Last time I had one was, I don't know, 4 years back? 5?

People still use discs? What for? 🤣

I've ran across pretty hilarious pitfalls to not having a optical drive installed.

Stuff crashing\refusing to run because it can't detect such a drive, for example...

Skyscraper wrote:

realnc wrote:

I don't even HAVE an optical drive anymore. Last time I had one was, I don't know, 4 years back? 5?

People still use discs? What for? 🤣

You can not stream in high enough quality for us with really big screens. Like Steve I was also waiting for Ultra HD Blu-Ray, I was thinking I finally would get a reason to replace my full HD Plasma TV.

You can not stream at all on a train with slow Wi-Fi.

There's also a huge difference in sound quality. Perhaps it's my piss poor vision, but I think there's a bigger difference in audio fidelity than there is in picture quality between streaming and Blu-ray. To me, Netflix streaming in at 1080p looks great on my F8500 plasma. At a normal viewing distance, it's often difficult to see much of a difference between BD and Netflix. It depends on the material. Dark scenes can sometimes exhibit color banding, while the same movie on Blu-Ray looks completely smooth. But Netflix audio, which I believe is E-AC3 5.1 running at only 192Kb/s, is completely lacking when compared with the lossless 24-bit 5.1/7.1 on Blu-ray discs. Highs sound crisper and the LFE channel hits harder. I don't think I've ever heard/felt Netflix content go below around 30Hz. The LFE on Blu-Ray can easily reach down to ~15Hz, which makes everything in the room shake.

I'm hoping that the introduction of UHD Blu-Ray motivates someone to create a viable open source AnyDVD replacement. Man that would be awesome.

I use MakeMKV to rip my Blu-rays losslessly, and I can usually find it free in beta.

As improbable as it sounds, the fox has managed to somehow break free from its captors 😈

https://forum.redfox.bz/threads/anydvd-hd-7-6 … released.68383/

https://forum.redfox.bz/download/

Happy days are here again..... for now 😁 😁 😊

Enjoy! 😀

Wow, their logo hahaha.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

As improbable as it sounds, the fox has managed to somehow break free from its captors 😈

That was expected. Good 😎.