“What year is it? Yeah it’s December 2018. Nearly 2019,” Anthony Casella writes for iMore. “And I’m about to show you how to decrypt and copy your old 480p DVDs to your Mac.”
“DVDs are yesteryear’s technology for certain. Although 90% of my collection exists on digitally available versions, I’m not inclined to re-purchase the entire collection on iTunes or Amazon,” Casella writes. “Nor am I inclined to be at the mercy of streaming services like Netflix that may have the feature one day, and due to licensing limits, lose it the next.”
Casella writes, “DVD drives have NOT been a thing for quite a few years now, so those of you who still have a DVD reader on your Mac (as I do on my 2009 Mac Pro) and haven’t yet created digital copies of your DVD collections had better get cracking (intentional pun here) before you no longer have any DVD hardware available to copy them with!”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Depending on how many favorite films you have that you like to rewatch (that number in very small for each of us here), it may cost you less in time to just purchase the film in much better quality via iTunes Store.
I don’t rip DVDs/BR discs but any discussion about it would be incomplete without acknowledging the ridiculousness of some parts of the DMCA. It’s still technically illegal to rip “protected” movies. I doubt that migration to computer by a licensed disc owner for their own use (format shifting, if you will) would be challenged… but it would seem to be a common sense move for the Librarian of Congress to carve out a DMCA exemption in this very poorly constructed law.
I have a Pioneer DVD/BR drive that connects via USB that cost like $30 at Best Buy. It works with Make MKV SW for archival of my BR discs.
There is no fear of not having the HW is nonsense.
Would love to know more about the unit you have, especially at that price. A search of the BB website right now shows the cheapest external BR at $85. How did you get something around $30?
Back in the day Apple was allin defending owner-copying when they were locked out of Hollywood….
Now they lock your shit up with BS coding….
I’m going the other way. If I buy a movie or music from Apple, or anybody online for that matter, I’m copying it to a DVD/CD or an external hard drive outside of the Apple sandbox.
I have had way too many instances where music or movies simply disappear off my Apple devices, especially after there has been some sort of App or OS update. Or even the other way, where I have excluded something off my play lists and they suddenly reappear. Totally unpredictable.
I had about twenty old DVDs I wanted to add to my iTunes library last year. Several were Blu-ray, but most were standard DVDs. Almost all of them were listed as available on the Movies Anywhere website. I used Vudu’s app and for $2 each or $5 to upgrade from DVD to HD I converted them to digital. Movies Anywhere then added them to my iTunes library. It wasn’t free, but it was certainly less expensive than a straight purchase from iTunes. I would also assume completely legal.