I decided to connect with my inner 13 year old and bought Army of Darkness on Blu-Ray. Like the rest of my video collection, my goal was to rip it to my NAS so it’s available on my Kodi box; I don’t own a blu-ray player, only Blu-ray optical drives for computers. But, I decided I wanted to just pop the movie in and play it on my PC, should look pretty good on my gaming monitor.
No machine in my inventory would play it from the disc. VLC and the one or two other media players in Fedora’s pathetic excuse for a repository would play it. VLC would throw an error and tell you to look in the log for details…wherever the log is. Side note: I’m not going to see log for details if you don’t give me a link or path to that log. We hold up VLC as the best media player but it can barely play mp3 and mp4 files from the local machine, it doesn’t work across a network, it doesn’t read optical discs, it doesn’t give useful errors and I’m not looking up how to read its logs for more details.
So, several rounds of troubleshooting across a few computers later, I finally get a setup where MakeMKV will rip it from the goddamn disc. And what does the 1080p version of the movie get you? Film grain. Noisy hideous distracting film grain. Exporting it as a 720p video made it look better because crushing the resolution evened out the film grain.
Is this what liking movies is like these days? I don’t think I want to like movies anymore.
A few months ago (I’ll make another post about this, it’s probably more what the community’s founder had in mind) I bought some CDs from a band I like. They were kickstarting a new album, and they offered a bunch of their back catalog as an add-on bonus. Bought it from the band on their terms, so I’m confident the artists themselves and not some private equity holding company got paid. I got media that functions perfectly well in every device I own including my high school Discman, I was able to effortlessly rip them to FLACs and now I’ve got high quality audio to enjoy on the go on my modern smart phone. It works, we all got to be legitimate citizens of a society, it’s great.
I’m not convinced Sam Raimi or Bruce Campbell got paid from my purchase. I bought the movie in new still sealed condition from eBay, it’s a genuine disc, so at some point it did come from Warner Brothers and was probably purchased at least once wholesale before I bought it. Did any money from any of those transactions go to the artists who actually made the film or have they been paid in full and further sales don’t affect them? What I got was a product so riddled with DRM and/or proprietary codecs that attempts to play it legitimately failed but ripping it worked. To engage with movies, you have to be a bad guy.
I guess at the end of the day I did get to her Ash say “this is my BOOMSTICK” and that was fun.