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.
Your main problem is trying to play it on a computer. It’s always been a pain to play movies from disc on a computer. The MPAA is so fucking terrified of people being able to make copies they crippled the usability of the media on computers. Doesn’t stop people from pirating. Just fucks over anyone who wants to watch a movie they own on a computer.
DVDs work more or less fine. Blu-rays are a complete scrotal gash.
So few devices nowadays come with optical drives, I tend to rip my videos to mp4 anyway, I had planned to do this with this disc in the first place. I decided to buy the disc to have at least some pretense of legitimacy. I did get it ripped and I did watch the movie.