lupi

Lupi

@lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

avatar by @citriccenobite

you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.​

i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi

I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory

they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"

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lupi
@lupi
pendell
@pendell
plumpan
@plumpan

So I was on wikipedia reading about CPUs as you do

And noticed something in the article about Alder Lake CPUs (Intel 12K models):

The CPU family no longer features Intel SGX which is a requirement for playing UltraHD Blu-Ray discs.

So if you've never fucked with optical media on a PC, it can be a surprisingly annoying chore. Even a lot of DVDs have fucked copy protection that requires software workarounds (VLC maintains those libraries, thanks yall) and I can only imagine blu-rays are even more fucked.

So without having read more into this at all, obviously there has to be ways to play back newer blu-ray disks with software workarounds, though I'm curious if it's similar to DVD copy protection or if there's more hoops to jump through. The fact that, officially, playback is limited to CPUs that have a hilariously flawed security feature is pretty absurd. Given when this became a thing there's a good chance AMD CPUs were never officially supported too.

Again I'm writing this without looking any of it up past what I initially read here, because I enjoy the conversation. So I may be very wrong about a lot of this.

pendell
@pendell

Yeah.

4K Blu-rays introduced a new layer of encryption on top of standard blu-rays that required some goofy bullshit CPU feature to "properly" decrypt. And it did indeed never support AMD CPUs.

From what I can tell, this was only really the case because the only legitimately licensable way to play 4K Blu-rays was probably through some Cyberlink software suite that cost another $100 on top of the 4K Blu-ray drive you bought for your PC. I really can't imagine there being that many "legitimate" home theater PC enthusiasts who would bother with any of this, or how many people got "screwed" when this was made impossible on newer CPUs.

If you use any of the popular Blu-ray ripping apps - AnyDVD HD or MakeMKV for the most part - those apps can bypass these security features easily, almost instantly, no matter what CPU you're using. So it's 100% certainly an arbitrary limitation imposed upon people who want to do things legally. As usual, the DRM only fucks over the consumers who want to do things "the right way".

Notably though, most PC Blu-ray drives cannot actually achieve the read speeds required for 4K Blu-rays when treating them as data discs, and presumably the "legitimate" software would kick the drive into some special mode to read the disc at the right speed. With the ripping tools, it generally can't do this trick, and so ripping a film usually takes longer than the length of the film. Which sucks.

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lupi
@lupi

just a tangent, i made the mistake of buying a BD optical drive for my tower and then realizing i couldn't even watch most normal blu-rays without a lot of fuckery in VLC, and even then sometimes it doesn't work

or it works and then it breaks because suddenly the java required for blu-ray menus is busted in a software update and it makes VLC crash constantly unless you disable the menus

boy it sure sucked to try and do things the correct way indeed

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pendell
@pendell

fr. The menus will just Break randomly for no good reason and then you have to close VLC and run it again. And while VLC is intelligent enough to skip commercials and stuff on DVDs, you're FORCED to sit through that shit on blu-rays because VLC for some reason respects UOPs and won't let you skip ads or anything unless the disc allows it.

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lupi
@lupi

i had to disable menus entirely because it just wouldn't play discs anymore unless i did, i haven't looked into whether that situation has improved but eh.

and as to the other comment, i'll probably go for an extra hard drive when i spec out a new computer, if i ever get to the point where i can afford to do so; 'til then, the 2015 budget build i did with graduation money will continue to suffer. i'd just kinda hoped i could like, play the discs i guess, so i didn't have to rip em lmao

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pendell
@pendell

Pioneer is basically the only company still making drives worth a damn, imo. Unfortunately a few months ago they patched some of their newest drives in a way that blocks the exploit MakeMKV uses, and you can't easily downgrade the firmware - I suspect ordering any of their current generation of drives at this point will have you receiving one that's been patched, but it's a roll of the dice honestly.

The MakeMKV forums have a list of compatible drives that I would recommend looking at for a blu-ray drive that will suit your purposes. If you don't want to take up a whole 5.25" drive bay on a PC tower, I know Pioneer makes very good super-portable drives, some even 4K compatible.

And 4K compatibility is also worth keeping in mind. If a drive doesn't explicitly state compatibility with 4K discs, they will likely have them blocked at a firmware level. Even if the drive can burn/read 3 and 4 layer BD-R discs, they will often be firmware programmed to not read commercial 4K discs unless specifically permitted to (licensing reasons, as usual).

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pendell
@pendell

for the record I have the Pioneer BDR-S13U-X in my PC, running firmware v1.03 (1.04 is I believe when they patched out the exploits). But I was splurging at that time and got their silly, overpriced, "home theater enthusiast" model. There's also the BDR-S13UBK that has the exact same specs but is made out of normal materials, may be half a decibel louder, and costs like half as much. But again, fair warning about the firmware versions.

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pendell
@pendell

HD-DVD did get done dirty, but it's worth noting neither DVD or HD-DVD were "open," they were still very much proprietary formats you had to pay licensing costs for, DVD employed (basic, easily broken) encryption and HD-DVD, like Blu-ray, implemented tighter, more complex encryption systems than DVD did.

But it's entirely true Sony pulled a lot of BS to make Blu-ray win the format war. But it's never as simple as "good guys vs bad guys." HD-DVD was a format designed by a consortium of megacorps rather than a single megacorp, was basically the only difference. The only reason HD-DVD was able to compete at all was because the corps in that consortium wanted to push the format they helped fund. In practical terms the formats were effectively identical (and several companies, like LG, who had no real stake in one or the other, even sold combo HD-DVD/Blu-ray players for a brief time).

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