there are many options but the best one for all purposes is and will continue to always be ImgBurn.

ImgBurn has not been updated since 2013. This is because it does not need to be updated anymore, unless a new optical disc format hits the market (highly unlikely). ImgBurn does not have bugs. ImgBurn works flawlessy. ImgBurn will run just fine on Windows 10 or 11, but will adorably proclaim itself to be running on Windows 8 in its log window.

ImgBurn has a setting for every possible thing you could want to do with a recordable disc, and gives you as much information as it possibly can, while adhering strictly to the specs laid out in the respective formats' official standards.

ImgBurn is love. ImgBurn is life.

my endless rambling posts about the Struggles of burning BD-Rs may make it sound like i am not enjoying myself, but i want to clarify, one of the Whole Reasons i took on this silly BD-R charity project was to give myself a reason to fuck around with blu-ray drives and burnable disc media, and the endless series of challenges, riddles, quizzes, and conundrums are a part of the magic.

also i wonder why optical media has lost significant market share to hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, and flash memory cards. beats me.

Anyways ripped a ton of discs tonight. Alternating between AnyDVD HD + CloneBD on my main desktop and DVDFab on my old laptop.

I'll give credit where credit is due to DVDFab, once I used up their "free trial" they continue to allow me to rip discs to ISOs with all their modifications (remove copy protection, region codes, UOP's, etc.). Their restrictions are a little odd - had to switch from their "proprietary" burning engine to ImgBurn, which is just a toggle in their settings that sends the ISO construction task to an instance of ImgBurn it opens up which I find amusing, also the program has to check every inserted disc against a cloud database to ensure it meets their requirements of being at least one year old lmao. But once you get past those restrictions and click past the five or so prompts begging you to buy shit, it just works fine!

AnyDVD HD is certainly less annoying to use - though CloneBD has its own distinct Weird Vibe, feeling less like adware begging me to spend $250 and more like the kind of clunky cartoony app your grandpa might have on his Windows Vista PC that uses big colorful buttons for everything and treats the user like a baby. There's a big stupid beaver taking up a significant amount of real estate who spouts useless tidbits at you occasionally, real Clippy vibes. Every time I go to rip a disc to an ISO it really wants to compress the video for me, even in ways that make zero sense ("I can compress this 22GB movie to 18GB for you!" why would I want that), so I always have to manually drag a compression slider to the "no compression plz" end before starting to a rip a disc, but then it works just fine as well.

While CloneBD appears to be free so long as you don't use their compression features (which I probably never will... There's something to be said for making UHD films fit into a 50GB disc though...), but AnyDVD HD is cut and dry "21 day free trial and then give us €109". DVDFab technically allows me the functions I want for free in perpetuity. Unless I, like, wanted to rip copies of a recent movie, I'll never really have issues with it. But I also hate its design and dark pattern buy-begging. So I might actually cough up the asking price for AnyDVD just to have an app that respects me somewhat (CloneBD appears to be the fault of a different development team entirely). Also AnyDVD has its own extremely basic image ripping utility that I haven't tested yet for some reason so maybe that'll do what I want as well (I'm anxious its rips will not include the modifications it makes, but that wouldn't make sense, would it...?).

Anyways I need to get some sleep, I'll be burning more BD-Rs tomorrow for sure though! Some of y'all might be getting a little more than you asked for!

one of the real reasons I'm doing this is because it's a perfect intersection of Several of my Special Interests:

• Physical Media
• Obsolete or Weird Removable Storage Formats (optical discs qualify, as being Definitely Weird If You Think About It and having been obsoleted by flash storage about a decade ago, even if it's still produced)
• The Postal System, and in particular using it for anything other than Fucking Ads