Does the “Buy European” community disregard software?

Nokia briefly had a couple devices with an apparently FOSS platform: Maemo, IIRC. Then they ditched that to align with Microsoft. And their recent smartphones are apparently based on Google’s Android. That’s not European.

If you must have an Android for some strange reason, then I suppose Nokia or Wiko would be as close as you can get to European. But fuck Android. It’s proprietary and designed for obsolescence.

I have not tried much of anything yet. I just got a cheap laptop with a BD which came with Windows and VLC. I popped in a blu-ray disc from the library and it could not handle it… something about not having a aacs decoder or something like that. I didn’t spend any time on it yet but ultimately in principle I would install debian and try to liberate the drive to read BDs.

thanks!

Though I should mention my original motivation with makemkv was to rip blu-ray discs, which has complications that go beyond DVD. But the DVD guide will still be quite useful.

Well it’s still the same problem. I mean, it’s likely piracy to copy the public lib’s disc to begin with, even if just for a moment. From there, if I want to share it w/others I still need to be able to exit the library with the data before they close. So it’d still be a matter of transcoding as a distinctly separate step.

What’s the point of spending a day compressing something that I only need to watch once?

If I pop into the public library and start a ripping process using Handbrake, the library will close for the day before the job is complete for a single title. I could check-out the media, but there are trade-offs:

• no one else can access the disc while you have it out
• some libraries charge a fee for media check-outs
• privacy (I avoid netflix & the like to prevent making a record in a DB of everything I do; checking out a movie still gets into a DB)
• libraries tend to have limits on the number of media discs you can have out at a given moment
• checking out a dozen DVDs will take a dozen days to transcode, which becomes a race condition with the due date
• probably a notable cost in electricity, at least on my old hardware

Wow, thanks for the research and effort! I will be taking your approach for sure.

I’ll have a brief look but I doubt ffmpeg would know about DVD CSS encryption.