Physical Media

So...

I got the DVD to rip in MakeMKV on my old computer running Mint. I cannot get MakeMKV to work as a decoder for VLC on that machine; there's no documentation that walks you through how to do that, everyone in their forums talks in links to other threads, I'm going to assume that flatpak CAN'T work because flatpak. It does recognize discs on that machine though and can rip them. That makemkv addon flatpak shows up in Fedora's software manager but not on Mint's. It seems to do nothing.

On my Fedora machine, neither MakeMKV nor Handbrake seem to function at all. Neither of those applications seem to be able to interact with the disc drive in any way. VLC can play ordinary DVDs, so the drive is functioning and talking to the OS. MakeMKV either seems to work normally if you launch it without the optical drive attached or with it empty of discs, the second you put a disc in it spools a thread up and then just hangs forever. DVD drive isn't doing anything. Doesn't matter if it's a DVD or a blu-ray. Handbrake just doesn't do anything, there's nothing you can do to select the optical drive as a source. Just sits there with it's tongue in its ass waiting for a round of applause.

Neither app is available from Fedora's repos as a .rpm. Nothing ever is. Neither app offers instructions for compiling on Fedora. Nothing ever does. If you try to follow the compile instructions for Debian substituting apt-get install for dnf install, inevitably the packages it wants aren't in the repos. Because nothing ever is. I'm distro hopping tomorrow.

Like I get that the first post to the community was negative in tone and downvoted, an auspicious start, but from the perspective a media lover...

The book nerds are the loudest. Possibly because a paper book is a very visceral experience because for the several hours it takes to read a book you're touching it the whole time. They talk about smells and sounds and feels of a thing designed only to be looked at.

After that it's probably the audiophiles, who have spent decades arguing about vinyl versus CDs, that one is warmer or whatever. I get the appeal of vinyl, you get to fiddle with something. A turntable is an inherently mechanical thing, you get to touch it and move it. And large discs come with huge covers with lots of room for artwork and liner notes to look at and display. CDs often get a miniaturized version of this in their jewel cases.

Personally I'm not really a media quality snob; I grew up listening to 128kbps mp3 files and watching movies on VHS tapes. "The Force will be with you, Luke. Always." was just as magical on VHS as it was in the theater on 35mm film, as it is on 1080p blu-ray. You don't need a 4k transfer of Groundhog Day.

I'll admit I have some nostalgia for the clacks and whirs of a tape deck or VCR, not enough to bother keeping one hooked up.

In the modern day, to a lot of us, owning physical media is a badge of at least attempting to uphold the social contract. Artists made a work of art, a movie, a TV show, a song, a book, a story, and having a legitimately purchased copy of that work rather than a pirated copy downloaded from the internet means I'm trying to pay the artist for making it so he can live. Streaming services were for a time a better way, very convenient means of legitimately accessing content instead of pirating it. Except corporate greed has almost entirely undone this; they keep altering the deal and telling us to pray they don't alter it any further. So many are returning to physical media, which in the modern world basically means CDs for music and blu-rays for movies, 480p DVDs as a mostly obsolete fallback. And blu-rays are so riddled with paranoia that they're difficult to actually live with. "You aren't willing to live up to your end of the social contract under any circumstances, are you Paramount Pictures?"

That and the combination of blu-rays being very high resolution and appearing at a time when physical media is secondary to streaming, and you get lazy releases where they dumped raw video to disc without putting any effort into making it a good experience. Hence bad cropping, horrendous mismatched film grain, bad color grading, and basically nothing fitting a 16:9 screen because that's not the aspect ratio of old TV or old movies, and you get a kind of garbage product. You get kicked in the face for trying to do right.