#blu-rays

The FANCIEST blu-ray box set I've ever seen...

The Middle-Earth Ultimate Collector's Edition Blu-Ray: Complete LOTR + Hobbit Trilogies, Extended Editions + all Appendices. Each movie has its own "book" that holds its discs, which are all stored in a special bookcase. There's also two beautiful art cards with art by Alan Lee and John Howe, and a completely filled red book that has all the ending character portraits from the movies and more.

Here's a list of my top 10 fave anime, physical style! I promise I'll make some more in-depth, separate posts about the blu-rays I haven't already highlighted another time. Also: yes, horror is my fave genre ◕⩊◕

Boogiepop Phantom (2000)

Black Lagoon (2006)

Elfen Lied (2004)

Highschool of the Dead (2010)

Jormungand (2012)

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)

School Days (2007)

Serial Experiments Lain (1998)

Shiki (2010)

Higurashi When They Cry (2006)

But if the level of drm (aacs) on a particular blu-ray is higher than what Makemkv can handle, the disk will update the firmware on your drive to revoke access to makemkv, so it can't access any blu-rays.

"One famous “feature” of AACS is a so-called host revocation. It was designed to ensure that only “approved” software can use your drive. Every Blu-ray disc contains a file that has a list of host keys known to be used by "unauthorized" software. This list has a version number. The moment you insert the disc into your drive, the drive checks if the list is newer than the one it knows about, and if it is, the drive re-flashes itself (updates firmware)."

And that happened to me. It was a blu-ray of the 1972 Hammer horror movie Fear in the Night that did it. The one program that works with my blu-ray player now couldn't access any discs, including ones it had ripped before. And there are absolutely zero linux programs that are authorized to playback blu-ray discs.

I had to flash my drive's firmware to allow something called libredrive, which allows direct access to files and bypasses the aacs drm firmware.

And that was quite the journey. I had makemkv installed as a flatpak via my distro's software manager. and I needed to use the command line. Flatpaks are a great packaging format. but they are primarily for gui apps. So i had to build makemkv from source. And then I had to figure out the commandline for the firmware flashing tool included with makemkv, which was hard because the instructions linked flat out lie. There is no "flash" command for sdftools, there is only "rawflash", you have to read the thread carefully to find that out. This page helped. I had to download new patched libredrive firmware.

And finally i figured out the command I needed ""sdftool -d [drive name] rawflash main,enc -i [new firmware file name].bin. And now I can use my blu-ray drive again. It's now libredrive.

So much work to finally be able to use the drive I paid for, and the blu-ray discs I also paid for. I'm not running some major piracy operation, I just want to be able to watch movies I legally own on my laptop. And drm stopped me, and I had to break it.

Remember, remember the 5th of November ⚔️

"Luis Samra, an employee at Cinefile, has noticed both a flood of younger followers on the store’s Instagram page and an influx of college students coming into the shop. He says, every Friday night (when they are open until midnight), he sees Gen Z friend groups pour into the store, in search of the movies from David Lynch, David Cronenberg and anything from A24, the production company best known for movies like 'Hereditary,' 'Midsommar' and 'Marty Supreme.'

'It’s like an after-dinner hangout activity,' said Samra. 'They like to browse amongst each other and say ‘Have you seen this movie?’ or ‘Have you seen this director?’ And maybe one in three of those people usually come up and make a membership.'"

Artes & Capas dos Blu-rays da 1ª Temporada de Yubisaki to Renren:

Yuki Itose & Itsuomi Nagi - Vol. 1

Rin Fujishiro & Kyouya Nagi - Vol. 2